Are You Reducing Your Sales Enablement Budget? Tips for Staying Ahead

Man looking at sales enablement budget on a laptop

For the past few months, we’ve heard a lot about the impending economic recession. In preparation, many businesses are either considering or actively tightening their purse strings — effectively putting increased sales enablement budget and additional headcount on pause.

Though the economy may weaken, business operations won’t halt altogether. Now, more than ever, sales organizations need resources that help employees do their jobs more efficiently.

Here’s how sales readiness can help your sales enablement teams do more with less.

Sales enablement budget tip 1: Keep and develop what you have

To drive performance and reduce turnover when hiring new reps isn’t an option, upskilling your current team becomes essential. This means providing reps with ongoing learning, support, and reinforcement to develop knowledge, skills, and behaviors that will help them meet or even exceed goals.

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This learning and support should come in the form of training materials, which can include videos, product sheets, and quizzes; marketing content to engage customers; regular one-on-one sales coaching for guidance and feedback, and role-play opportunities to practice handling different selling scenarios.

With the right platform, sales leaders can track performance on individual and team levels to identify and address where reps may be struggling and where they’re succeeding, then alter the enablement program as necessary.

Sales enablement budget tip 2: Examine what you might have missed

It’s hard to look ahead without considering how you’re doing things now. Look back at workflows and pipeline management processes to identify gaps and inefficiencies. Are you optimized to move opportunities through every stage of the sale?

A great way to get started is to perform a win/loss analysis, where you examine deals that were won and deals that were lost. Have sellers answer specific questions for each, like:

  • Where did you find the lead?
  • How did you initially reach out to the customer?
  • Who did you talk to first and who were you in contact with throughout the process?
  • How did the first conversation go? What was the next step?
  • What were the customer’s pain points at the time?
  • What were the customer’s goals at the time?
  • Was the customer looking at competitors at the same time?
  • How did you know this was a good deal to pursue (or what were the signs that it wasn’t)?
  • How did you present the value proposition/use case?
  • Who within the customer’s buying team was involved in making the final decision?

Revisiting opportunities allows you to determine what types of engagement and content led to success — and whether recently disqualified opportunities were properly disqualified or are still warm enough to warrant reaching back out.

Sales enablement budget tip 3: Quantify your impact

Besides making changes to your approach, you must also prove the value of your sales enablement function when navigating budget discussions. This means being able to present numbers that demonstrate how enablement projects directly impact revenue.

Look at factors like content engagement and role-plays and how they correlate with quota attainment and revenue generation. For instance, how much more likely are sellers who engage with enablement content to reach or exceed quota? Do sellers who practice with role-plays ask more questions in real-world buyer conversations or have more success in moving an opportunity forward? Putting numbers to these key performance indicators (KPIs) enables you to align efforts to stakeholder goals.

This is also an ideal time to make sure your current customers have clear benchmarks and KPIs to measure success. Dig into what they’re already measuring and talk through how those metrics can be used to understand their progress with your product. If they don’t have data to analyze, work with customer champions to establish KPIs that are easy to start measuring right away. If their own organization is looking to consolidate technology, those champions can tie those KPIs to revenue and defend your product.

Sales enablement budget tip 4: Automate tedious tasks

When reviewing your sales processes, look for tasks that can be automated to help sellers focus on sales activities and boost productivity. Clunky, manual work like toggling between tools or scouring different folders to find specific content wastes time that could be spent on revenue-generating activities.

In these instances, there are likely ways to automate or consolidate programs in your tech stack to save sellers time and effort. Many sales technologies have integration capabilities to alleviate frustration and streamline methods for transferring customer data, sharing content, reporting, and more. If yours doesn’t, it’s probably time to look elsewhere.

When evaluating new solutions for your sales organization, consider vendors who provide at least several of the functionalities in your current tech stack within a single platform. This way, your sales team members — along with adjacent and supporting teams, like marketing — are working from a single source of truth and all know where to find what they need. A sales readiness platform has enablement and training, content management, conversation intelligence, coaching, and analytics all in one place.

By delivering time savings abilities and the assurance that every rep is using the most up-to-date internal and customer-facing content, a sales readiness platform lets sellers focus on sales activities that drive outcomes and revenue growth.

Ready to see how Mindtickle can help you do more with less? Request a demo today.