Are You Reducing Your Sales Enablement Budget? Tips for Staying Ahead
While the threat of recession may be fading, we’re still facing a lot of economic uncertainty. It’s not surprising that many organizations continue to monitor spending closely.
Revenue enablement teams are feeling the effects.
Today, many revenue enablement teams deal with flat (or even reduced) budgets. Yet, the expectations placed on these teams only continue to grow.
In other words, revenue enablement teams are pressured to accomplish more with smaller revenue enablement budgets.
Are you a revenue enablement professional looking to maintain (or even increase) the impact of your program – even when you’re forced to trim your sales enablement budget? If so, you’ve come to the right place.
In this post, we’ll share four powerful tips for effective sales enablement – even when you’re facing a flat (or reduced) budget. We’ll also explore four key elements to incorporate into your organization’s revenue enablement budget.
Tip 1: Retain and develop your existing sellers
In today’s economy, many organizations aren’t replacing sellers who leave the organization – at least for now. But often, sales goals remain the same.
Revenue teams must boost performance and reduce turnover – even when hiring new sales reps isn’t an option. Upskilling your existing sales team is the most effective approach.
Upskilling is the process of providing existing sales reps with ongoing learning, support, and reinforcement so they can develop knowledge, skills, and behaviors that’ll help them meet (or even exceed) their goals.
Learning and support can (and should) take many different forms. For starters, revenue enablement teams must provide training materials to develop sales reps, including:
- Live training
- Videos
- Product sheets
- Quizzes
Revenue enablement teams must also provide sales reps opportunities to practice their new skills. Role-plays are one popular example. Sales reps can record their pitches and get instant input from artificial intelligence and feedback from sales managers and peers.
Sales reps must also receive regular, personalized one-on-one sales coaching for guidance and feedback and sales content to use with buyers throughout the sales cycle.
With the right sales enablement platform, sales leaders can track performance on the team and individual levels. This enables leaders to understand each seller’s strengths and weaknesses. Then, revenue enablement teams and sales managers can deliver additional, personalized sales enablement and coaching to strengthen lagging skills.
Tip 2: Examine what you might have missed
It’s hard to look ahead without considering how you’re doing things now. Look back at workflows and pipeline management processes to identify gaps and inefficiencies. Are you optimized to move opportunities through every stage of the sale?
A great way to get started is to perform a win/loss analysis, where you examine deals that were won and deals that were lost. Have sellers answer specific questions for each, like:
- Where did you find the lead?
- How did you initially reach out to the customer?
- Who did you talk to first and who were you in contact with throughout the process?
- How did the first conversation go? What was the next step?
- What were the customer’s pain points at the time?
- What were the customer’s goals at the time?
- Was the customer looking at competitors at the same time?
- How did you know this was a good deal to pursue (or what were the signs that it wasn’t)?
- How did you present the value proposition/use case?
- Who within the customer’s buying team made the final decision?
Revisiting opportunities allows you to determine what types of engagement and content led to success — and whether recently disqualified opportunities were properly disqualified or are still warm enough to warrant reaching back out.
Tip 3: Quantify your impact
Besides making changes to your approach, you must also prove the value of your sales enablement function when navigating budget discussions. This means being able to present numbers that demonstrate how enablement projects directly impact revenue.
Look at factors like content engagement and role-plays and how they correlate with quota attainment and revenue generation.
For instance, how likely are sellers who engage with enablement content to reach or exceed quota? Do sellers who practice with role-plays ask more questions in real-world buyer conversations or have more success in moving an opportunity forward? Putting numbers to these key performance indicators (KPIs) enables you to align efforts to stakeholder goals.
This is also an ideal time to ensure your current customers have clear benchmarks and KPIs to measure success. Dig into what they’re already measuring and discuss how those metrics can be used to understand their progress with your product. If they don’t have data to analyze, work with customer champions to establish easy KPIs to start measuring immediately. If their own organization is looking to consolidate technology, those champions can tie those KPIs to revenue and defend your product.
