Sales enablement is just a term du jour for “hooking your sales team up with tools to continually crush it.” I hate the term “crush it,” just because it makes it sound so easy and flippant. As buyers have become savvier and marketing and sales teams have become less splintered, it’s a concept that’s being re-evaluated and applied to the entire lifecycle of a buyer. This is completely changing the sales landscape, and as a result, the required skillsets.
Now, I’m not necessarily suggesting you start expanding your office space to include a new sales enablement team. In fact, one of the many strengths of enablement is that it’s inherently cross-disciplinary among teams and individuals you already employ. Bigger companies may want to invest in at least a sales enablement director, but oftentimes the tools to set sales teams up for success are already in the wheelhouses of HR, sales managers and definitely marketing pros.
Perhaps the clearest way to think about enablement is as a way to organize activities for better buyer empowerment. It used to be good enough to familiarize your reps with your product and build some assets they could take with them without regard for how well reps were using those assets. And it wasn’t their fault, either; they just weren’t properly trained from the get-go. Some companies excel at content creation for their target audience, but fail to do the same for their salesforce. The best sales enablement practices will bridge the narrowing gap between sales and marketing. This concept is what Jill Rowley calls Social Selling – and it’s critical.
You want your sales teams to own your product’s message just as much as the marketing team does.
If your onboarding process for new sales hires isn’t considered part of your sales enablement efforts, your first steps will be right over a cliff. Before you ever turn your reps loose on potential customers, empower them. Give them best practices, and access to webinars and training session after training session so they learn your process and the marketplace. Make it fun — gamify it even — but create urgency.
Studies have shown that training retention among new hires is just 65% after only one month on the job, and it falls to 10% after six months. Learn how to engage your hires and present information to them in ways they’ll understand and remember. Basically, if you treat them with the same depth and consideration you afford your target audience when marketing a product, and follow up with them on a regular basis, you’ll be enabling them to succeed from the get-go.
There’s no mistaking the positive impact various technology tools have had on the sales world. Automated programs take care of so much heavy CRM lifting that companies often underutilize their sales teams.
A properly enabled sales squad understands that even though two-thirds of the buyer journey is conducted digitally, automated tools can only carry customers so far through the funnel.
Companies are becoming more precise about how they measure success. Conversions are no longer cut-and-dry propositions that exist solely at the end of the funnel. Strategies for interacting with potential buyers can vary wildly from stage to stage within the funnel, and automated emails can never replace the impact a well-prepared, socially enabled sales representative will have on a consumer.
So what I end up seeing too often is companies equipping their salesforce with good tools, then wasting them with poor execution. Sales touchpoints exist before a customer even knows he or she has a problem to solve. Your team needs to be encouraged to go beyond what your CRM tells them and never stop pressing forward to anticipate a buyer’s need. That’s a skill that becomes instinct among the top salespeople, but only with the right company mindset in place at the beginning.
And that bit I mentioned earlier, about training new hires? Well, it never ends! The same tricks of the trade that were effective at the time of hire might be obsolete a year in. The feedback loop between upper level management, sales teams and their marketing cohorts must be kept open at all times so that all employees continue to operate with a high level of understanding of what the others do.
There should never be a hard line in the sand between salespeople and marketing.
It feels very much a function of a new-school insistence on hyper-specialization, when in reality everyone is pulling toward a very similar common goal. If a member of the sales team is working with a piece of messaging that consistently fails to perform, that information needs to reach the marketers. Part of this catch-all term “enabling” refers to the empowering of sales pros to be open and honest in communication within your organization.
There is a mystic force behind sales enablement; it’s called training. Great tools enabled by poor process and skills actually have the propensity to create a negative impact. We all know the powerful impact of well-aligned messaging, but what we don’t talk about often is the dire consequences of misaligned — or worse, lazy — efforts. The line between sales and marketing is blurring to the point where suddenly the most effective teams on either side have completely crossed over. And the push that propelled them there is always rooted in training and playbooks that force them out of their past comfort zones.
Justin Gray is the Founder of LeadMD, a marketing automation and CRM consultancy specializing in Marketo and Salesforce. The company aims to offer Marketing-as-a-Service that specializes in outsourcing the core functions of a marketing department either through on-demand solutions, consulting or both.
