No matter how good your product or service is, without an effective sales enablement strategy, your team will struggle to sell your solution.
In this guide, we’ll go over what B2B sales enablement is, the elements of a good sales enablement strategy, and metrics to track to evaluate performance over time.
What is B2B Sales Enablement?
B2B sales enablement is the tools, resources, and support that you provide to your sales team to close more deals for your organization.
As explained by Jacob Fleisher from Attention, sales enablement is about giving your sales reps the best chance to win – at scale.
💡 The main difference between a sales strategy and B2B sales enablement is that sales enablement is what you can do for your sales team to help them convert leads, while a sales strategy is what you can do to convert the leads.
A B2B sales enablement strategy usually includes:
A good sales enablement tech stack that includes a sales CRM, digital sales rooms, and other sales pipeline management tools.
Onboarding, training, and coaching of new and existing sales reps to improve their performance.
The creation and curation of sales collateral, which includes case studies, white papers, and product use cases for different industries.
Sales feedback loops by tracking what is working and what is not to continuously monitor and improve prospect communications.
Cross-functional alignment and collaboration with the customer success and marketing teams.
The end goal of sales enablement is to prepare your sales team with all of the resources and processes that they need to close more deals.
➡️ Continue reading to find out the elements of an effective B2B sales enablement strategy later in this guide.
B2B Sales Enablement Examples
Now that we got the theory right, it’s time to dive deeper into actionable examples of B2B sales enablement.
Case studies: Organizations can work on building case studies (per industry and use case) that showcase the results that your solution is producing.
Digital sales rooms: Provide your sales reps with a single and organized space where they can insert the case studies, next steps, and other resources.
ROI calculators: Return-on-investment calculators are one of the best ways of dealing with price objections. Your sales team can be prepared to show the potential monetary value of using your product or services.
Detailed ideal customer profiles (ICPs): You can equip your sales team with in-depth buyer personas that include information about your target audience’s pain points, struggles, and common objections.
Pitch deck templates so your sales team does not have to create pitch decks from scratch. You can replicate high-performing sales decks across your sales team.
Internal knowledge base, where your sales reps can find relevant information about your product or service quickly.
Discovery call checklists that cover the key questions that the sales reps need to ask your leads to understand more about their pain points and how much they are willing to spend.
Analysis of competitor features versus yours so your salespeople can be prepared to answer competitor-related questions.
According to Atif H., a CRM specialist and sales leader, sales reps learn best from their peers.
This is why organizations should let successful and more experienced sales reps deliver relatable and practical training to new SDRs.
As Atif believes that playbooks aren’t enough, good sales enablement focuses on scenario-based training (more on that later), building soft skills, and tackling recurring challenges.
What Are The Main Objectives of Sales Enablement
The main objectives of sales enablement are to help your organization to:
Shorten the sales cycles by having a more streamlined selling process, decreasing time to revenue.
Onboarding new sales development representatives: You can reduce ramp-up times for new hires with pre-built strategies, workflows, and software.
Increasing sales productivity by enabling your team to spend less time on mundane tasks, such as sending back-and-forth emails, and more time on prospecting and selling.
Ultimately, maximize sales revenue by improving the buyer experience with relevant case studies, ROI calculators, and tailored solutions.
A confidence boost for the sales reps: Your sales reps should feel confident in every prospect interaction by having access to the right resources at hand to move the deal forward.
The Elements of a Good B2B Sales Enablement Strategy
The elements of an effective B2B sales enablement strategy include:
Having a solid sales tech stack with sales platforms that integrate with your existing sales systems and improve your sales productivity.
Tracking what is working and what is not in your sales process to find opportunities for improvement.
Creating sales collateral per industry and per product or service use case.
Training new sales reps on your effective sales methodologies.
Aligning the sales team with marketing and customer success.
Let’s go over each element in more detail: 👇
#1: A Solid Sales Tech Stack
The main element of a good sales enablement strategy is having a sales tech stack that integrates with your sales CRM.
These should be tools that are easy to use by your sales reps (instead of another time-waster) and can improve their productivity and selling capabilities.
