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Sales Enablement - It's not all the same. What does it mean to you?
Best Answer
- Recommended by:
- Michael Fox,
- Russell Palmer
Hi Michael, every analyst firm and every business has their own definition. Here on focus.com you can find many of them. Some use a very broad and all encompassing definition, some a very narrow, and some do not use the term Sales Enablement at all. I like the saying "You are either in sales or you are in sales support!" Basically everyone in a business should make sure that those who directly touch accounts have more valuable conversations with them and have everything they need to close.
You can have philosophical discussions whether the "support"/"enablement" should be spearheaded by the sales leader or the marketing leader, you can talk about "sales and marketing alignment" or you can get to work and put people, content, processes and technology in place that make sure that everyone (no matter whether they report to global, a regional team, a product line or a business function) can contribute the following:
- Contact details of subject matter experts per specific intersection in the matrixed organization,
- Knowledge about up-selling&cross-selling opportunities,
- Knowledge about customer pain points in specific industry verticals,
- Tools (like ROI calculators),
- Insights from the field (like customized presentations that resonated well and why),
- Collateral (branding approved vs. generated in the trenches) in different languages
- Comments / blog posts / questions
- Leads
- Pricing information for specific scenarios
- News etc...
When everyone globally can access, contribute, rate, and comment in an "Enterprise 2.0" fashion then all that searching and re-creating/re-formatting that costs your sales people so much time can be cut down and through the wisdom of the crowd they will be better prepared to face the buyer who thanks to "Web 2.0" is also better informed than ever. Now that terms like "Buyer Enablement" start to emerge, the buyer who is in the driver's seat will not put up with the generic pitch and only listen to sales people after a lot of research which means the questions asked will be so specific to the buyer's pain point that only the sales person who can tap into the wisdom of his/her entire organization can answer them.
- Recommended by:
- Enrique Blumtal
Sales Enablement is getting using the right method to get the right content & tools to the right people at the right time to accelerate a customer buying cycle.
Michael,
this question has been asked a number of times in different ways and I think that there have been some very complete and thorough descriptions of what it means.
I'd like to add my view on the topic that prompted your question; does sales enablement need to be defined for the sales force? One could argue that the answer to that question is no, sales enablement doesn't need to be defined for the sales force. Do we have to define education for students to be educated? Do we need to define Information Technology for knowledge workers to be able to complete their jobs? No.
As long as the people in the organisation that set the strategy and objectives and that work out the resourcing and measurements, understand what is required for the company to succeed and can create conditions for adequate sales enablement, sales should do what they are supposed to do.
I think that one can get a bit caught up in definitions and discussions about what it is and what it isn't. In the end, someone has to go out there and help a customer to buy what's on sale. There are many factors that affect the success or failure of that process. Only some of them are defined as sales enablement. In my view, we should concetrate on what the customer needs to make that buying decision and work inwards from there.
Russell,
I thought I detected a hint of "British" in your response. Me too! Good to connect.
Thanks for your answer although I am not in complete agreement by any means. I do agree with your point regarding over-analysis, a bunch of TLA's (three letter acronyms) etc all adding to the mix. But I have been finding that if you ask ten different people what sales enablement is, you will get ten different answers. And many of these answers are right here at Focus.com. So many answers floating around, and yet, as my VP-client told me, his sales team still does not understand what it is.
Perhaps this is a ploy by consultants to keep the subject varied, vague, and somewhat confusing. After all, if everything were perfectly clear, consultants would be losing business.
My answer to this question is that sales enablement generally falls in to three categories:
Product training
Soft skills
Sales support, perhaps a form of tribal knowledge, for example.
I agree with your point regarding working backwards from what the customer needs. However, if marketing is doing its job, they are telling customers what they need - and sales people should be an integral part of that strategy. So when would a marketing team, going off and doing their awareness campaigns and generating demand, start to share their activities with the sales team? Some may argue that the sales team should just be getting leads, and not be worrying about the pre-work. I disagree. If a sales person receives a lead that was generated by a particular outbound marketing message, then he needs to know what that message is so that the sales process can flow with some degree of continuity from the awareness campaign.
Thoughts?
