Differences Between Sales Training Vs Sales Enablement
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What a sales department does is simple: it aims to boost revenue by improving sales performance and building client loyalty. However, exactly how it achieves these goals is a more complicated matter.
There are several business terms to explain ways to empower the sales department in your organization. Each method has a different intent and process. There are times when you have to talk about the distinction between sales enablement vs. sales engagement or sales readiness vs. sales enablement.
Need a refresher course on the right lingo? If you’re often asking yourself what all of these terms mean and how they’re different, you’re in the right place. It’s time to answer these questions, starting with sales training and enablement.
What is Sales Training?
Sales training is a type of employee education that aims to help sellers improve their skills when it comes to closing more deals. There are many kinds of sales training, but here are a few that you might have heard of:
- Product-focused training, which involves learning about the product or service itself. The material usually includes technical specifications and use cases. By engaging with product-focused training, salespeople learn about the product, understand what they’re selling and answer questions effectively. By using a sales training platform, sales reps can truly understand it before they go live with a prospect.
- Process sales training, which points to sales procedures specific to your organization. Participants for this type of training learn about the exact sales cycle in use in your company. For instance, what are some common tools and strategies for interacting with prospective buyers? Process sales training ensures that all customer experiences align with the values and goals of the business as a whole. During process sales training, you’ll learn how to use the software for effective demos, the right follow-up procedure, and how your businesses handle objections.
What is Sales Enablement Training?
Sales enablement is a related but distinct concept, and that means sales enablement training is also its own entity.
The main difference is that sales enablement expands beyond the sales department. It’s a mindset that applies to the entire organization from management to marketing staff.
Sales enablement training doesn’t stop at the Sales cycle. It’s about how the whole org can support sales and customer success. It involves onboarding processes, generating useful content and tools, crafting the right sales cycle processes, and tracking the relevant metrics and key performance indicators to ensure customer satisfaction.
Sales enablement training must be customer-centric, as it helps the business appeal to the modern customer. New trends and methodologies in consumer behavior are the focus here.
Sales Enablement in a new word: Challenges, Skills and Tech - Webinar
Related Terms to Consider
Some other useful terms to know are sales engagement and sales-readiness.
Sales engagement
Sales engagement is about how engaged prospects are with the way that you sell. After a demo or a POC, how likely is it that leads convert to paying users? Sales software can be great at tracking this data, showing everything from ease of use during a POC, to moments of friction in a hands-on demo. Using these actionable insights, sales enablement and sales engineering teams can interact with the prospect with greater accuracy and visibility.
Sales readiness
How ready are your sales reps to get the job done? With your best “Gladiator Ready” impression, sales readiness is about giving your reps the tools they need to perform effectively in their role.
Do they have the technology and the platform to show your software’s best abilities? Do they have the knowledge to answer the tough questions and objections?
This is what sales readiness is measuring.
Sales Training vs Sales Enablement: Which One Is Right for You?
While a small company might get away with relying on simple sales training, the truth is just as Alec Baldwin told us, we need to Always Be Closing.
Sales don’t start and finish with a demo or a POC. Sales enablement means crafting better customer experiences across the journey, including onboarding, customer education, certifications, and partner enablement.
In a constantly changing market, enablement education and training allow sales and marketing teams to stay relevant and competitive. This is where a sales training platform comes in, especially as an important part of the job is collecting sales metrics so that you can track progress and continue to improve, something you can’t do manually.
Empower Your Sales With CloudShare
It’s clear—you need a tool that lets you administer sales training while collecting useful metrics for growth. The answer lies in a virtual sales enablement platform like CloudShare.
CloudShare enables you to set up immersive and interactive sales demo environments, POCs, training sessions, and many other essential tools for optimizing sales cycles. By allowing customers to get handsy with your solution in a virtual environment that mimics their own, they can see exactly how intuitive and easy to learn it is, and how it integrates with their specific processes and workflows.
At the same time, your sales and sales enablement teams can use the platform for training initiatives, whether it’s for onboarding new employees, customer education, improving sales processes, or quickly getting sales reps up to speed with a new product or feature update.
This post was originally published on January 2021 and updated on November 17, 2022.
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