Here is an example sales tech stack that you can incorporate into your business:
Sales rooms: Enable your sales team to keep prospects engaged and improve your by consolidating all sales collateral in one place.
Interactive proposals: Equip your sales team with the ability to provide personalized pricing, quotes, and e-signatures in one place that they can send to leads.
Sales forecasting software that helps your team forecast deals, revenues, and renewals. Such a platform can help you find growth opportunities and risky deals.
Information scraping to get contact information of qualified prospects from their websites or social profiles.
AI-powered knowledge base search that can help your sales team with searching for product-related or prospect-related information.
Interactive product demos that your sales team can show to prospects during calls, or interactive demos that can be sent to prospects for their use case.
➡️ When building out your sales tech stack, you need to make sure that the platforms can integrate with one another.
An example of a sales enablement platform that can help your team win more deals is Arrows (that’s us) which we built for teams on HubSpot.
Our platform helps you improve your sales team’s close rates with dynamic pages that keep prospects engaged, equip champions to sell internally and maintain deal momentum.
You can equip your sales development representatives with everything that they need to close your high-intent leads, such as:
Resource sharing: Unify all resources and data about each client or new customer. Keep leads engaged between calls without the need for excessive follow-up emails.
Next meeting sync: A component that stays up-to-date based on your next scheduled meeting in the CRM. You will not have to rely on link-dumping.
Milestone tracking: Set clear objectives and track progress to ensure deals stay on course and deadlines are met.
Engagement activity sync back into your HubSpot account in real-time, including creating and associating new contacts discovered with the deal in HubSpot.
Track buyer engagement: See which leads view the digital sales rooms in real-time.
Real-time alerts of when tasks are completed or when your leads ask questions during onboarding or in the sales funnel.
💡 You can replicate your champions by using templates to enforce a winning process.
Your sales team can simplify follow-ups by replacing the traditional email with personalized sales rooms without having to overwhelm prospects with links.
How Do Arrows Sales Rooms Work?
Arrows sales rooms can be set up from any existing deal once activated in your HubSpot account.
You can then edit and publish the sales rooms directly through the Arrows app, customizing each room to your clients.
Your sales team will then receive updates on room engagement, including views and updates, via the deal’s activity feed.
💡 It is possible to link sales rooms in email snippets sent from your HubSpot account, keeping everything connected.
➡️ Our users achieve a 44% higher win rate with our digital sales room softwarecompared to the average win rate for deals over the last 12 months.
Case Study: Roobrik Is Closing More Deals With Arrows Sales Rooms
Roobrik has transformed its post-demo process by changing its approach from a generic feature and resource ‘’dump’’ to a more dynamic and collaborative workspace with Arrows sales rooms.
The brand is now able to close more high-value deals by delivering a unified user journey – from the first touch to ongoing customer success.
Learn more about how they did it with Arrows: 👇
#2: Tracking What’s Working & What Is Not
A part of enabling your sales team to win more deals is the ability to track what is currently working in your sales execution strategy and what is not.
For example, some sales tools let you see what kind of case studies get the most engagement and results.
That allows you to audit your existing sales process, such as:
Tracking what sales collateral is effective, such as slide decks, case studies, and white papers.
Identifying winning sales behavior to improve each sales rep’s performance.
Analyzing client interactions across multiple sales platforms to evaluate why deals have been lost or won.
Identifying gaps in the buying journey, such as where prospects are getting stuck, or objections that your sales reps are struggling to deal with.
For example, the sales productivity platform Gong helps your team analyze data, track initiatives and translate user conversations.
You might find out that clients are reporting issues with the price of your product or service, and can figure out a solution to deal with it.
#3: Sales Collateral
Another important element of an effective B2B sales enablement strategy is equipping your sales reps with sales collateral.
Sales collateral is any kind of document or media that assists during the sales process to move your prospects through the sales funnel.
Examples of sales collateral include:
Case studies: You can equip your sales team with a variety of case studies of your product or service that are based on use cases and industries.
Product videos and interactive product demos that will help your sales team demonstrate the value of your solution to your leads.
