What is sales enablement? This is a common question that business owners face.
While sales enablement can cover a pretty broad topic, the general idea is that it’s an approach for helping your business close more sales and make more revenue. And who wouldn't want that?
You might offer amazing travel experiences and have a solid lead-generation strategy in place. Yet, turning those leads into actual bookings can still be a tricky process.
Having the right content and tools for sales enablement is essential if you want your travel business to make the most out of your marketing and sales strategy to generate more bookings.
In this guide, we’ll cover what exactly sales enablement is and how you can apply it to your travel business.
Sales enablement is the practice of making sure your sales team has all of the resources they need to sell more efficiently. This could include providing sales teams with the right tools, sales content, and knowledge to better equip them to reach and communicate with potential customers.
Simply put, sales enablement is all about making sure that your sales team has everything they need to be successful and meet their sales/booking targets.
Sales enablement also refers to the marketing processes that your travel business can take to assist sales teams. This could include lead generation, lead nurturing, and the process of how leads are handed over to the sales team.
Because the process involves marketing and sales tactics, sales enablement includes a number of different elements.
When a lead comes into contact with your business, it is essential you guide their journey and provide them with everything they would need in order to become a customer. You also need to make sure that your marketing and sales teams have the right information to make the sale happen. This epitomizes the sales enablement concept.
The short answer is that sales enablement can help your business close more deals and generate more revenue. Let’s delve into some of the main reasons why a solid sales enablement strategy is important for business growth.
First and foremost, the overall purpose of sales enablement is to help your tour business increase sales/book more tours. Your marketing team uses sales enablement to ensure your sales pipeline is filled with as many leads as possible.
They will then need access to useful resources and tools to turn this pipeline into closed deals.
With effective tactics and tools for sales enablement, you’ll be able to reach higher-quality leads. This can improve your chances of conversions and help you achieve higher close rates.
Having the right set of sales enablement tools and resources helps marketing and sales teams work more efficiently.
With the right resources, you can reach qualified leads faster, communicate with them more easily, and speed up your sales funnel. This results in more bookings for your travel business and more overall revenue generated.
A key focus of sales enablement is making sure that you provide the most valuable experience to leads and customers. This can be achieved by providing more personalized experiences, and utilizing tools and content that best reach and engage with your sales leads.
The purpose here is to enable more relevant, valuable interactions with customers. Doing so will increase your chances of making more bookings, while also enhancing customer satisfaction along the way.
For effective sales enablement to happen, marketing and sales functions both need to be streamlined and work closely together. The marketing and sales journey needs to seamlessly connect, and both departments need to understand what works and what doesn’t.
This means that the right sales enablement approach can help both marketing and sales teams make more informed decisions that enhance their overall strategy. This will help your travel business achieve its goals more efficiently.
Now that you understand what sales enablement is, you’ll want to start applying it to your travel business to maximize revenue and market share. Here are some of the main ways you can apply this to your travel business.
Having the right sales content available is paramount for closing more deals. The more relevant, personalized content you can provide to sales leads, the higher your chances are of them making a booking with your travel business.
Case studies are some of the most valuable sales content you can use. They are highly effective at building trust and inspiring sales leads to make a booking. Having relevant, positive case studies available for the different travel experiences you offer can help you personalize the sales journey with leads.
With WeTravel’s customer review widget, you can automatically collect reviews from customers and add them to your own website. This has shown a massive improvement in conversion rates (even with only a couple of reviews).
If you’re looking for positive brand recognition, this is a surefire way to achieve it.
You’ll also want to make sure that you’re able to furnish sales leads with all of the information they want to know about your travel experiences. This can be done by offering detailed booking pages for your tours, having sales decks for your different packages, and offering plenty of relevant marketing content (blogs, videos, etc).
The more relevant content and information you're able to offer potential customers, the better your chances are of them making bookings with your travel business.
