What happens when you don’t have a solid sales enablement strategy?

Your sales reps waste valuable time searching for content, messaging is inconsistent, and worse, you miss out on opportunities.

A strong enablement strategy is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a core compenent for efficient, successful teams and thriving businesses.

A well-planned sales enablement strategy aligns your teams and equips reps with the tools and resources they need to close more deals.

Read on to discover how to create effective sales strategies to empower reps, accelerate sales cycles, and drive measurable results.

What is sales enablement?

If you’re trying to build an enablement strategy, you likely already have a grasp on sales enablement.

But as a quick refresher:

Sales enablement means equipping your teams with the coaching, relevant content, training, and technology they need to onboard, improve their sales skills, and sell more and faster.

Essentially, helping your sales team to sell as effectively as possible.

What is a sales enablement strategy?

A strong sales enablement strategy equips your team with the content, tools, and training they need to engage buyers at every stage of the journey.

This could take the form of team sales training, working with marketing to implement helpful resources, or integrating sales collaboration tools into your tech stack, among other things.

But sales enablement is not a one-and-done initiative. Buyers’ preferences constantly change, the market shifts, and sales methodologies evolve.

This means you must regularly assess and optimize your training, tools, and materials to help your sales team.

Why is a sales enablement strategy important?

A sales enablement strategy is important to equip your sales team with the right tools, content, and training to meet evolving buyer needs. It aligns sales and marketing efforts, improves message consistency, and enables reps to engage more effectively at every stage of the customer journey. Without a strong strategy, teams risk wasting time, delivering inconsistent messaging, and losing potential deals.

How can a sales enablement strategy improve team performance?

By providing centralized access to up-to-date resources, integrating effective training programs, and enabling better collaboration across teams, a sales enablement strategy empowers reps to sell more confidently and efficiently. It shortens ramp-up time for new hires, improves coaching opportunities, and helps reps adapt to market changes. An effective strategy leads to higher productivity, better conversion rates, and improved overall sales performance.

What are the elements of a sales enablement strategy?

The following five functions make up the core of a strong sales enablement strategy:

1. Sales enablement content

To help your sales team add value to every potential customer interaction, they need content for each stage of the customer journey.

The most effective types of sales enablement content include:

  • Product walkthrough videos: In-house demos of key product features.
  • Datasheets: For use cases and specific product results.
  • Customer testimonials: Materials that demonstrate why customers choose your business, together with the relevant product or service benefits.
  • Slide decks: Presentations including information on market trends, industry challenges, and how your products solve customer pain points.
  • eBooks: Downloadable guides on how your sales team should handle particular customer call scenarios.
  • Battlecards: Information on how your sales team can improve their objection-handling skills.

Often, businesses will have a huge collection of sales resources, but they might not be easily accessible, and some content may be outdated.

To pull your company’s most valuable resources together, consider creating a sales playbook.

Start by taking a thorough look at all the materials your business has available.

Sort through them and begin building an effective sales playbook that makes it easier for sales reps to find what they need.

Creating a comprehensive sales playbook as part of your sales enablement strategy can help your teams reach their targets and improve your business’s overall ROI.

Creating a playbook ensures your team has access to, the type of content they’ll need to address::

  • Different prospects’ pain points.
  • Varying levels of urgency in terms of sales scenarios.
  • External-facing content like datasheets and case studies.
  • Internal-facing content, such as training videos and internal messaging.

Your sales team should be able to instantly access the right content from anywhere and at any time.

It’s much easier to pull together disparate content if you use a document management solution like PandaDoc.

With PandaDoc for sales, your team can create, collaborate on, and share all types of critical documents in one place.

2. Training and coaching

Training and coaching are also vital pieces of the sales enablement puzzle.

Through effective coaching, salespeople develop the soft skills needed to understand their prospects and ultimately close more deals.

Begin training from your first onboarding sessions, and seek to create sales training that gets reps excited with collaborative learning. Decide whether face-to-face, e-learning, or a combination of the two is most effective in your company.

One of the benefits of continuous sales coaching is that your team receives the support and guidance to upskill and improve their performance.

It’s important that leaders keep tabs on all pipeline deals so they can deliver useful coaching sessions at the right time.

