If you are gunning to be part of the C-suite at a visionary company, then you will need a strategic, cyclical approach to the lifecycle of customers. But where should this sales enablement fit in?
This is the keynote of a report that was newly issued by Seismic (landing page, email required). Not overly surprisingly, ‘ the sales enablement platform provider disclosed that sales enablement is key’ and is not going to get tongues wagging. Yet, as expected, the report carried out says that companies are applying sales enablement to help them get better business outcomes, there are some good interesting areas to start exploration.
Sales enablement definition is very broad as an iterative process giving an organization’s sales team the resources that they need to close more and more deals. This can include the content marketing, or include certain martech tools.
Overall, those organisations who had the most mature sales enablement programs have followed some of the best practices:
Many organisations have really accelerated their digital transformation initiatives just as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, they moved with a virtual B2B selling environment being part of it. If you are having a dedicated sales enablement team it is a popular way of achieving this, cited by a 95 percent of the more than 1,000 survey respondents.
The question is to whom does this team report? If you are a stronger organisation, the sales enablement team will go directly to the executive team, rather than it becoming another division within sales. 59 percent of ‘visionaries’ report to the exec leaders compared with the 42 percent of laggards, while for the CSO and the VP sales, it was at 68 percent and 69 percent respectively.
Drive go-to Market Alignment
This area are relating to when and where the sales enablement starts. The answer is: very early and as often as possible. An overwhelming 97 percent of companies have highlighted as visionary said they used sales enablement pre-sales, compared with just only 41 percent of the laggards. Post-sales (76 percent visionary, 51 percent laggard) saw a similar story, as did point of renewal (80/44 percent). Many laggards more than three quarters (77 percent) focus mainly on the sales process itself.
For the where, the report notes sales enablement should have impact on all customers that are facing job functions. Again, the ‘visionary’ companies are more likely to do this. Sales and marketing are very evident, with more laggards that are agreeing (76 percent) than the visionaries (67 percent), but the customer service with an uptick of about 13 percentage points to the visionaries, the operations (13), the customer support (16) and the professional services (15), all see same trend.
Not surprisingly, the respondents who were in the tech business were the ones most likely to use the sales enablement to help them support the marketing organisation (78 percent).
Avoid Tech Silos, Move to The Well Integrated Tech Stacks
A well integrated technology stack will unarguably both expand and also deepen the capabilities of sales enablement of technology, while it is extending its functionality into other environments, report was noted. “The Integration between the sales content or the sales intelligence data that surfaces actionable insights in the CRM in a natural, unobtrusive way streamlines the workflows and enables the sales teams to be much more productive.”
Adopt sales enablement capabilities and make use of insights for best practice
One of the telling statistic showed almost all (94 percent) visionaries were very confident in the data they used in the tracking of the effectiveness of their sales enablement efforts. For companies defined as the laggards, it was at 28 percent, and 68 percent for survey respondents overall.
Similarly, 94 percent of visionaries also responded affirmatively to saying that they have provided organized, ongoing efforts to the scale learnings from their top performers. The job of the sales enablement, as one of the executive interviewed put it, is to ‘minic what the top performers are doing… at scale.’