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Tales of Sales Enablement

Posted by Joe Galvin on Mon, Dec 07, 2009 @ 04:43 PM
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Sales enablement is about knowledge transfer. Salespeople need to access and acquire constantly changing information from a variety of internal sources to maintain their state of knowledge readiness and be able transfer that knowledge to their customers. That knowledge needs to be in the context of their company, their products and the value they represent to the customer. Newly developed, upgraded, or acquired products need to be absorbed by sales along with new marketing initiatives and programs that are being rolled out. Sales enablement impacts sales productivity by making content and resources available through tools and technology.

Sales enablement is one component of a broader sales readiness strategy. Sales readiness focuses on the sales processes, skills and knowledge requirements of all sales people. This involves the coordination of various sales and marketing teams (sales training, sales operations, field and product marketing) to define and reinforce organizational sales processes (account management, opportunity management), identify and develop individual sales skills (face-to-face call dialogue, presentation, negotiating) and to transfer knowledge (products, market and strategy) to their clients and prospects. Interlacing these three elements into to a seamless customer interaction is the goal of sales readiness.  

Sales enablement is focused on knowledge, making it available to sales and powering their customer interactions with customer ready content. Salespeople can manually sift through the range of unique documents, standalone events or optional learning sessions on their own, or an enablement function can rise to meet this requirement scripting, assembling and synthesizing the best customer messages, content and strategies in a format that the sales rep can readily apply to customer opportunities. Sales enablement teams establish the right set of process to bring content and knowledge to the salesperson from a variety of product management, product marketing and field marketing teams in the format and context that they can absorb and relevant to how their customers buy.

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Comments

Joe captures the essence of sales enablement when he wrote "or an enablement function can rise to meet this requirement scripting, assembling and synthesizing the best customer messages, content and strategies in a format that the sales rep can readily apply to customer opportunities." 
 
The challenge of course is to deliver the best messaging strategy and content to the sales person at the precise moment when said material are needed in the buying process, whether it be before the first qualifying conversation, when making a presentation to the committee making the decision or when confronted by the procurement specialist demanding a hefty price reduction in return for doing the deal this quarter.  
 
Each conversation in a buying process differs significantly from every other conversation in that process depending on the role and priorities of the person the sales person is talking to, their role in the buying process, and the stage of the buying process when the conversation takes place. 
 
Delivering said content, messaging and strategy is easier thought about than actually accomplished in a repeatable, sustainable manner.  
 
Posted @ Tuesday, December 08, 2009 10:17 AM by Ken Knickerbocker
Many important aspects of sales enablement are pointed out in Joe's article, thanks for sharing! I just want to add a few experiences: Before sales enablement can work successfully as it should ("The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place", IDC) a lot of process and governance topics have to be clarified in the organization before - in sales, marketing and portfolio, product or offering management (however you name it!). It’s about processes and governance e.g. content creation, document management rules, content ownership, publishing ownership, quality processes to avoid the classical “garbage in/garbage out” effect, resource types to be defined, etc. Then it comes to the creative part of generating “customer ready content” for different customer situations along the sales cycle and according to the customers buying process – and always consistent to the company's offering portfolio and core messages. “Customer ready content” like this will improve the quality of customer interactions significantly as Joe Galvin explained here, I'm sure. Additionally the skills especially of consultative selling and - depending on the offering portfolio - of solution selling should be developed too. That's all together really hard work but necessary from my point of view to realize a sales enablement “quantum jump”.
Posted @ Monday, January 04, 2010 2:56 PM by Tamara Schenk
Tamara, you're right. Not only do "a lot of process and governance topics have to be clarified in the organization before" sales enablement can work effectively, but management has to find a way to keep those various components (people, departments, business units, contect, etc.) in a steady state of alignment going forward. Michael Webb, who wrote the book Six Sigma for Sales has written about the need for a "sales productivity system" to accomplish the "keep them aligned" phase (http://www.salesperformance.com/need-to-fix-low-sales-productivity#more-2438). Would his approach work in your environment?
Posted @ Monday, January 04, 2010 3:18 PM by Ken Knickerbocker
Ken, thanks a lot! That's a great link and covers exactly the situation (functional silos...) why we are pushing sales enablement as a 360° approach (sales, marketing, portfolio & offering management and delivery). I'll keep in mind the "keep them aligned" phase!
Posted @ Monday, January 04, 2010 3:45 PM by Tamara Schenk
Ken and Tamara, Thank you for taking time to comment on my post. Sales enablement is a term that is getting a lot of attention these days with a wide variety of definitions. The important takeaway here is that sales people need to be better informed and more knowledgeable than the buyers they deal with if they are going to influence their decision. However, knowledge alone will not carry the day, excellent sales skills and well executed processes are still required for success. The good news is that while the technology has made information ubiquitous to the buyer, sales productivity applications are available to give the advantage back to the sales person through customized communications, knowledge management and collaboration capabilities. Buyers may be able to source all kinds of information, but it still requires a skilled and polished sales professional to synthesize the information into actionable intelligence.
Posted @ Monday, January 04, 2010 4:39 PM by Joe Galvin
I would agree Joe that synthesizing information for her prospects is an important job for any sales person. The drawback is it takes someone “skilled and polished” to use your words to synthesize it appropriately from one customer/ sales conversation to another. If I’m a CSO of a 5,000 person sales organization experiencing 10% annual turnover, taking a green sales person from zero to the “skilled and polished” level is time consuming and expensive and we won’t even mention the cost of opportunities that would have closed had a more experienced sales rep been making the call. You’re “A” people are going to fall into the “skilled and polished set for sure, but what about your “B” and “C” players? Is it realistic to expect them to synthesize complex material flowing at them from several different sources, same fresh others dated, in an appropriate way any one of their many prospects and opportunities?
Posted @ Monday, January 04, 2010 5:05 PM by Ken KNickerbocker
Joe, forgive me for dominating the conversation but I had another thought about your post I wanted to throw into the mix. 
 
