Sale Enablement teams improve sales performance in regular market conditions but become critical when the sales environment degrades in difficult times like we are seeing in the current Pandemic. Let us unpack what an elite Sales Enablement team requires. At the base, SE must provide sales teams the information, training, tools and intelligence to compete and win. But is that enough? What is the difference between successful SE Teams and others?
First, the Sales Enablement team must be directed by a leader who implements a strategic, formal and chartered-based approach. It must be a business leader who has experience in sales but can also process and understand the sales strategy, the corporate strategy and any accompanying initiatives. They must be customer centric in nature, which means supporting those customer facing individuals within the organization and making them successful with the end or target buyer. Being a holistic thinker is also essential as the position is cross-functional in nature. It goes well beyond Marketing and Sales to include product, operations, IT, legal, etc. This leads to one last crucial skill for the SE Leader, the need to be collaborative and orchestrate issues for mutual benefit.
To be successful, Sales Enablement must be run strategically with a charter that outlines how the SE team will support the sales strategy, in what way challenges will be addressed, what tools will be utilized, the roles that are supported and what does success look like from a quantitative standpoint. In other words, structure the SE team around the customer journey and ensure that there is consistency in the product training, customer facing materials, sales playbook, and value messaging. Organizations who run their Sale Enablement this way see 27.6% better quota attainment according to Tamara Schenk in her book, Sales Enablement: A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower A World-Class Sales Force.
The primary job of a Sales Enablement team is to empower the sales team to be successful. Accomplishing this goal requires providing your sales team with the tools, information, training, insights, content and data to help them tell stories. Customers want to know how a product or service will remove pain points, solve problems, increase productivity, improve processes and achieve their goals. Providing the sales team with the ability to converse with customers today requires very different skills, content, value propositions and coaching.
Much of this discussion is around transformation. Moving from a product-based support system to a team that focuses on the customer journey and how best to bring value to the selling system in a way that is aligned to the customer. Sales Enablement allows this change or transformation to happen at a faster speed which in turn allows the sales team to transform their selling models much more quickly. By doing so, the sales team can more appropriately address the modern buyers needs, wants and desires.
Reach out to Brad at brad.gay@theandgroup.com if you would like to learn more about how the AND group can assist in the area of Sale Enablement.