We’re living in the golden age of sales enablement technology, and innovative companies are taking advantage of this reality by freeing their reps to engage in more value-added activities with key prospects. Effectively deploying various sales enablement techniques can have positive ramifications across nearly all of your sales processes, and it can also transform your salespeople’s relationships with your buyers.

Make lead qualification more straightforward

No one is going to argue that lead qualification is easy, but it is possible to take some of the guesswork out of the process thanks to sales enablement tools. When lead qualification is an entirely manual process, you’re asking your sales reps to digest and analyze a jumble of various points of data, often from wildly diverse sources, and then make a judgement accordingly. All it takes is a small error to cause a decision to veer off course.

However, with sales enablement, you will have access to simple, automated lead scoring techniques that will clarify the process for your sales reps. When you consider that companies with a robust lead nurturing initiative generate 50% more high-quality leads, and do so for two-thirds of the cost, then it becomes clear you can’t afford not to engage in this strategy.

Take your content creation to the next level

In the game of content creation, can you accept the occasional misses if they’re scattered throughout some hits? You may think that if a prospect comes across a piece of content that isn’t engaging they’ll click away with relatively little harm, at least as long as your product and your salespeople are up to the task.

But ineffective content is actually more damaging than you think because it dilutes the authority of your brand, fails to add value to the prospect’s life, and wastes your own valuable resources. Sales enablement tools help your reps create more optimized content for your buyers in a fraction of the time.

Broaden your analytical reach

The greater the number of components in your sales process you can analyze in detail, the healthier your sales operation will be. Data is more important to B2B sales units than ever before, which means companies are gathering and storing even more of it.

Attempting to analyze all of the data you need to succeed in the contemporary environment without the help of sales enablement software is a fool’s errand, and a recipe for wasted manpower. Enhanced analytics can take your productivity to new heights and companies who use these techniques have been shown to hit team quotas four times faster than others.

Specialize your communications

Not all forms of client communication are created equal. In some cases, there is absolutely no risk of relying completely on automation to create and deliver a message. Other cases require the intimate knowledge of a relationship history that only a salesperson can possess.

It’s your job to use sales enablement to eliminate the distractions of the former in service of the latter. Software tools can help you expertly specialize your customer email strategy so your talented sales reps spend more time nurturing relationships at the moments when they can add the most value.

Create a holistic view of your pipeline

Bottlenecks in the sales pipeline can kill productivity and leave your team members scrambling to find enough high-quality leads to have a shot at hitting their quotas — don’t settle for it. When small inefficiencies can have ripple effects across the entire sales unit, you have to exploit every available opportunity to stamp them out.

With the aid of advanced sales enablement dashboards, you can see how your sales pipeline works in its entirety. Then, you’ll be able to use analytical trend spotting tools to pinpoint potential bottlenecks before they have an opportunity to inflict maximum damage.

Embrace social channels without the hassle

The value of social selling is no longer a secret and even organizations who were slow to jump on the social media bandwagon are now firmly entrenched in its ecosystem. The reason it has become such an important tool is because buyers specifically look to it for value, which means sales teams have a unique opportunity to be exactly where their prospects need them to be, with the information they need.

The issue is manually monitoring all social selling activity takes a massive amount of time. But by employing social listening tools, you can keep track of interactions across a variety of social platforms in a fraction of the time it would take you to manually monitor just one.