For example, tasking a new sales agent with sending a customer quote, together with a CRM alert.

This could include simple steps on how to generate rapid quotes and instructions on how to follow up.

When it comes to rapidly generating quotes, PandaDoc CPQ is a godsend for sales teams.

It lets you pre-configure and customize quotes with ease, so you can present the right offering to prospects, quickly and easily.

Use tools like your CRM or other sales enablement software to create a centralized content location for all your up-to-date training and coaching documents.

This way, you can keep your content library updated with market and industry changes, together with changes to your organization’s ICPs.

Don’t forget to include ongoing tech stack training programs in your strategy.

After all, the best digital sales enablement tools are only as good as the team using them.

3. Strategy

To develop an intelligent strategy, you need a clear understanding of your sales team, the business’s overall goals, and your prospects’ buying traits.

Seek to establish where your reps get stuck within your sales processes and uncover areas requiring additional support.

Typical types of support may include more topic-specific training, personalized coaching, or discussing new pieces of content.

Successful sales enablement requires a strategy that consolidates different elements and aligns them with your business’s goals and North Star.

To verify this, ask yourself the following:

  • Do you have specific content for reps to use at each stage of the buying journey?
  • Have you synced with marketing, sales, CX, product teams, and your customers to map out the most effective digital journey?
  • Is that journey the best design point for your current sales enablement strategy?
  • Does your current sales enablement tech stack provide reps with what they need for valuable conversations that move prospects along that journey?

4. Tools

There is no shortage of software options to support your business’s sales processes and enablement strategy.

These tools will offer different functionalities, with choices including communications, content management, prospecting, and sales management tools, CRM (customer relationship management) systems, and coaching tools, to name a few.

Optimized tech empowers your team to work more efficiently by shortening the sales cycle and closing more deals.

However, take the time to thoroughly research whether bringing in specific tools will facilitate greater efficiency without creating additional work or generating too steep a learning curve while your team gets to grips with them.

5. Metrics

It’s essential to have the tools in place to measure the effectiveness of your sales enablement strategy.

Metrics reveal where you need to provide more support, which allows you to deliveractionable resources or training to drive more sales.

Sales enablement metrics to measure include the average sales cycle length, closing rate (also known as win rate), average deal size, and sales productivity (both individually and for the entire team).

For instance, the average deal size metric helps you expose potential sales cycle bottlenecks.

You might discover that automating sales processes is de-personalizing the customer journey and that you need to iterate on this automation process.

Sophisticated tools like best-in-class CRMs enable you to monitor the content you send out.

Discover which team members utilize content, calculate the proportion of prospects that read your emails and open links, work out how many emails your team sends before getting the first call, and find the average number of calls initiated before closing a deal.

Sales enablement strategy example

To see how this looks in execution, a sales enablement strategy for a B2B SaaS company could look something like this:

Define your goals and objectives

Establish specific, measurable goals that align with business objectives. For example:

  • Increase lead-to-customer conversion rate by 20% in six months
  • Reduce sales cycle length from 45 to 30 days.

Create buyer personas

Create profiles of your ideal customers to help reps tailor their sales approach. Personas should include details such as:

  • Industry and company size.
  • Job roles and responsibilities.
  • Pain points and challenges.
  • The decision-making process. 

Align sales and marketing teams

Sales and marketing teams must be aligned to ensure all internal and client-facing materials are consistent. Help cross-functional teams collaborate by:

  • Establishing shared goals and KPIs.
  • Creating a consistent, unified content strategy.
  • Scheduling ongoing meetings or standups to discuss progress. 

Empower sales reps with tools and content

While some reps have the innate ability to sell anything to anyone, for the most part, your team is only as good as the training and coaching you give them. Arm them with the resources they need, including:

Schedule ongoing training and coaching

Keep your sales team updated on:

  • Product updates and new features.
  • Industry trends and best practices.
  • Sales techniques and methodologies.

Measure progress and optimize as needed

Track KPIs to measure the effectiveness of your sales enablement strategy.

  • Lead conversion rates.
  • Average deal size.
  • Sales cycle length.
  • Customer aquisition cost (CAC).

