How does being a strong leader equal a boost in sales? What sets you apart as a sales manager? Or maybe you’ve made a costly hiring mistake, and aren’t sure how that happened!? To discover more about your management strengths and how to have a rock star sales team, check out SalesFuel’s free white paper: "The Best Sales Manager I Ever Had."

Welcome to the 100 Sales Enablement Best Practices! We set out to curate best practices from sales enablement practitioners in the trenches so we could publish them for the benefit of the sales community. We invited the community to submit their best practice suggestions. As we reviewed all the submissions, it was difficult to find ones to exclude, as so many contributed valuable tips. When we narrowed the submissions to the 100 best practices provided by actual practitioners, we found found they naturally fell into five categories: Strategy, Leadership and Management, Training and Development, Content and Cadence, and Sales Coaching. While there were common threads, each best practice is a unique perspective on what all sales enablement leaders struggle with: how to provide sellers the right tools, skills, methods, content and processes to enable them to create more pipeline, nurture prospects, and improve win rates. We sincerely thank all those who took the time to submit their best practice. We hope you find these sales enablement best practices as valuable as we did. Mario Martinez Jr. CEO and Founder, Vengreso  

Throughout this eBook, you will learn 11 key strategies that will help you position your profile to be seen as a thought leader and subject matter expert, leverage your existing network to gain access to decision makers and engage with people who are engaging with you.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the 17 innovations occurring to the methods of training and learning. Some are in their infancy; others are more mature. Additionally, we'll suggest some neuroscience-based practices to help you develop your organizational training.

How to use video in your sales enablement practice to help your reps ramp up more quickly, sell more efficiently, and share best practices more easily. Click below to download this Whitepaper.

Able, adjusted, all systems go, apt, equipped, fit, in order, organized, planned, prepared, primed, qualified, rehearsed, set. These are all synonyms for the word ready. The question is, can you really be sure that these words apply to your sales team? To help you not only shift the way you think about sales readiness, but actually take steps towards ensuring your own sales organization’s readiness, we have compiled 22 tips to guide you.  

Companies around the globe have canceled sales meetings and training sessions and are enacting work from home policies to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Yet sales enablement professionals must get new hires up to speed and keep teams on track in a world where face-to-face meetings are impossible. Traditional training and sales enablement approaches won’t solve this challenge. But building a virtual training program when you’ve relied on in-person sessions can feel like an overwhelming task. Fortunately, there are proven tactics that organizations can employ to train across geographies and time zones. Use this guide to learn how the right strategy and technology can help you manage high-performing virtual teams.

Why Your ROI Story Is Stronger Than You Think If you’re in charge of training a sales team, you know how hard it is to ensure they properly receive and retain training while in the field. But since organizations often treat sales training as an unavoidable cost of doing business, you may find it even harder to justify investing in technology that would improve your learning program. Sales, sales enablement, and sales training leaders often don’t realize how much investing in sales training technology contributes to a stronger ROI. That’s because most companies haven’t instituted best practices for identifying the business impact of better sales learning. Most limit their tracking to activity metrics like usage and adoption, or they capture anecdotes about how a recent training contributed to closing a specific deal. Quantifying the full return on your sales training investments helps you more effectively champion your initiatives and win more resources. That way, you can improve your team’s performance and create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. Here are four sources of ROI you’re already delivering that you should capture to demonstrate how sales training contributes to the bottom line of your organization. Click below to download this eBook.

Charts and graphs are an incredibly powerful way to present your data, but even minor mistakes can bury your insights in clutter and confusion. This e-book will help you tell a clear and compelling story every time with critical tips on color choices, choosing formats for different data types, avoiding "chart junk," and more.

We have identified five potential areas of failure in sales process/sales methodology implementation in the midst of data-driven sales transformation.  These areas are broad and multifaceted, but we have explained them within the context of the business issue, and their effects on process implementation, as well as the way that shifting process implementations can affect business issues.

Modern Corporate Training Today, modern corporate training programs must focus on building a culture of learning to engage, train, and retain employees. They must also prove that these programs impact business growth. To help you prioritize initiatives, we’ve identified six of the most important trends shaping corporate training today.

