It is a pretty hot topic these days, but what exactly is sales enablement? Sales enablement refers to educating sales teams on marketing activities, positioning, messaging, and content. The primary role of the sales enablement team is to provide an organisation with the tools, content, information, and content that help salespeople sell more effectively.
Almost every company in the marketplace today is trying to accelerate growth, thus underscoring the need for high performing sales. It’s not always easy, particularly for businesses with a complex team structure and a mix of partner originations, specialist and generalist sales teams, sales teams divided witching given territories.
This team basically pushes the necessary resources in a timely manner, in order for sales personnel to better guide their customers throughout the buying process. The Sales Enablement team also makes sure that the information they provide is easy to consume and is reusable across the sales organization.
Sales enablement is usually owned jointly by sales and marketing.
1. Know your Internal & External Audience
Sales enablement is more about the buyer and less about Marketing & Sales. It is predicated on providing sales people with what they need to engage their target buyers throughout the sales cycle. The buyer, who is the external audience, is more important than the internal audience who are sales and marketing teams. Saying that, the buyer will only consume the information or get helped once the sales team is provided with resources required. For a Sales Enablement team to run effectively they must know their audience well enough.
2. Repeatable
The Sales Enablement team will keep sharing the necessary tools, content and information to the sales teams per their needs at a regular pace. They have to make sure that they publish the content and also build tools that are repeatable in nature so that it can be reused by the different teams and individuals. This helps in not only becoming very efficient in terms of speed, but rather it helps the sales enablement teams to work less toward doing the same thing, but working on newer items which will help the sales teams with additional resources.
3. Camaraderie
Working in sync with multiple teams is what makes an organisation successful. In a sales enablement team’s case it is even more important that they strike a rhythm and camaraderie with all the parties involved — internally, and with the sales and marketing teams, respectively. When there is a crisis of required resources that’s needed for the customer situation, camaraderie will play a vital role.
4. Being customer-focused
As much as it is important for the sales team to be customer-focused, the sales enablement teams needs to become customer-focused as well. Oftentimes it has been observed that sales enablement teams are focused on the sales team’s requirements rather than the customer’s. In my view, they have to learn to be both focused on the customer and also sales team’s requirements, so that the information provided to sales team becomes effective and is used much more efficiently throughout the entire sales cycle.
5. Ownership
Sales enablement teams are a vital piece in driving the sales in any organisation. They must take complete ownership of the resources to be provided to sales and marketing teams in timely manner and of the highest quality. Owning the production of the tools, content, materials and information will help the sales teams perform at their best.
Originally posted on e27