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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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