If you’ve been working in the banking and financial services industry for some time, this scenario may not be unusual for you: Marketing, product teams, proposal appraisal, compliance, everything is in place. And yet, your sales teams aren’t able to convert as many leads as you thought they could have.
That’s because your sales team wasn’t equipped to make the most of the opportunities; no proper sales enablement framework was in place. Consider this:
- Forbes reported that 55% of the executives surveyed said sales enablement topped their investment priorities for sales productivity.
- HubSpot estimates that improper enablement and poor sales-marketing alignment costs organizations $1 billion every year.
No wonder businesses in general and the financial services industry, in particular, are keen to devise and implement best sales enablement practices.
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a continually evolving process of making available to your sales teams relevant content, data, tools, training, and resources to help them convert more leads and achieve more revenue per customer.
Sales enablement strategy is all about making sales more efficient. With sales enablement, your salespeople spend more time converting instead of looking for the right material.
Why sales enablement for banking and financial services is important?
There are several reasons why sales enablement is key to better sales in the banking and financial services industry. Here are the top 5 reasons:
- Because of the strong compliance requirements in the financial sector, your sales teams need to follow a disciplined process in sales. Sales enablement brings this discipline.
- Thanks to appropriate material and content, sales enablement helps your sales teams minimize or eliminate sales friction.
- With more data on hand, your sales teams can bring more personalization into their sales efforts. This becomes an important factor for the financial services industry where organizations face the risk of weakening brand identity and increasing commoditization.
- Sales training provides the right inputs for sales teams, absent which they’d be wasting lots of effort on unproductive tasks or poor-quality leads.
- Sales best practices optimize the entire sales flow and provide a strong structure with which more salespeople can deliver results.
Top 6 sales enablement best practices
Sales enablement is iterative and constantly changing, so there are certain best practices to follow in order to be sure you’re improving.
Below, we discuss the top 6 sales enablement best practices for financial services and banking:
1. Entrench high performing activities
The larger goal of sales enablement best practices is to create an ecosystem that drives your organizational growth by infusing excellence in the sales process.
It’s important to understand and document the best practices for sales reps that your top performers follow. By having the rest of your sales follow those practices, you institutionalize efficiency and eliminate activities that aren’t producing results.
You can either manually break down and record the entire process or let a sales acceleration platform do that more efficiently. You can also get your top performers train the rest of the team, or share some powerful tips. Let your best deliver today and train the rest for tomorrow!
2. Ensure continual training and upskilling
Sales enablement best practices require that you provide your sales teams the wherewithal to convert leads into paying customers.
For example, learn the language prospects use and the objections they raise. Then have your star performers come up with the best answers that the rest of the team can use.
Upskilling and grooming sales leaders for tomorrow is also very much a part of your sales enablement. As new technologies emerge, new markets are discovered, you want to rope in all the experience of your salespeople and make sure your organization keeps growing successfully.
3. Align to the buyer journey
Financial products are rarely, if ever, bought on a whim. At every stage of the buyer journey, prospects have different concerns. The more accurately you can align your tools and assets to these stages, the more likely you’ll close the deal.
Begin by creating your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Figure out what kind of information would be both persuasive and relevant at every touchpoint. Whether your prospect goes to the next stage of the journey or drops out depends almost entirely upon how you’ve engaged with them at the previous stage.
During different stages of their journey, your prospects need different kinds of content. Also, this content should be neatly organized and integrated with the software used by sales teams.
Sales enablement best practices for financial services needs to include on-demand webinars, blog posts, testimonials and other marketing-cum-sales collaterals that your sales teams can use at different stages.
4. Leverage sales automation
A good sales automation platform will let you automate tons of tasks. For example, you can automate the entire email sending process. What’s more, you can also personalize these emails, based on what actions your prospects take.
Send a reminder email, for instance, to someone who hasn’t yet downloaded an eGuide or watched a certain video as part of sales enablement. For financial services, you want to convince the prospect that you’re interested in helping them and hence you’re following up.
5. Streamline technology usage
Here are the three most important questions to ask before adopting new technology:
- Will the technology adapt to my systems?
- Does the new technology cover solutions of all sizes?
- Is the technology capable of shortening my sales cycle?
The sales enablement technology should not only fit into your system but also make sales better by swift, best-fit mapping. For example, it should be able to quickly and dynamically allocate leads based on expertise, proximity, and experience for a particular product.
As part of best practices for sales enablement, the technology you choose should solve both small and big problems. For instance, when one of your salesperson’s meetings gets delayed by twenty minutes, your sales enablement platform should immediately suggest an action, like a follow-up for a document with another customer. As a result, your salesperson gets a smart digital assistant that ensures no time is ever wasted, providing you a great ROI.
6. Provide transparent reporting
One of the best practices for sales enablement is to make reporting easy, transparent, and swift, in addition to automating as much as possible.
A strong sales enablement platform should leverage technology in order to help your sales heads track and measure the activities and performance of all the team members. Team leaders should be able to, at a quick glance, spot the KPIs, closure rates, and outcomes.
And because it’s transparent, your teams know how they’re being evaluated and what areas they need to work upon in order to perform at the next level.
Closing remarks
Selling is the lifeline of any business. Naturally, you want your organization to build strong sales processes and systems to ensure success and growth.
Sales enablement is the only way to scale effectively because it injects efficiency and institutionalizes sales best practices that do the job. Making rich and relevant content available for your customer-facing sales teams, building their skills through strong training, adopting appropriate technology platforms, and devising transparent reporting form some of the most critical aspects of sales enablement for banking and financial services.
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