Sales enablement, in simple terms, is the process of facilitating sales teams with resources to make them more efficient –Facilitation is done by making available necessary product/customer information and technology and tools to make the most of the available information.
The concept of sales enablement has been around for more than twenty years now. Its use was limited back then and primarily revolved around helping salespeople deal with the most prominent issues of that time – variation in the sales process, lack of information about products and customers, and lack of consistency in the delivery of a brand message.
How has sales enablement grown in recent years?
It wasn’t considered an important concept in the initial years, and it is only in the last decade or so that it has managed to garner the attention of the business world. Technology has played a big part in bringing the sales process where it currently finds itself at. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the sales process has transformed in the last few years or so. With the advancement in technology and the transformation of the sales process, sales enablement has found the space it needed to affect how companies imagine and conduct sales. Over the years, sales enablement solutions have managed to draw attention from some of the biggest names, such as IDC, Forrester, SiriusDecisions, and Gartner. The relevance and acceptance of sales enablement tools can be gauged from a study conducted by CSO Insights in the year 2018 – the study found that more than 60 per cent of the participants had a sales enablement function.
There are still people who are finding it hard to understand sale enablement, how it works, how to implement it the right way, and how to monitor its results. The good news though is that there are professionals out there who can help you make the most of this strategy.
Broadly, our discussion has found sales enablement to drive buyers to their decision point faster. And as we look ahead to this year and beyond, there is a lot more taking place in the sales enablement area than the need for mature practices.
- ‘Agile’ is the newest favourite of sales enablement. Agile has long been a significant element in product development cycles, but several other functions have also started using it well. According to a survey done by CA Technologies, 79 per cent of businesses that participated in the survey were using Agile in their communications and marketing functions. At the same time, 78 per cent of the participants were using it in their sales. Agile is expected to be at the forefront of sales and marketing efforts of business across the world in the coming years. Agile in sales enablement could start from as small a task as organising a standup meeting with the sales team daily. The iteration in these meetings could be about anything from the issues that the team is facing and needs help in overcoming and the tasks that the team needs to complete on a given day. The two tasks should lead to the achievement of a simple objective. This is how Agile works, right?
- Awareness of how sales enablement practices are performed. Sales enablement could even be termed as an exercise towards change management. You are asking salespeople to perform newer tasks or to perform the existing tasks differently. These changes have a lot to do with observation and data. You need to follow an iterative approach and measure results daily. Here is a small example of how it works. Interact with all the managers in the sales team. Hold weekly meetings to ensure alignment on changes and understand managers’ perspectives on these efforts. This is important before you go ahead and deploy those changes in the team.
- Revenue enablement. Before moving any further, let us discuss what revenue enablement exactly is. It is the process of acquiring and keeping customers while ensuring revenue generation at every level of a customer’s journey. Revenue enablement not only focuses on acquiring customers but puts as much emphasis on maintaining them too. It requires you to provide your entire revenue team – marketing, sales, and customer service – with information and training to perform their jobs better. You can use your cloud storage system to store training material as well as product and customer-specific content that your teams can easily access whenever they require. You need to also look at the sales process from the buyer’s perspective to recognise, reduce, and eliminate areas of buyer friction throughout their journey.
There is no denying the fact that sales enablement is a growing concept that more and more organisations are moving towards to back their sales teams. What started with a focus on information and training has gradually moved towards aligning sales and marketing process and supporting salespeople in more tangible ways than before.
