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What are the biggest pain points in your sales enablement processes and how can you identify them?
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5 Answers
Great question – it hits the mark of every sales enablement professional!
I agree to everything, Dave and Mike already explained here – these are our day-by-day challenges!
But I think we should trace back a bit and discuss ”Do we actually have a sales enablement process in place?” . That's very closely related to “how do we define sales enablement” and “how do we run sales enablement in our organizations?” Have a look on a thread on that topic joining the Forrester Community (http://community.forrester.com/thread/3773)
Sales enablement is still a topic on its way to maturity and it still means different things to different people (ask ten people, you will receive eleven answers, even in the same organization). Sales enablement from my point of view (based to the Forrester definition) makes only sense as a holistic end2end approach which means orchestrating the whole sales support supply chain backwards from the customer as design point with the target to enable sales to have more valuable conversations with our customers to drive their business outcomes and to create more profitable business. So, sales enablement is a strategic ongoing process, measurement has to focus on the whole selling system - on growth AND efficiency.
What I currently recognize all over the place are these questions: How do I get started? More often: Where am I currently on my journey in my organization and how can I evolve the topic? Which roles do we need and where and then, how do we come to a process?
Why is that such a challenge? My perception is – based on many discussions with peers - that we all have different points of departure (sales, marketing, portfolio or training) with different roles, different charters and we are measured often completely different. Most of the programs, initiatives, functions or councils we see, have still a more or less functional driven view, even if they are working cross-functionally – which depends on the major stakeholder. To consider that issue is fundamental to answer the question on necessary processes and the problems we might have with them.
Those of us who are running sales enablement in a program mode have to deal with virtual project teams, with managing activities and getting buy-in from and alignment with our stakeholders. These initiatives are often reporting into a steering committee. In these approaches we are normally not primarily focused on designing a sales enablement process, what we do is to develop blueprints in projects which could be re-used later on for sales enablement processes (then, we already achieved another level of maturity!).
I'm also experiencing, that we have already - depending on where sales enablement started - very useful sales enablement process piece parts! The sales driven initiatives have e.g. added process piece parts to the sales cycle and/or to the sales ops cycle with a specific focus. Others have process piece parts in the marketing and/or the product management process, some of them established content inventory and governance processes, ideally supported by sales enablement technology.
Evolving sales enablement to an end2end approach covering the whole sales support supply chain requires to put all these piece parts together.
I think we all need more forums, more roundtables, more formal or informal events and exchange of sales enablement professionals across our technology industry including analysts, consultants and vendors to share practical experiences, to derive practical down-to-earth blueprints on road maps, processes, deliverables, services and lessons learned.
We already have great strategic approaches as e.g. the Forrester SIMPLE framework and models to think these topics through and to adapt it – we have to break that down-to-earth in an end2end way!
Thoughts?
My two bits:
@David : I agree with your view that an outcomes-based enablement model is key, and best achieved with alignment + measurement. @Tamara : I agree with your view that end2end is key. @Michael: I agree with your view that we need to help everyone see the value, if any, that they're adding to outcomes being achieved.
IMO, achieving these goals requires that we measure ROE (Return-on-Effort in Sales) - measures that make a direct cause + effect connection between the effort it's taking sales people to get into conversations with buyers, and the procilivity of buyers, as an outcome of conversations, to take specific invited actions (agree to a subsequent scheduled conversation and/or go on to read details emailed to them after a conversation).
These kinds of ROE metrics give everyone involved in sales a clear picture of what's being achieved from what's being done. Two benefits accrue: greater sales effectiveness on the front-lines; greater alignment between the front-lines and everyone else involved in enabling sales effectiveness. Trust this adds some value. - John
Thanks for initiating a discussion on this topic, Lauren. For me, biggest pain points are in two areas: alignment and measurement.
Aligning cross-functional teams towards an outcomes-based enablement model is never easy. Absolutely necessary, but a difficult task in a large company. Aligning the message/content, aligning the enablement strategies - by geo, by role, by deliverable, and by route, and aligning the execution of those strategies/plans can be a significant challenge. However, all are all fundamental to the overall success or failure to maximize the selling opportunity.
Measuring the "return on enablement" (ROE) is a big deal for us at my company. Identifying the appropriate measures, the needed systems, and the manual effort involved is not trivial.
No doubt, Sales Enablement is in its early stages and we're working every day to streamline processes, design points, etc. For me, though, addressing overall alignment and measuring continues to be a work in progress.
This is a really interesting topic. Tamara's comments are so insightful. What I'm seeing here is a discussion about how to simplify and discipline the process metrics so that they will be more easily shared across functions. Doing so appropriately drives the use of performance metrics that produce alignment - so ipso facto we're fixing both of those key pain points simultaneously.
There is a Japanese management philosophy called "hoshin kanri" that offers a way out of this dilemma. Hoshin kanri, sometimes called "policy management" is a companion to kaizen, which stands for continuous improvement. Hoshin kanri is deployed to measure strategic breakthroughs. It involves using the fewest, most vital performance indicators to gain diagnostic insights into the overall performance of a major business process or unit.
This type of framework, like the Forrester model and our model, Selling the SMART Way, "ride over" the interdepartmental and tactical complexities of the various sales support units, bring them into alignment, and also provide effective cross-functional measurements. There are always sub-processes that are more tactical in nature, and they come into alignment when they are tuned to reach the "hoshin.”
When you bring it all down to earth, the various support units share strategic sales goals and objectives, fine-tuning their processes and performance metrics to satisfy those shared goals and objectives. What we typically do with clients who face these challenges is to help them map out the various sub-processes that surround sales - marketing, lead generation, sales support, customer service - and then compare those process maps to find points of intersection. Within the points of intersection lie excellent KPI's. These metrics accomplish both alignment and measurement. In simple terms it's "if I do this by this date, and you do that by that date, we will jointly reach our objective."
There is a lot of meat in this discussion; I love the idea that we should have a roundtable or live conversation of some sort. Let’s keep this conversation going.
David has already outlined two crucial aspects for managing successful sales enablement; alignment and measurement.
The alignment component can easily be considered as a simple point to fix. This is not necessarily true. Vendors of sales enablement systems are inclined to promote their products as facilitators of alignment, and that may have some authenticity. But such systems are far from being silver bullets in a sales enablement program. The biggest pain points I come across (dealing with several clients and many different sales enablement initiatives) include:
- Alignment
- A clear understanding and appreciation for what types of sales support will actually add value
- Cross-functional buy-in and support of a sales enablement processes (which supports direct and indirect selling resources)
- Steering clear of the check-box mentality. By this I mean, effective sales enablement does not only involve the deployment of a "system." Like quality standards and organizational process control, the most successful sales enablement initiatives will be those that are recognized as having a long-term presence in an organization. We regularly discuss the challenges faced with the deployment and effective utilization of CRM systems. For sales enablement to be successful, it cannot be perceived as another CRM-type solution; it is far broader than that.
Organizations considering the launch of a sales enablement program should take the time and invest wisely in determining what their sales enablement architecture should look like.
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