5 Must-Ask Sales Enablement Questions for B2B CMOs

If you're on the hunt for a sales enablement tool and have a list of questions about which platform is right for your B2B organization, you're not alone. As your sales team continues to grow, it's essential to choose a sales enablement platform that can support their efforts and help them close deals more efficiently. 

In this article, we'll delve into five key sales enablement questions that every B2B CMO should ask when evaluating potential sales enablement tools. These questions will guide you in making an informed decision about which platform is the right fit for your organization's unique needs and goals.

Sales Enablement Question #1

Are there clear guidelines and standards for sales presentations?

Presenting a clear and concise sales story across your growing organization all starts with providing clear guidelines and presentation standards to your team. For many companies that haven't embraced a sales enablement platform yet, this can be a challenge. Without a centralized platform, sales teams often use tools like PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides without any brand guideline controls. As a result, everyone in the sales organization is creating presentations in whichever way they feel fit, which can lead to brand and presentation dilution.

If you're not yet ready to invest in a sales enablement platform, it's still crucial to put forth brand guidelines and template guidelines that your team can adhere to. However, that's only the first step. You also need a brand guardian within your organization who can ensure that the standards are being followed. Without it, your sales stories may go rogue and fail to deliver the desired impact.

Clear guidelines and standards for sales presentations are essential for maintaining a consistent brand image and message across your organization. They also ensure that your sales team is presenting information in a compelling and effective manner that resonates with potential clients.

Sales Enablement Question #2

Are my team's presentations capturing and holding the audience's attention?

Creating consistent presentations is important, but capturing and holding your audience's attention is equally crucial, especially in a competitive landscape. To stand out from your competition, you need to ensure your presentations are engaging and visually appealing.

In today's B2B sales landscape, prospects and clients are often busy and on-the-go, so it's crucial to present your products and services in a way that captures their attention quickly and effectively. This means investing in highly visual presentations that don't rely on lengthy bullet points to convey your message. Your presentations should be designed to tell your story in a visually compelling way that your audience can easily understand.

Using highly visual presentations can also strengthen your brand image by demonstrating that your company is invested in presenting your story in the best possible light. This sets you apart from competitors who may rely on uninspired and hastily thrown-together PowerPoint presentations. We recommend finding a design or production partner with experience in B2B sales presentations. Collaborate with them to find ways to tell your sales story in a unique and visually engaging way. Consider incorporating animation, 3D product renderings, and even augmented or virtual reality experiences that are relevant to your product or service. 

Sales Enablement Question #3

Are your presentations tailored to the specific needs of the audience?

To ensure your team's presentations are effective throughout the entire sales cycle, it's important to tailor your presentations to the specific needs of the audience. As a CMO, your responsibility is to equip your team with the necessary tools and presentations to keep the audience engaged. Typically, a sales cycle can take three to six months, requiring six to eight presentations.

The first presentation should be an introductory one, providing a high-level view of your products and services. This presentation can be a digital one-sheet that can be sent without requiring a meeting. As the sales process progresses, deeper presentations that provide more detail about how your products and services work should be created. These presentations can be delivered either in person or virtually, depending on the situation.

When a prospect goes cold or silent, it's essential to provide your team with the tools to stay engaged, such as testimonials or ROI presentations. These presentations showcase the value of your product or service and how it can benefit the prospect's business. Providing valuable content gives you a reason to reach out to the prospect and continue the conversation.

Sales Enablement Question #4

Is there a way to track and measure the effectiveness of the presentations?

Measuring your presentation's success involves two critical aspects. Firstly, it's essential to view your presentations from an external perspective, particularly from the seller's point of view. This is because the seller needs to understand how their presentations are being received, which content is being consumed, and for how long. This information helps them have more meaningful follow-up conversations with their potential clients, understand their interests, and tailor their next presentations to suit their needs.

However, tracking only the external metrics is not enough. It's equally important to track internally how the sales team is using the presentations and which content is resonating with prospects. By gathering this data, you can set presentation benchmarks, identify gaps in your sales process, and gather insights on how to optimize your presentations to better meet your target audience's needs. Choosing a presentation platform that offers detailed analytics and insights can provide a deeper understanding of your sales process, enabling you to make informed decisions to improve your overall sales effectiveness.

Moreover, having an optimized presentation system that tells the right story for every touch point within your sales cycle can significantly increase your chances of success. Continuously optimizing your presentations based on data-driven insights ensures that your sales team is equipped with the most effective tools to drive conversions and close deals. In today's highly competitive B2B landscape, having a presentation system that is consistent and highly effective can be a game-changer for your business. By investing in the right tools and processes, you can stand out from the competition and achieve your sales goals.

Sales Enablement Question #5 

Is there a centralized platform for managing and distributing sales presentations?

In our opinion, this is one of the most important of the sales enablement questions, because when it comes to managing and distributing sales presentations, relying on tools like Dropbox may be a mistake for your presentations, especially as your sales team grows. Instead, it's crucial to invest in a centralized platform that offers your team easy access to sales content, while also providing your internal team the ability to control, modify, and update the content as needed.

This becomes even more critical in regulated industries such as medical devices, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and finance, where compliance requirements demand the utmost control over content distribution. A centralized platform that enables the modification of master presentations and the global update of content to the entire team is vital for organizing the way your content is distributed.

Moreover, with the rise of remote sales, it's essential to ensure that the platform you use is accessible anytime, anywhere, and from any device. The platform should also optimize your presentations for mobile devices, given that the global mobile email open rate was 42% in 2020, according to the Litmus Email Analytics report.

Investing in a centralized sales presentation system that meets these requirements can significantly streamline your sales operations and enable your team to close deals more effectively.

Simplifying Sales Presentations: One Solution for B2B CMOs

If there's one thing you should take away from these sales enablement questions, it's that relying solely on tools like Dropbox, PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, or even modern presentation solutions such as Prezi competitors, Beautiful.ai and Pitch, is not suitable for today's B2B sales teams, especially if they're scaling. What you need is a sales enablement platform that not only allows you to control how your sales presentations are delivered to your team but also pairs that with a creative services partner that can help bring your presentations to life and set you apart from the competition.

At Nuvue, we are a first-of-its-kind technology company with a background in building highly visual B2B sales presentations that help brands increase engagement and drive sales. We also offer a one-of-a-kind drag-and-drop presentation system that allows your sales team to create presentations in seconds while providing your internal team the ability to control the story-building process, track how your content is performing, and ensure that your team is delivering your story the way it was intended.

If you'd like to learn more about Nuvue, schedule a call with us today, and let us show you firsthand how we're helping CMOs better scale their sales presentation system.