Eric, nice answer. You are most likely not a consultant!
Michael, in response to your answers and follow on questions:
It seems to me that we are largely in agreement. This follows through to a point that you make between the lines of your text. That is, sales and marketing should be a lot more integrated than the "classic" view of things. I've written one or two posts about this in my blog (forwardbalance.wordpress.com).
In summary, it should be rather difficult to draw a distinct line between where marketing ends and sales begins. Neither can exist in isolation and their interactions and co-operation should extend past their specific boxes in the go-to-market process chart so as to make sure that the customer experiences a seemless buying process.
Marketing and sales work together to understand customer and market needs, marketing works to build offerings and value propositions and identifiy ideal prospects and generate leads for sales. Sales takes those leads and uses their talent, experience and skill in conjunction with tools and training (sales enablement) to progress through the buying cycle to closure.
They feedback to the GTM team on successes, failures, objections, competition etc. That intelligence modifies the offerings, value propositions, sales enablement etc. The cycle continues.
@Michael, yes it's obvious I don't bill out my time by the word or by the minute :-)
BTW, if you are interested in a "more than one sentence" response, you can gain more insights into my philosophy around sales enablement in this other focus.com discussion http://www.focus.com/questions/sales/sales-enablement-who-owns-sales-enableme...
Cheers - Eric
Russell and Eric - I appreciate your follow-up responses. Thanks for taking the time to share your opinions and guidance.
Here is one more thing to ask. If all these questions have been asked before, with a myriad of responses to be found in various locations, and yet we are still seeing similar issues with definition, what questions "should" we be asking to try and get this pinned down? Should there be an industry association of some sort? (no eye-rolling please)
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Very good question, Mike!
Sales enablement really means different things to different people. It depends on people's “functional lens” how they are considering the topic. A sales point of view is often focused on trainings, coaching, sales tools, playbooks, easily to customize for specific sales situations. A marketing point of view is more focused on branding, content generation and lead generation. But content from a marketing view point is very often not the content a sales person has in mind! The portfolio lens instead are also focused on content but have a deeper view on how to consolidate, structure and present a portfolio to the sales force but more important - to address customer's needs. The challenge is first to show people their different view points and to create these eye opener effects like “Oh, I see, it's much more than I thought!”, “it's all related to each other” or “we have a lot of different activities in parallel and they are all driven from functional views only”.
Coming back to your question whether sales enablement should be defined for the sales force – I think the more valuable definitions have another design point which is not the sales force but the customer. There is a lot of excellent research available on http://www.forrester.com/rb/tech_sales on how the customers (= the buyers from a vendors perspective) look at the vendors, how they differentiate vendors and what they think about valuable conversations with sales people: Only 15% of these conversations were considered as a valuable conversation. Criteria for valuable conversations were - among others - understanding the customer's specific role and responsibility and having knowledge of the industry and their specific challenges.
That's why I think a holistic vision of sales enablement is necessary and that's why we defined our initiative as a cross-functional approach based on the Forrester broad vision, as a strategic ongoing process, not a one-time action, with ambitious goals: To equip all people within an organization touching the accounts with the right information in a well-structured, re-usable way at all stages and at each level of the customers problem solving process. The objective is to have more valuable conversations with the customers to create more business and of course to improve the top financial key performance indicators.
Consequently we need to understand sales enablement as a cross-functional selling system designed backwards from the customer, which requires a fundamental change. We have to overcome the well known “functional silo-thinking”. It's about how to sort out these random acts of sales support that are well established in the different functions (see the eye opener effect mentioned above) and how to organize and align them in a way that the defined sales enablement goals can be achieved. Implementing an approach like this requires additionally a clear vision and a clear understanding of bringing strategy to execution.
There are a lot of operational disciplines to be tackled e.g. sales model, sales content and governance, knowledge management, skills and competencies, engagement model and last but not least a measurement focus. All of them concern sales, marketing and portfolio.
From my own experience it is helpful to create a sales enablement architecture covering all these areas – to tell and to sell the story and to run a program! The architecture should include foundation elements, enablers and the specific fields of actions.
Of course it's all easier said than done – the journey is the reward!