Mention the term “sales enablement” to a team of asset management wholesalers, and you're likely to be met with a host of confused expressions. While the concept of sales enablement has been around for over two decades, it is only recently that it has begun to be adopted by financial services firms.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your sales team members with the tools to accelerate the sales process.  Those tools can include various digital elements, including email templates and sequences, 1 to 1 videos, counter links, snippets, and meeting links.

How it Can Help

When you properly implement sales enablement in your distribution strategy, your sales team can put the numbers back in your favor. For example, the 50-60 unanswered outbound phone calls and blast emails your wholesalers send daily to earn a single conversation can be transformed into meaningful touchpoints that engage prospects with timely and relevant content.

Sales enablement makes your wholesalers more productive by compounding their effectiveness. It also helps remove the friction of one-to-one engagements. The best way to explain the power of sales enablement is to provide an example of one platform without and one with.

Sales Without  Sales Enablement?

Research shows it takes an average of eight touches to get a meeting scheduled with a prospect. Those touchpoints might be a combination of voice messages and email. Here’s an example of outbound sales without sales enablement:

But here’s the problem with this process. Research also reveals that while 80% of all sales happen after 5-12 touches with a prospect, 44% of salespeople give up after just one attempt.

This disconnect between what it takes and what wholesalers do to secure a sale completely undermines an asset manager’s prospecting strategy. Without sales enablement tools, salespeople get bogged down in the minutiae of logging and tracking activity. Follow-up efforts get abandoned and opportunities are lost.

Sales With  Sales Enablement?

Wholesaling teams that use sales enablement find they are far more efficient with their time and more relevant and valued when engaging with advisors. Sales enablement automates and personalizes many everyday sales tasks. With sales enablement, sales and marketing teams work together to:

• Establish a cadence for the 8-10 necessary outbound touches in advance 
• Build the cadence of those activities into the CRM in advance
• Pre-build the templates (emails, scripts, etc.) wholesalers will use for each activity
• Enroll the appropriate contacts into your pre-defined cadence of activities
• AUTOMATICALLY communicate the 8-10 touches

The sales enablement process ensures that the advisors you are pursuing will be engaged at the right time, with the right assets, by informed, customer-facing sales professionals whom they are ready and willing to speak to.

A Perfect Partnership

If you are looking for a competitive advantage over other asset managers in reaching and attracting prospective advisors, make sure you have a sales enablement process deeply embedded in your digital distribution strategy. Asset management sales teams that use sales enablement effectively, will be clearly positioned to outperform those that don’t.

As a result of sales enablement, 76% of business organizations have seen an increase in sales between 6% and 20%. - G2