It is well-known that for a business to perform well, its salespeople must be well-trained, extremely knowledgeable about the products being sold, and must establish solid customer relations in order to ensure customer loyalty. However, sales training is only one of the tactics used to achieve this. The other, sales enablement, is not always as well-known. What is the difference between sales training and sales enablement? This difference can be significant for your business! This article explores the differences between sales training and sales enablement, and what each type of training can do for your business.
What Is Sales Training?
Today, sales is one of the most critical areas of business, as revenue is directly related to the company's operations. Moreover, salespeople are in direct contact with customers, and thus have the power to shape their opinions of the brand, thereby establishing loyalty with your business. As such, sales training is an important strategic action for any company. The more skilled and motivated your sales team is, the faster and more revenue is generated. Sales training helps salespeople develop new skills and improve existing ones as well.
Developing sales skills requires a blend of practical application, role-playing exercises, and technology. In face-to-face training, this may include coffee breaks, lots of discussion, and training facilitators that must be on-site to ensure the proper functioning of the training. For online sales training, eLearning may be utilized to manage training, publish content, and automate actions – usually, this method increases efficiency by cutting down the time required to go through each training step. Salespeople should be encouraged to take advantage of a regular rhythm of coaching, which provides direct feedback and builds confidence week by week. Thankfully, this no longer needs to take place face-to-face – online education has revolutionized sales training. At Lighthouse Organizational Development, we consult with you to establish your HR needs, develop the proper training for your team, and we deliver training that has the information your people will really use.
What Is Sales Enablement?
This concept brings together the marketing and sales teams in order to increase close rates. It provides your salespeople with the information needed to successfully engage your business’ target audience. Sales enablement combines sales coaching, content generation, onboarding, metrics, processes and systems, as well as tools and technology to help your salespeople deliver the best sales pitch possible. The goal is simple: to increase the speed of sales.
Sales enablement involves several processes, including defining your company’s objectives, buyer experience (maximizing it by understanding who the buyer is), and creating high-quality content that can be used by your salespeople effectively. With sales enablement, your sales representatives can be onboarded quickly and with less friction. As a result, they improve their sales skills universally, while the process remains cost-effective for your business. At Lighthouse Organizational Development, we are doers. We help you achieve this through our world-class eLearning-based Sales Academies, effectively creating sales enablement solutions that are exclusively tailored to your business needs, your salespeople, and your target demographic.
The purpose of an eLearning-based Sales Academy is to turn your own, internal learning materials, product documentation and your experts’ tacit knowledge into engaging e-learning content for sales enablement, training, onboarding and performance support.