What is Sales Enablement?
Sales Enablement is a rather new concept of having a team or a person in your organisation that is solely responsible for providing your sales team all the information they need to make a well calculated, impactful sale.
A dedicated person for Sales Enablement might be researching your prospect, personalising reach outs, follow ups, showing you the best tools to make your processes as efficient as possible.
They can also be helping you out with practicing your pitch, give you trainings on the skills you need to improve.
Their responsibility might be to teach you how to be digitally present and visible, they can be giving you the right words, knowledge and information at every point of your sale journey when interacting with a client.
A Sales Enablement rep will focus their work on aligning the requirements for leads between sales and marketing if that is needed.
It is a team that will be there for a sole purpose to make Sales work better and more efficiently.
What Sales Enablement is not?
It is not just a support team that does small tasks for the sales team.
It is a team that works so close with sales that they provide crucial, well rounded information that helps you elevate your sales skills, knowledge and tools, so you can only worry how to give your prospect excellent, on point experience.
Sales Enablement is not there to replace Sales, but to make sure they can do their job with as little distractions and drawbacks as possible.
Why should you have a Sales Enablement team in your company?
Sales, together with marketing are directly bringing in the revenue into the company.
Obviously, every single department of a business is incredibly important, but if you’re thinking solely from a revenue bringing perspective, this is the first stop that assures you have a well operating company.
That is why it makes perfect sense to allow someone to focus solely on improving the way sales are done.
So many sales reps get overwhelmed by all the things they need to do, so improvement becomes a secondary thing.
However, how are things going to become better, if they’re being done in the same way?
It is logical that it’s hard for sales reps to focus on what they’re best at, therefore a sales enablement team can be a big step forward.
You can build a Sales Enablement team today!
As I was interviewing Bill Stolpe, a VP of Sales Enablement at IBM for our upcoming Podcast “The Seller’s Mind”, he said it perfectly:
“Go to your sales leaders and ask “Where do our sales teams need the most support”.
Pick an area and focus on it first. Define the functions, the scope and what results you want to get in whatever the time frame is.
Also, have a champion that would drive the Sales Enablement, so they can be an advocate inside the company.”
You don’t need to go all in yet, if you’re weary, even though I’d recommend it.
But you can warm your feet by putting together an initiative group or find a few people that you know have the mindset of building improvement and have them dedicate majority of their time solely for this purpose.
I am sure your employees already know the areas that are stagnating, you just need to allow them to focus on fixing them.
Sales Enablement can be a big force driving improvement
It’s not a shocker, as we know it well.
If you want something to improve, you need to have people focused and dedicated towards its improvement.
If you want my help putting sales enablement in place, message me on LinkedIn or email, or you can simply start by small steps on your own as Bill said it.
Define the area that is not getting enough help, dedicate someone who is able to coordinate putting the right people in place and make it happen.
That is an almost definite way to improve your sales.
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