Tip 4: Automate tedious tasks
Recent Salesforce research found that sales reps spend a mere 28% of their time each week actually selling.
Sales reps spend just
When reviewing your sales processes, look for tasks that can be automated to help sellers focus on sales activities and boost sales productivity. Clunky, manual work like toggling between tools or scouring different folders to find specific content wastes time that could be spent on revenue-generating activities.
In these instances, there are likely ways to automate or consolidate programs in your tech stack to save sellers’ time and effort. Many sales technologies have integration capabilities to alleviate frustration and streamline methods for transferring customer data, sharing content, reporting, and more. If yours doesn’t, it’s probably time to look elsewhere.
The same Salesforce report cited earlier found that 66% of sellers are overwhelmed by the number of tools they’re expected to use.
So, when evaluating new solutions for your sales organization, consider vendors who provide at least several functionalities in your current tech stack within a single platform. This way, your sales team members and adjacent and supporting teams, like marketing, are working from a single source of truth, and all know where to find what they need. Revenue teams will spend less time hunting for what they need, switching between tools, and more time selling.
For example, an integrated revenue enablement platform has enablement and training, content management, conversation intelligence, coaching, and analytics all in one place. By delivering time-saving abilities and the assurance that every rep is using the most up-to-date internal and customer-facing content, an integrated revenue enablement platform lets sellers focus on sales activities that drive outcomes and revenue growth.
4 key elements of a sales enablement budget
In the best of times, a sales enablement budget is an essential piece of your sales enablement strategy. Today, when organizations closely watch their spending, creating a sales enablement budget is even more important.
If you’re building a revenue enablement budget from scratch (or revising an existing budget), you should incorporate four key elements.
Fixed costs
Variable costs
Unexpected costs
ROI
#1 Fixed costs
Fixed costs are any sales enablement expenses that stay largely the same. Some examples of fixed sales enablement costs include:
- Sales enablement team member salaries
- Monthly or yearly cost of sales enablement platforms and tools
These fixed costs are easy to predict because they remain steady – even as your business encounters change.
In general, fixed costs represent your sales enablement program must-haves. They’re things you need for your sales enablement team to be successful.
#2 Variable costs
Variable costs are expenses that can (and often do) vary based on the ever-evolving needs of the business. Some examples of variable sales enablement costs include:
- Travel
- Consultant work
- Vendor costs
Because these costs are variable, they’re trickier to plan for. It’s always better to overestimate variable costs than to underestimate them.
#3 Unexpected costs
Unexpected costs are – you guessed it – expenses that aren’t expected or planned for.
It’s important to consider any upcoming changes that could impact your budget. However, it’s impossible to anticipate everything. As such, it’s a good idea to build some wiggle room into your sales enablement budget so you have the funds to cover unexpected costs.
#4 ROI
Sales enablement’s goal is to positively impact sales productivity and performance. It’s important to prove that your sales enablement program is impacting the metrics that matter most to your business.
Your ability to convey return on investment (ROI) is key to maintaining the revenue enablement budget you already have. Proving ROI may also help you secure additional budget and resources.
Maximize the impact of revenue enablement with Mindtickle
When it’s done well, revenue enablement can have a large, measurable impact on sales productivity and performance. Yet, in today’s uncertain economy, many sales enablement teams have flat or reduced sales enablement budgets.
Using the tips in this post, you can maximize the impact of sales enablement—even when budgets and resources are tight.
Streamlining your sales enablement technology is one powerful way to maximize your sales enablement budget. Now’s the time to trade disparate point solutions for an integrated revenue enablement platform like Mindtickle.
Mindtickle incorporates all the key elements of revenue enablement – including onboarding, ongoing training, sales content, sales coaching, and conversation intelligence – all in one platform. Your sellers can find everything they need in one spot, so they’ll spend less time hunting down materials and more time engaging buyers and closing deals.
Sales Enablement in Mindtickle
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Request a DemoThis post was originally published in October 2022 and updated in July 2024.