The benefits of sales enablement

Some simple benefits of sales enablement include:

Better scaling

When you arm your sales reps with the right tools and content, you help your entire team level up and meet their sales targets.

In addition, creating valuable onboarding materials speeds up the hiring and onboarding process, while getting new reps ready to take sales calls earlier.

This can help your business to scale and grow with greater efficiency and success.

Stronger sales insight

Data-driven insights and a robust sales enablement strategy help teams understand performance and make adjustments that lead to results.

Use sales enablement technology to gather valuable insights around prospects’ preferences, pain points, and target buyer personas, and help your sales team reach out in a more personalized way.

Sales enablement data includes important information about firmographics, channel analytics, prospect interest, goal completions, and content performance metrics.

Quicker deals

With the best data insights, intuitive sales enablement tools, and access to marketing and sales collateral, sales reps can move through the deal process faster.

When your sales enablement data is integrated with your CRM, you can keep track of deals and customer data— there’s no need to worry about contrasting data sets or to spend time manually updating different software.

This means your sales team can spend more time selling than they do on manual data entry.

Improved alignment with marketing

It’s a given that sales reps become more successful when they can give prospects the most relevant information at the right time in their journey.

An effective way to achieve this is through ongoing collaboration between your sales, marketing, and product development teams.

For instance, when sales reps work with your marketing team, they can glean a more comprehensive understanding of the buyer’s journey, and they’ll be equipped with crucial marketing materials that they can use to close deals.

Working with the product development team gives your salespeople a better understanding of the product or service’s key features and selling points.

This can aid and improve sales pitches.

How do sales enablement and marketing work together?

As we mentioned, when sales enablement and marketing form a partnership, your sales team has a huge advantage.

Not only will you save time with sales enablement strategies, but you can also create more valuable content and pitches for prospects and customers.

Educational content is an integral part of lead generation and the sales nurturing process.

For example, top-of-sales-funnel content that you push out on social media can educate prospects and provide value.

This strategy shows that your business is an industry leader and can deliver the solution your prospects are seeking.

Some examples of sales enablement content that’s perfect for social media include:

  • Articles
  • Ebooks and webinars
  • How-to videos
  • Case studies
  • Customer reviews and testimonials

Free, downloadable content is ideal for funneling social media users to your business’s landing pages. From there, opt-ins can be passed to sales for successful conversions.

See also

How to use visuals to increase sales conversions

How to build a sales enablement strategy

It’s time to build your business’s sales enablement strategy.

To reiterate, sales enablement helps your team to:

  • Positively engage with more prospects
  • Access the best content to help them close more deals
  • Better understand their target market
  • Obtain usable data and insights
  • Automate repetitive sales processes.

Here are the steps to create an effective strategy.

1. Create a sales enablement charter

A robust sales enablement strategy begins with the right framework.

Define your expectations, goals, processes, and business needs.

To formalize this, you should create a sales enablement charter.

Without one, your sales team might have trouble organizing sales processes like pitching, nurturing, and closing deals.

Tailor your sales enablement charter according to your business’s specific challenges, SWOT analysis, industry, and overarching company strategy.

As a constantly iterative document, your sales enablement charter must contain S.M.A.R.T. goals to help you remain strategy-focused.

2. Get your sales team involved

It makes sense to involve your team in developing your sales enablement strategy.

Also, you could bring in CX and marketing for valuable feedback from their unique points of view.

Look to discuss:

  • Tools they think would improve and streamline the sales process
  • Daily challenges that might be stopping them from reaching their sales targets
  • Skills, data, and information they might need to help them optimize their sales approach
  • Tactics they feel are currently successful with prospects
  • How your product is positioned in the marketplace compared to the competition
  • What they feel might improve your company’s position in the market.

As your sales team will be handling daily prospect calls, they’re the ones with a frontline understanding of the best strategy to use moving forward.

3. Bring in the stakeholders

By involving the relevant stakeholders in developing your sales enablement strategy, it’s easier to attain buy-in and break down departmental silos.

Consider the stakeholders who should be included, together with their roles.

Ensure you bring in the C-suite early on to get buy-in from your executive team before your strategy gets fully underway.

