Sales Enablement Assessments Pave the Path to SDR Success

It’s not easy being a sales development representative (SDR). In fact it’s pretty challenging. SDRs are tasked with making dozens of calls per day to busy, time-crunched executives. They have to quickly convince prospects to invest their onboarding time and attention to overcome challenges they may not even realize they’re facing.

To ensure your SDR content is effective and your SDRs “kit bags” contain the right resources, we recommend conducting periodic sales enablement assessments to identify any gaps and enable your SDRs to:

• Prepare or personalize calling scripts for their target prospects or clients
• Position your company as a trustworthy supplier or service provider worthy of their business
• Confirm the individuals they are connecting with have the budget, authority, need and realistic timeline for the products and services you offer
• Overcome common objections
• Persuade prospects and/or their colleagues to participate in a discovery call with a senior sales rep or a subject matter expert

Before sharing your playbooks, competitive battle cards, or other content assets, it’s critical that you properly validate them. Ensure they are effective, practical, and include future-proof resources for experienced and new-hire SDRs alike.

According to Gartner’s Sales Enablement Framework , sales enablement functions should be:

• Aligned to revenue objectives
• Design-driven
• Value-centric
• Overcome common objections
• Technology-powered

Once these elements are in place, it becomes easier to implement a successful sales enablement program. Continuing education coupled with periodic assessments of your sales content are the key to optimal ROI and long-term success.

Four Kinds of Sales Enablement Assessment Strategies

Here are four kinds of sales enablement assessment strategies you can implement to ensure the right technology foundation to support training, coaching, and knowledge sharing.

1. Role-playing exercises

Using a sales training session or scheduled meeting as a safe place to test drive sales enablement content is an effective tactic before adopting it as a sales tool. Role play between colleagues can feel awkward or uncomfortable yet is preferable to experimenting (and possibly failing) with a prospective customer.

Want to alleviate your SDRs’ embarrassment of staging a make-believe sales call in front of their peers? Try having your SDRs call a sales coach, manager, or senior member of the sales team from their desk, using the sales enablement tools you created. SDRs will not only benefit from hearing the analysis and feedback from their calls, but this approach also provides the sales enablement team with good insights into how effective your SDR tools are.

2. Key performance indicator (KPI) analysis

There are many statistics to monitor, measure, and manage in the realms of account and sales development. KPIs can include call quantity, quality, average talk time, lead and opportunity conversion rates, and CRM activity volume to name a handful.If your sales enablement tools are effective, sales reps will see longer talk time, better leads, and more customer interactions overall.

Building a searchable, intuitive content library of best practices, competitive intelligence, FAQs, and other instructional resources can motivate your SDRs and increase their confidence. This newfound confidence outweighs the doubts which discourage SDRs from meeting their productivity objectives.

There are a few ways to incentivize SDRs to leverage your sales enablement content . Consider giving out points to those who use your playbooks or other lead generation tools in customer interactions. You can also introduce the resources to strategic parts of the sales organization at annual kickoff meetings. If SDRs and account executives all use a common sales enablement solution, successful sales reps can continue to make the content part of their ongoing sales process.

3. Evaluate sales enablement tools as part of your sales app stack

Has your business invested in a CRM application like Salesforce.com , collaboration applications like Slack, or messaging tools like Microsoft Outlook or Google Workspace? Make sure your sales enablement conten t platform can seamlessly integrate with these popular tools to:

• Facilitate conversations between sales and marketing teams with added context
• Offer customer, prospect, strategic and competitive intelligence within a common interface
• Enable SDRs to access timely, personalized resources during a call, or to leverage for after-call follow-up materials
• Accelerate new-hire onboarding by surfacing key insights within the “tools of the trade” like CRM and collaboration tools
• Connect to LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a prospecting resource
• Continue to support the sales team far after onboarding and increase their day-to-day productivity

All businesses have unique workflows across their CRM and communications tools. Sharing enablement content within your sales workflows can be the catalyst to generating better qualified leads and more revenue. If a sales enablement solution meshes well with the tools your SDRs use every day, digital adoption rates are sure to rise.

4. Keep remote employees engaged

Whether your sales organization has always worked remotely or is new to hybrid work environments, sales enablement content is a great way to make SDRs feel connected. Need to share a new sales process, or notify SDRs of a new custom field or service offering? Embed announcements, video content or other sales empowerment resources in the systems your team uses most.

Video meeting fatigue and email overload can take a toll on us all. By introducing insightful and motivating content to your team through the applications your team uses most, you can increase SDR engagement and connectedness wherever they are.

Do you need to “take the temperature” of your team’s engagement during extended remote working stretches? Send out a survey or motivating messages to your team through your sales enablement platform.

Empower your SDRs for success

Choosing an innovative, value-driven sales enablement platform like Spekit can be a revenue catalyst, a morale enhancer, and a powerful coaching tool for any sales development team. Ongoing sales enablement assessments ensure your new and existing content programs won’t have any strategic or information gaps. To give your SDRs the resources they need to be successful, contact us today for a demo to learn more about Spekit.