Employee Spotlight: The secret to effective sales enablement with Braxton Carr

How do you achieve effective sales enablement? You’re in luck: in this interview, Canto’s Head of Sales Enablement, Braxton Carr, reveals his number one tip for effective sales enablement, the most common mistake people make and the best way to streamline the sales process for both your sales team and customers!

Sales enablement may be one of the latest buzzwords in marketing, but with good reason! We’re seeing the most successful companies break down the traditional silos between sales and marketing, and having these functions intersect to create more efficient sales processes.

Not convinced? Check out these stats:

Companies with a sales enablement team are 52% more likely to have a sales process that’s tightly aligned with the buyer’s journey. (Source – HighSpot)

59% of companies that surpassed revenue targets and 72% that exceeded them by 25% or more – have defined sales enablement functions, compared to only 30% of underperforming organizations. (Source – Forbes)

Hi Braxton! Thanks for taking the time to share some of your sales enablement expertise! How would you describe sales enablement to someone who doesn’t work in sales or marketing?

I like to think of the movie, Iron Man. It’s about putting a person with a certain skill set into a suit that augments that skill set. It’s the same thing with sales enablement; you’re helping augment your sales team’s skills with technologies and processes.

What do you do in your role as the Head of Sales Enablement at Canto?

I primarily run the onboarding process for the sales team and help streamline the sales process. I came into this role because of my prior experience in the DAM industry, so I help educate our sales team about the space, competitors and how to engage prospects at each stage of the sales process.

I started by creating presentations about the industry, competitors and how Canto works in the space; then, I built out our learning management system that’s like an online course for our sales team to learn how to sell our product. Next year, I’ll work more in automating processes.

What’s your number one tip for effective sales enablement?

A lot of people go into sales enablement thinking, “How can I make my sales people better?” That’s the wrong way to think about it. My role is really focused around the customer experience. Sales enablement is about easing the process through which customers acquire the product. It’s about making it easier to buy from us through a more fluid and cleaner process.

As a marketer, a lot of the content I create is for sales enablement. From your perspective, what role does content play in sales enablement?

The best way to enable your sales team, especially when the buying process is mostly digital, is with content. I create so many kinds of content: timelines of deals, multimedia files such as audio and video recordings, charts, presentations and more. It’s impossible to store this all in my Macbook Air, so having a content repository in Canto makes it so much easier to not only store everything in one place, but also to deliver the content to the team at the right time. Though we do use a learning management system for training, Canto is the go-to place for resources after the training is done.

We have a sales portal that everyone knows to go to for sales content. That way, they can access content on the fly. If they’re dealing with a certain situation on a call, they can pull up the relevant content in the portal and be equipped to handle it.

When you democratize your content, your team is more agile and customer-centric.

What’s a common mistake you see people making with sales enablement?

Trying to be everything to everybody. ‘Sales enablement’ is a loose term and there’s no standard operating procedure for how people buy. As a result, there are lots of areas that you might want to solve. But you can’t go in saying I’m going to change it all at once. The biggest mistake I see people make is taking too much of a macro view. What I like to do is break down process step by step.

Thanks, Braxton! Check out how companies use Canto for sales enablement here.