When the late, great Herb Brooks, architect and coach of the 1980 “Miracle On Ice” U.S. Olympic hockey team was asked how his mostly college-aged and little-known players shocked the world and won the gold medal, he had a simple reply. “I didn’t need the best players,” he said thoughtfully. “I needed the right players.”

While your daily business routine may not entail developing strategies to defeat legendary and world-class athletic powers, it may sometimes feel that way. Bringing your team together with the right players and resources to support them is the key to reaching your prospects where they are in their customer journeys and building a unified, sales-driven organization that accurately reflects your company and brand. 

Inspired by Coach Brooks and his Xs and Os chalkboard sessions, let’s develop a sales enablement strategy for you and your team to create productive and profitable results. 

Build a Team That Plays to Your Strengths

“My recruiting key? I look for people first and athletes second. Your team is only as good as its values.” – Coach Brooks

When building or training a sales team of your own, make sure your people reflect your brand values. For example, if you have built a brand around customer service, it’s important to have a group of good listeners who are detail-oriented and responsive. But more importantly, find empathetic individuals who truly care about others and are willing to do whatever it takes to develop helpful solutions. While it’s critical to utilize a sales training program that helps people understand their responsibilities and is true to your brand, your best opportunity for shaping your team is in the hiring process. While you should welcome different points of view and thinking, finding candidates who also share your brand values will give you a big head start toward success. 

Outfit Them with the Right Resources

“Success is won by those who believe in winning and then prepare for that moment.” – Coach Brooks

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Having a desire to succeed is one thing. Having the right resources and support during critical points of your sales process is quite another. How can you ensure your sales team always has what it needs to succeed? Here are key elements of a winning sales enablement formula:

• Lead qualification – Effective upfront lead qualification allows your sales team to aggressively pursue the sales most likely to close and avoid qualification surprises.
• Sales advancement – Train your team to develop customer-focused approaches that keep the sales agenda on time, on point, and on purpose while building buyer engagement.
• Sales positioning – Encourage your team to maximize sales opportunities by making sure value and price are communicated clearly and powerfully.
• Objection management – Plan, role play and prepare for customer objections. Turn apathetic or negative customer comments into sales opportunities. 
• Competition differentiation – Develop a unified selling message of what makes your brand unique and why it is the right solution to your customers’ challenges. 
  

Maximizing the potential of your sales team and resources will help you build more revenue – and stronger brand loyalty.

Develop a Winning Strategy

“We’re not going to sit around waiting for things to happen. We’ll make things happen ourselves.” – Coach Brooks

When you’re looking for an experienced and proactive assistant coach to help you develop your sales enablement plans, Spoke is ready. Unlike other marketing firms, we’ll take the time to get to know your customers, then work with you to understand what your salespeople actually need versus what your typical marketing firm believes they should have. 

We’ll let you in on a strategy secret: we believe it’s not about how you want to sell – it’s about how your customers want to buy. That’s why everything we create for you relates to the customer journey, providing key purchase decision information through every step of the process, and converting prospects into buyers. If it were easy, everyone would do it. But we’re ready to put in the work to help you succeed and everything we do is designed to get you where you want to be.

Bring it All Together

“Talent is not enough. Strategy is not enough. You have to bring it all together to achieve victory.” – Coach Brooks

Your investment in coaching, training and resources will still fall short if you lose sight of the ultimate goal: connecting with customers during every phase of the customer journey. Does your sales and marketing team thoroughly understand how to implement the tools they have access to? And, when it matters most, will your customers have the information they need, at every turn of their journey, to make a purchase decision?

That’s where Spoke comes in. We’ll bring everything together into a meaningful and profitable sales enablement experience. Just like highly talented teams that seem to have it all, yet just don’t “gel”, Spoke will help you avoid these obstacles to help you create a well-trained team that makes the most of every opportunity and knows how to use proven resources to their advantage. The end result? Your brand messaging meets your customers where they are – and gets you to where you want to be.™

Never Lose Sight of Your Goals

Ready to lead your sales team to higher levels of success? Here’s where it all begins. Let’s talk about how we can implement a sales enablement strategy that will help you build a stronger marketing effort – and brand.