The book represents an ingenious guide on how to achieve peak performance in sales, your career, and life. It is written by 27 exceptional entrepreneurs and sales leaders. If finding excellence in sales were like climbing to the top of a mountain, we offer you here 673 years of climbing to the top of the sales mountain. You can hike your way up to the summit in 52 pages. The book has two main parts: "The Process" chapter represents the most important hard-earned lessons, on the following topics: Sales Development, Negotiation/Closing, and Customer Success. "The Career" chapter is profound in its simplicity. "The Career" chapter tells you about our heroes’ North Star or what key ingredients brought success, in their long and fruitful careers. This book is a treasure trove. We hope you find the guidance you are searching for and some new valuable insights as you browse through these pages.

CSO Insights’ 2017 Sales Manager Enablement Report compared the win rates on forecasted sales opportunities between companies with a formalized approach to coaching—meaning there is a standard approach used by all sales managers—to those companies where coaching strategies were entirely left up to the manager or done informally. Their findings provide proof as to why a sales coaching initiative at your company is so important: companies who had adopted a formal approach to sales coaching achieved a win-rate on forecasted deals that was 19% higher. In short, developing a strong sales coaching culture offers a great ROI. And great leverage: Each sales manager trained is then empowered to improve the win rates of every sales rep on their team. Here are seven keys that will move you in that direction.

WHAT IS A COACHING CULTURE? Culture shapes behaviors inside the organization and a coaching culture is one deliberately focused on growing and nurturing talent in order to deliver key results, strengthen leadership capacities, increase retention and deepen engagement. A culture that has cultivated a coaching approach to development often demonstrates some of the following characteristics: • Giving and receiving feedback in the service of being at one's best • Focusing on opportunities to help members of one's team grow • Operating in teams with clear goals and roles • Developing others when it matters most • Asking and empowering more than telling and fixing When coaching is embedded through all levels of an organization it becomes the predominant approach to working and leading together with a goal of building a best-in-class organization by building great leaders. Click below to download this White Paper.

Are your prospects singing the blues like Ray Charles and telling you, "Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more!"  Or are they screaming like James Brown, "You got, you got, you got WHAT I NEED!" Listen up! If you’re constantly turning people off and getting nowhere...and you’re not rocking the right approach to connecting with your buyers...you’re going to be hitting sour notes and going broke in a hurry, my friend! Fortunately, there’s a way to change your tune to one that strikes the right tone with your prospects. And it involves embracing just a few mindset shifts and learning a simple but powerful 3-step formula we developed called the PVC Sales MethodologyTM — which stands for: • Personalization • Value • Call-to-action Leveraging the PVC Methodology will turn you into a rock star connector, prospector and seller! But before we dive into the details of the PVC Sales MethodologyTM, there are a few other things we need to cover as we set the stage for your success. So sit up, and get ready to learn how to strike the right chord with your prospects!

When you set out to target new business, you probably have an ICP in mind - your ideal customer profile. When you set out to recruit a new sales professional for your department, you should also have an ICP. In this case, ICP stands for ideal candidate profile. The individual you envision possesses nonstop energy and resilience, outstanding listening skills and can close deals faster than you can blink. Go ahead and blink. Then, pinch yourself. Because you are dreaming. These types of candidates don’t just sail into your organization. When you’re recruiting, you must look for candidates who are highly coachable. Using the right guidance with the right tools, over time, you’ll be able to develop your new rep into the polished professional you envision. Coachability is one of the top traits that sales managers consider when they’re hiring. In our Voice of the Sales Manager survey, respondents rated the most desired characteristics in their reps as follows: 1. Problem solver 69% 2. Confident 66% 3. Positive attitude / Optimistic 64% 4. Takes initiative 62% 5. Highly coachable 60% Click below to download this free White Paper from SalesFuel.

Managing remote workers has always been challenging, particularly with sales teams where everything is measured on productivity and results. With more employees working from home than ever, sales managers must learn to manage a distributed workforce from a distance. For those organizations new to the world of a remote workforce, managing from a distance has presented unforeseen challenges.  So how do we know, then, if our sales team is cut-out for remote work? How do you gauge how well your team will adapt? We don’t have all of the answers today, but we can take a look at what successes and challenges remote sales teams have experienced, what new challenges organizations are seeing and how they are addressing them, and how sales managers can support, engage, motivate, and assess their newly remote workforce. We can use this information to help our salespeople adjust and thrive in a remote environment. 

Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, many (if not all) companies are hyperfocused on boosting sales. A Google search for "sales enablement" yields millions of results—and a variety of conflicting definitions. Clearly, sales enablement can mean different things to different people. To some, it’s tools, tactics, and training. To others, it’s all about strategy, data, and analytics.  To us, it includes all those things—but it always starts with the story. Like any good book, your sales story should be a page-turner—keeping prospects hooked by engaging, inspiring, and making powerful emotional connections with them. But too often, the stories sales teams tell are fragmented, overly focused on product specs and features, or misaligned with marketing. The right story can make all the difference. And because research suggests that 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy, telling that story in the right ways at the right stages of the sales funnel is essential for converting new prospects into loyal customers. But an effective sales story involves more than delivering certain keywords to drive awareness, consideration, and decision as prospects move through the funnel. It should be a holistic, consistent thread that runs through all your communications to prospects—and one that’s laser-focused on the value you offer and the problems you can solve for them. Here are three critical steps to ensure that your sales team is telling a clear and compelling story about what you offer and why people will want to engage with your brand.

As sales organizations endeavor to escape the constricted economy of the 2009 recession, one of their most significant barriers is stagnant progess regarding bringing their sales cycle under control. Aberdeen research conducted in March, 2010 for the benchmark study of 441 corporate sales teams,Automating Lead-To-Win: Shrinking the Sales Cycle and Focusing Closers on Sealing More Deals, included 37 companies currently deploying CPQ technology, and analysis shows that these organizations are realizing concrete performance advantages over other survey respondents.

Just as B2B sales strategies must adapt to increasingly savvy buyers, sales training must change too. This brief discusses how newer training content and methods can result in a better, smarter sales force.

You are about to embark on a journey that is going to help you to book, sell, and retain like never before.  This book reveals: What has changed in our B2B industry/profession, how to cope with the change, and what skills should one acquire to thrive? What should you change/improve to book, close, and retain more than ever? What resources are valuable to keep on your road to success? "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." ― Alvin Toffler Click below to download this eBook.

Beyond the Sales Process focuses on the frontline of engagement with customers. It is specifically intended for salespeople, account managers, their managers, and sales leaders, as well as others who have responsibilities and pressures associated with developing and winning business, and those who are tasked with extending and expanding their relationships with customers.

Ask a CEO to name his or her organization's most important asset and you're sure to hear "our people," followed closely by "our customers." Everything  else  takes  a  backseat, and  yet few books are written about how these two most  valuable assets interact, engage, align, collaborate, innovate, and create value together. Beyond the Sales Process focuses on the frontline of engagement with customers. It is specifically intended for salespeople, account managers, their managers, and sales leaders, as well as others who have responsibilities and pressures associated with developing and winning business, and those  who  are  tasked  with  extending  and expanding their relationships with customers. In the case studies that follow each section, you'll learn how top companies engage differently and grow successful customer relationships based on collaboration, innovation, and mutual value creation and co-creation. These case studies provide an in-depth perspective on how industry leaders across the globe engage, win, and grow with their customers. Adecco Staffing U.S., BNY Mellon, Hilton Worldwide, Honeywell Building Solutions, Merck/MSD, Panasonic Corporation, Securian Financial Group-Group Insurance, Siemens AG, and Zurich Insurance Group have generously provided us with their stories. While this book is largely intended for those who want to consistently be at the top of their professional peer groups and are willing to consider new ideas to help them succeed, it will also be of value to the managers and leaders who motivate, coach, and support the efforts of their teams. Thus, this  book  is  for  those  customer-facing  professionals  who need to drive their performance to the next level of effectiveness. Click VIEW below to download these valuable strategies.

Regardless of industry, organizations are starting to recognize the value of big data and how they can use it to gain new insights about their business. CITO Research has surveyed Qlik customers in healthcare, banking, securities & investments, insurance, telecommunications, and retail. Download this white paper to learn more about how they are harnessing the power of big data to generate business benefits and competitive differentiators.