How to optimize financial services sales with effective sales enablement

Do you want your financial services sales team to consistently exceed their targets, effortlessly navigate complex sales cycles and forge long-term bonds with clients?

Sales enablement can be your secret weapon for all three.

Financial service firms that implemented sales enablement programs for advisors and agents gained a 20% increase in sales productivity.

Financial services executives are focusing on enabling front-line salespeople to engage prospects and clients effectively. But only 45% of those executives are highly confident in their ability to build a strong sales pipeline.

In an industry where trust, expertise, and relationships are crucial – financial services companies can leverage sales enablement to help their sales force succeed.

5 smart sales enablement strategies for financial services:

Here are five strategies to empower your team, improve the customer experience, and gain a competitive edge in financial services.

1. Target the right customers and get to know their financial needs

By integrating sales enablement strategies into market research and targeting, financial services organizations can reach the right customers with the right message at the right time.

Pitcher can help you create detailed buyer personas based on customer behavior data. You can then create targeted content addressing their needs and preferences using those personas.

Using data insights to personalize content is critical in the financial services sector. Customers are looking for advisors to help them select the right investment products for their specific financial goals, investment expectations, and risk tolerance.

Customer data from sales enablement tools and your CRM can give your sales team the information they need to identify new opportunities and target high-potential individuals and segments.

2. Get your sales and marketing teams talking

87% of sales and marketing leaders acknowledge that interdepartmental collaboration drives significant business growth. But 9 out of 10 leaders report misalignment in processes, strategy, culture, and content between departments.

To succeed in financial services sales, bridge the gap between marketing and sales by:

• Continually refining buyer personas. Your sales and marketing teams can regularly conduct joint meetings to examine buyer and seller data, and recent customer concerns and feedback.
• Establishing shared goals and KPIs. Set mutually agreed-upon objectives to foster a sense of shared responsibility to get teams working in tandem (e.g., setting quarterly targets for lead generation, revenue growth, or conversion rates).
• Implementing a Service Level Agreement (SLA). An SLA outlines the expectations and responsibilities of each team. This ensures that marketing generates high-quality leads while the sales team effectively follows up on those leads. For example, your marketing team might commit to providing a specific number of MQLs per month, and sales could agree to follow up with each lead within 24 hours.
• Aligning content and messaging. Collaborate on content creation to ensure marketing materials align with sales pitches and sales collateral supports marketing campaigns.
• Building in regular communication and feedback. Schedule routine meetings or touchpoints for teams to discuss challenges and share feedback. At each meeting, your teams can examine the performance of sales content since the last meeting. You can quickly and easily pull this data from your sales enablement platform – to improve your content marketing ROI.

3. Create content that works for your clients and ensures compliance

Financial services sales content needs to be highly personalized for each client to be effective. But customizing reports and pitch decks is time-consuming.

With a sales enablement platform, advisors and agents can customize content at scale, including adding the latest market performance and pulling in data from your CRM. This automated personalization process ensures clients receive relevant content tailored to their unique needs and financial situation.

Advisors spend approximately 30% of their time each week searching for pitch books, client presentations, and other content. With Pitcher, you can easily store, organize, and access sales collateral. This ensures your teams have the most up-to-date, relevant content at their fingertips. This allows them to spend less time looking for content and more time building relationships with new clients and strengthening ties to existing ones.

Staying compliant requires a tightly controlled content creation and management process that is challenging to do manually.

Sales enablement technologies ensure financial services organizations comply with all relevant regulations for the use of:

• Marketing and advertising materials
• Protection of client assets
• Information disclosure

Sales enablement tools can also help financial services sales teams track content performance – including client engagement, conversions, and other key metrics. This data enables you to identify what works and what doesn’t. You can refine your marketing and sales strategies and create more effective content based on what you find.

4. Create sales training that propels growth

To close deals faster, all client-facing employees in financial services companies need:

• Best practices for building relationships with clients
• Ongoing training on industry developments
• Updated products
• Content options

But being able to deliver high-quality training to hundreds or thousands of agents, advisors, and other team members can be costly.

Modern sales enablement solutions make it easy to create, edit, and deliver training that employees can consume when and where it’s best for them.

These solutions also allow financial services companies to create a centralized platform where agents, advisors, and sales reps can share best practices and work together on deals. This can help you create a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.

Want to track the effectiveness of your training program? Pitcher provides powerful analytics capabilities that help financial services companies measure how well their training is working by tracking metrics like:

• Sales conversion rates
• Average deal size
• Customer engagement

Companies can then use this data to identify areas where their sales training programs may be falling short and make adjustments.

If your advisors struggle to close deals with certain types of clients, you can use analytics to identify gaps and create new modules or just-in-time sales training to address them. Or you can design a sales training program that gets results.

5. Leverage smart tools and tech for better results

Financial services institutions can also use sales enablement technologies to gather client data – then analyze that data to get a complete view of what their customers value. By implementing data-driven client engagement, your advisors can get recommendations for content curation, best offers, and other sales actions.

Guided selling helps agents and advisors identify the most suitable products for every situation and customize investment portfolios based on clients’ unique financial profiles.

Wondering how to select the right sales enablement platform for your financial services organization? Use these questions to evaluate your software options:

• Does the company understand the financial services industry, and have experience working with firms like yours?
• Does the company understand the needs of consumer and B2B investment clients?
• Can the platform help you unlock insights from client data, so you can improve client satisfaction and increase retention?
• Does the platform enable continuous training, so your advisors and agents can stay fully compliant at all times?
• Does the company understand the regulatory and reporting requirements of the financial services industry?

The sales enablement advantage for financial service sales

Mastering sales enablement strategies is no longer a luxury for financial service firms – it’s a necessity. To do so, you need to create and distribute high-quality, personalized and compliant content and lead effective onboarding, training, and coaching for your reps and advisors.