E-books and white papers that dive into deeper detail on how your solution works.
Research reports with industry-leading data to showcase your company’s experience and expertise in the field.
After you’ve built a comprehensive library of sales collateral for your sales team, Huble then recommends equipping your sales reps with AI to find relevant content.
According to the sales leaders at Huble, you can use artificial intelligence to analyze your sales reps’ current pipeline and recommend relevant sales content to help them prepare.
#4: Being Able To Train New Sales Reps On The Methodology
After you’ve built out your sales tech stack and you’ve got your systems and sales collateral in place, it’s time to start thinking about replicating your methodologies to new sales reps.
According to the expert, organizations should dedicate the first 30 days of new hires’ time to pure enablement with mostly role plays to master discovery.
Sales role plays are short, focused sessions where salespeople can train specific skills, and work on:
Pain point discovery of the prospects.
Running through value proposition stories.
Practising different scenarios, such as objections.
For example, Dialpad’s AI-powered scorecards lets you spot issues that require coaching and evaluate conversations at scale.
You can use the platform to optimize your sales team’s cold outreach performance.
#5: Cross-Functional Alignment
Last but not least, cross-functional alignment is the importance of collaborating with customer success and marketing teams for sales enablement.
A lack of alignment between teams can result in your business having competing priorities at the same time.
During the sales enablement festival in October 2021, Susan Quesal went over how the different departments can collaborate together:
Susan goes over the collaboration between customer success and sales teams in greater detail, outlining benefits, such as improved customer experience and decreased account churn.
Here are a few examples of how marketing and customer success can assist sales enablement:
The marketing team can assist the sales team with case studies and pieces of content.
The marketing team can also help the sales team with building out ideal customer personas and the sales team can help the marketing team with pain point identification.
The customer success team can help the sales team ensure that their sales materials reflect real customer experiences and insights.
The customer success team can also give insights to the sales team about what features existing customers like the most about the products.
What Metrics To Evaluate B2B Sales Enablement’s Performance?
To evaluate the success of your B2B sales enablement efforts, you’ll need to track the following metrics and KPIs:
Sales Effectiveness
Sales close rate: How is your conversion rate changing over time with the implementation of your B2B sales enablement strategies?
Sales cycle length: Track the time it takes for a new lead to move down your sales pipeline and become a customer.
Average deal size: Are your sales reps getting better at up-selling or cross-selling your solutions?
Feedback from buyers: Are your buyers satisfied with how their needs were being addressed and the tailored solution that was proposed to them, or do they still feel confused?
Sales Content Performance
Views and/or downloads: How much has been each piece of content downloaded or viewed from the ones your team has used?
Content engagement rates: How much time are your prospects engaging with the content you’re sending out to them?
Content feedback: What are your prospects’ reactions after engaging with your team’s content? Do your sales reps feel like the content was useful or did not contribute much to the conversation?
Sales content utilization: How often is each piece of content utilized? Are there any materials that are not being used?
Sales Rep Performance
Deals closed per representative: How many deals on average are your sales reps able to close on average?
Speed of onboarding of new sales reps: How quickly are new reps able to ramp up to full productivity after engaging with your educational materials/
Sales rep level of knowledge: How much do your sales reps know about your solution? You can run knowledge quizzes about your product.
Confidence levels of sales reps: How prepared does your sales team feel after providing them with different tools and materials?
Enable Your Sales Team To Win More Deals With Arrows
Our sales rooms help your team close more high-ticket deals and keep prospective clients engaged with mutual action plans, resource sharing and milestone tracking.
Apart from that, Arrows offers separate purpose-built onboarding plans and client portals that help you manage the entire new client lifecycle out of one platform.
If you’re a sales leader looking for a sales enablement solution that offers:
Effective buyer engagement tracking to help you see which prospects are viewing the sales rooms in real-time and insights into buyer intent.
A best-in-class HubSpot integration, which is available for all pricing tiers and lets you sync 50+ real-time data points.
Other presale features, such as real-time alerts, buyer engagement tracking, and next meeting sync.
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