As per a recent Forbes Insights New Report with Brainshark, “The Power of Enablement: Bridging the Sales Productivity Gap,” that studied 200 plus US base executives, what topped the charts of priority for the C-level executives, was ‘How to improve sales productivity’ and how ‘Sales Enablement’ was important to productivity.
They believe that sales productivity is critical to future growth and are willing to put their money where their belief is, as it has obviously been paying them rich dividends. Sales enablement solutions, as we see, are the top technology solutions they plan to invest in. Scaling up in numbers and the quality of selling across the chain becomes important as organizations grow. As the sales in organization grow, it is not just enough to focus on each sales representative, each account, and even each Key Account manually or through traditional methods and tools. Sales enablement in this situation plays a critical role. As Brainshark CEO, Joe Gustafson says,
“You have to tackle sales productivity from two angles: improving efficiency and improving effectiveness.”
This happens with Sales Enablement. It’s helpful to go through what this Report reveals. It reveals certain interesting findings of Sales Enablement and top-performing organizations.
- CEOs look at Sales Enablement Technologies to leverage their content. The two things important to CEOs are Sales Content Analytics and giving the sales representatives easy and instant access to content in the field. With Sales Enablement, organizations can make sure that their sales team always has information and resources at their fingertips. It is like a Content ATM- but accessible across devices. Integration with the organization’s CRM further improves content disbursal at the right time to the right people and in every selling situation. Moreover, it provides the right training for every such situation as well. With Content Analytics, you can measure the impact of content through revenue analysis, white space opportunity analysis and also help in identifying best sales practices. Content plays an important role in Sales Enablement for top-performing organizations.
- Consistent sales messages: All leading sales organizations provide consistent sales messages throughout the buyer’s journey. Sales enablement helps to scale up in communication and messages; this is how consistency in sales messages is made possible.
- Value and consistency separate top salespeople from the rest: Selling value over price is made possible with the help of sales enablement solutions, so is the consistency of the salespeople in impactful delivery.
- Continuous sales coaching and mentoring: Sales managers consistently coach and mentor their sales representatives. This would not have been possible without sales enablement as a key enabler.
- Performing companies value and harmonize sales and marketing: The Report says that 3/4ths of the top-performing organizations follow a good syncing of its sales and marketing functions. This helps in better utilizing the joint prowess in identifying leads and closing deals.
There are multiple takeaways from this Report that a CSO can use. Trust you have already picked those up and are following those.