WeTravel offers a nifty brochure download with lead capture feature to assist you in sharing important information about your trips with your customers.
You can also use this tool to showcase your offerings to prospective customers who are still in the consideration stage.
Once the brochures are downloaded, you can collect email addresses and assemble leads for future marketing campaigns.
The foundation of sales enablement is to provide your sales team with the right tools to improve engagement with potential customers. These tools will help you generate better-quality leads, nurture them more efficiently, and help you close more deals. There are all kinds of different tools you can use to achieve this.
A useful way to generate more qualified leads and provide more relevant sales information is to let potential customers easily ask a question about your travel offering. By using a tool like WeTravel’s Ask A Question feature, you can engage with leads better at their research stage.
This helps you see what questions potential customers have about your tours, which can help to enhance your sales outreach materials, blog posts, trip pages, and more. The idea is that you learn more about your potential customer’s interests and questions while improving the information you can offer them.
An effective customer relationship management (CRM) tool is vital for sales enablement. These tools store all of your lead information, which can help you segment leads and provide more personalized marketing and sales experiences.
Using a CRM will help you reach the right people with the right messages at the right time. Doing so improves customer experiences, and can help you gain more meaningful insights into your leads and customers' behaviors. This is important for streamlining your marketing and sales efforts.
Email is one of the most effective ways to communicate with leads and customers. By using the right email automation tools, you can set up strategic drip campaigns and workflows to help you nurture leads more effectively.
Automated email sequences send out based on triggers. This means that you can set up email workflows and messages, which get sent to the right people at the right time, all automatically. Not only does this save you time and effort, but it ensures you target sales leads with relevant messages and content at each stage of their customer journey. This is important for nurturing leads and generating more sales.
Using WeTravel, you can create branded email communications. This will allow you to add your logo and branding front and center with customized headers on outgoing emails.
Sales enablement platforms provide a central place where you can manage all of your sales materials and content. You can also use this software to better understand your leads, their journeys, and their experiences.
Sales enablement software aims to ensure your sales team has access to the right information at any given time. This will help you share more relevant content with prospects, which will help you make more sales.
Looking for a way to prevent a loss of bookings/sales? The WeTravel abandoned cart allows you to enable automatic follow-ups with prospective customers who opt out during the checkout process. You can store a list of these high-intent leads for future marketing efforts.
If you want to optimize sales enablement, then you need to know how to communicate with prospective customers in the most efficient way possible. This should be based on what communication channels prospects respond best to, and what can help you streamline your sales funnel.
This depends on what kind of marketing and sales strategies you're using. For example, inbound marketing leads will take a more gentle approach compared to outbound sales outreach.
Communicating with prospects could be done over the phone, via email, through online meetings, and more. Whatever the case, try to automate communication processes with the right software. Being able to access the right metrics to understand the effectiveness of your communications is also important.
As a travel business, your final point of conversion is likely the booking page on your website. If you want to maximize sales, then you need to make sure you use a travel booking and payment solution that offers the best possible experience for your customers.
An important complement to your sales enablement strategy is an easy-to-use and efficient booking and payment process. If you’ve already warmed up a prospect and prepared them for a sale, the last thing you want is to lose the client due to a complicated booking system.
So make sure you use a travel booking and payment solution, like WeTravel, to optimize the final stage of the customer journey.
This platform lets you construct easy-to-create custom booking pages, and publish booking and payment buttons on your website. With a solution like WeTravel, you minimize friction in the customer journey and make it easy for qualified leads to complete their bookings and payments. This is key to driving more sales for your travel business.
Ultimately, sales enablement is all about making sure that you're properly prepared to provide the best possible experience to prospective customers. With the right tools, content, and tactics, you can streamline the sales journey and turn a lot more leads into tour bookings.
Of course, you also need to make sure that you're offering enough relevant content to leads at each step of the way. Knowing what questions they have and being able to provide relevant and helpful sales content is key to turning more prospects into paying travel clients.