4. Map out the customer journey

Your customers are at the center of your sales enablement strategy.

Without them, there can be no strategy.

Consider your buyer’s journey to see where there’s potential for sales to fall through and where you could provide helpful information during the sales process to avoid this.

5. Conduct necessary training

Once you’ve completed the previous steps, it’s time to train your sales team.

This includes creating relevant content (which you should have previously identified) and compiling all collateral in a central, easily-accessible location.

You’ll need to coach your team on effective sales processes, how to react to industry trends, respond to customer objections, use sales enablement tools, and analyze data.

What are sales enablement tools?

Sales enablement technology, a sales enablement toolkit, sales enablement software—call them what you will, are the tools to optimize your strategy and equip your team with the resources to close more deals.

Must-haves in sales enablement software

Most sales enablement software solutions exist to improve your sales team’s effectiveness.

This includes monitoring how quickly you onboard new hires, training attendance rates, sales rep performance data, and more.

To discover the best-fit sales enablement software for your business needs, look for these must-have functionalities:

Analytics

Your first port of call is analytics. Ensure your intended platform includes comprehensive reporting, tracking, and analytics features.

It’s essential that your sales enablement tool gives you uncompromising access to sales team metrics, utilized content, and how these influence results.

For instance, insights into deal-close likelihoods or the specific behavior patterns and actions that incite deals are incredibly meaningful.

, for example, offers a range of comprehensive analytics features.

See how often each document or link was viewed, the time spent viewing a document, and the last time it was opened.

You can also gain insights into which pages users spend the most time on, how much time they spend on each page, the number of page views, and the document status (i.e., whether it is opened or completed).

A robust sales enablement tool should provide your team with in-platform sales dashboards.

By making proper use of this data, you can work to prioritize leads and forge better prospect relationships so your team can close more deals.

Gamification

A steep learning curve with new software is never a good thing, so another must-have feature is gamification.

This function allows you to level up your sales training using interactive games and quizzes.

Created to improve your team’s sales process knowledge, gamification makes learning fun and information easier to retain.

Automated workflows

Workflow automation removes some of the burden from your sales teams. ‌

Sales enablement solutions will often automatically take care of time-consuming data entry processes by generating frequently used templates, ensuring your team doesn’t have to draw up new documents for each customer.

Another example of ’s sales enablement software features is real-time document notifications.

This means your sales reps instantly know when a document is opened, read, commented on, or completed.

CRM integration

Interoperability is a key feature — and not just for your CRM.

The best sales enablement software integrates with all your favorite tools.

For example, seamlessly integrates with more than 30 business tools, including payment tools, storage software, administrative and design tools, and CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce.

It also allows you to create custom workflows across 1,300 apps.

Content management

Sales enablement software should also have a content management feature that consolidates and organizes all sales content for team members to access when they need to.

If the tool is too complex or reps can’t find the content they require, you may lose out on valuable opportunities to close a deal.

For instance, sales enablement software helps you scale your business by creating automated workflows.

Document management

But your tech stack shouldn’t consist only of sales tools. Document management software like PandaDoc can help you generate professional documents, set up approval workflows, and track recipient behavior. You can also leave comments or feedback directly within your documents.

As we’ve mentioned (a few times), you need a centralized location for your sales and marketing collateral. PandaDoc has you covered as a central repository for your team to locate the content they need whenever they need it. And PandaDoc features two-way integration with top CRM platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce so you can create and send contracts without switching between platforms.

Optimize your sales enablement strategy

Your business’s sales enablement strategy isn’t static; it should evolve alongside your team, your buyers, and your business goals. 

By continuously measuring your progress, you can learn what works and what doesn’t, and identify gaps in your training, content, and processes.

When reps have easy access to the right resources, they can spend less time searching and more time selling. They show up prepared, confident, and ready to deliver real value in every customer interaction.

That’s where a document management and sales proposal platform comes in. It helps teams find the most relevant materials, build professional proposals, and deliver a seamless buyer experience every time.

Equip your team with the tools they need to optimize the sales process and close more deals. Try PandaDoc for free; start your 14-day trial today.

Disclaimer

PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Originally published April 24, 2023, updated April 1, 2025