When you wrote, “Sales enablement is about knowledge transfer.” did you consider the essential two way exchange of knowledge that must exist if a sales and marketing organization is to flourish? 
 
Not only must knowledge in the form of content, insight and data flow to the sales person, but insight, understanding and even raw data must flow back to other sales ecosystem stakeholders supporting the sales as well. 
 
For instance, lead gen groups need up-to-the-minute and accurate knowledge of lead status and campaign effectiveness passed to them to make adjustments in the current campaigns or plan their next initiative or event. 
 
Product marketing teams need to know how their product is fairing and what sales material is driving sales conversations forward. 
 
Finance and legal teams need knowledge of the terms and conditions agreed to and the customers performance against those targets the prior year as they consider pricing on new projects and opportunities with the same client. 
 
The sales operations group needs a damn near perfect knowledge of where each opportunity sits in the pipeline, how likely, for how much and when the deal is to close to generate a forecast executives can take to the street. 
 
Professional services leaders need to see what service level agreements are being extended to ensure the appropriate resources are trained and available when the value promised must be delivered. 
 
C-level executives need knowledge about the strength of the pipeline and current status of strategic opportunities and clients to determine where their time is best applied to drive forecasted results.  
 
Enabling sales people is a first step, but in a world where everyone sells, sales enablement must take on more of a two way, enterprise wide exchange of information and knowledge.  
Posted @ Thursday, January 07, 2010 9:04 AM by Ken Knickerbocker
Joe, 
thank you for starting this important discussion. Thanks also to Tamara and Ken for their contributions.  
I believe Tamra raises a very important point noting that sales people need also master skills and methods on consultative and maybe solution selling so they can make good use of the messages provided through the sales enablement system. Unfortunately most trainigs in this domain focus too much on what has to be said. What is primarily needed though when using a sales enablement system is however the analytical skill to understand the situation of the individual at the customer organization to then be able to select the right content allowing for a value adding conversation with the customer.  
 
I might add that the mindset of sales people and particular sales managers is another crucial element for sales enablement initiatives to be successful. People who remain in the believe that selling is about closing deals instead of having value adding conversations to facilitate the customer's buying process will never make good use of even the best possible contents provided by sales enablement systems.
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 8:12 AM by Christian Maurer
Christian, thanks for sharing your ideas. Speaking of sales people's mindset let me add an interesting link concerning the role of sales managers from Lee Levitt: 
http://www.thoughtsonselling.com/ 
He explains here how this role could be developed from a data management oriented role to a more coaching oriented role. In my opinion this challenge could be integrated as part of a sales enablement initiative or it could be initiated as a special sales management task. Improving the sales performance of B and C sales people like this, we should come to measurable impact concerning both value added conversations and - of course - the volume of closed deals.
Posted @ Tuesday, January 12, 2010 4:00 PM by Tamara Schenk
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