What is Sales Enablement, and How Can It Help Close Deals

Imagine if you will.

Some unknown car company decides to make the best car in the world, so they buy brakes from Porsche, a gearbox from Ferrari, an engine from Koenigsegg, a chassis from Maserati, a body from Rolls Royce and tires from Pirelli.

And management thinks now the supercar is ready for assembly.

It looks impressive to the unsuspecting bystander, but it’s about as useful as a neck massage en route to the guillotine.

It shows that just because we have the best individual components, the fully assembled product may well be a heap of junk.

This also means that just because you have some super high-performing salespeople and a small army of Ivy League marketing MBAs, it doesn’t mean you have effective sales enablement and your business development is flawless.

So, let’s see…

What the Hangman Sales Enablement Is Anyhow and Why Bother?

By definition, sales enablement is…

• As per Highspot: “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips sales teams to have consistently effective engagements with prospects and customers throughout the buyer’s journey.”
• As per SCO Insights: “A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training and coaching services for salespeople and front-line sales managers along the entire customer’s buying journey, powered by technology.”
• As per The Pedowitz Group: “Aligning marketing processes and goals, and then arming sales with tools to improve sales execution and drive revenue.”
• As per IDC: “Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward.”

Since sales enablement is a new concept, there is no universal definition, but from the definition above we can see, it’s very important.

Just consider that back in the good ol’ 20th century a millennium ago, salespeople were able to drop in on buyers and make sales on the spot.

They can’t do that anymore. In the best case, they only get kicked out of offices, but in the worst case, they can get taught a rather painful lesson not to do it again.

Either way, sellers have to realise that if they want to be successful in today’s marketplace, salespeople have to work with the marketing folks, form an integrated business development team an and hash a wickedly comprehensive business development plan. Then they can start implementing the plan.

One of the great ill-contrived business concepts today is that marketing and sales are two drastically different things.

That marketing folks operate in their nice corner offices undisturbed to create nice logos, fancy colour schemes and jaw-dropping slogans, while salespeople, the dull and non-creative workhorses, slave away in their dingy little cubby holes dialling for dollars and running around knocking on doors to keep the lights on and make sure the marketing folks can get paid.

And what happens at the end of the month, quarter or evaluation time?

Marketing people are celebrated for their amazing creativity, while salespeople get beaten up – again – for their dismal performance.

No one seems to realize that if sales- and marketing folks worked together, the company would be exponentially more profitable.

It’s really just the right team work.

Most sales experts doggedly focus on improving individual sales performance, but just think of the famous Budwiser Clydesdale horses where the experts focus on team performance.

While one horse can pull 5,000 lbs of load, a team of four can pull 40-50,000 lbs.

In business, a crack team of 5 business developers can outperform 15 individual salespeople at any time of the day without raising a sweat, while the salespeople are working harder than a convicted kulak in a Siberian Gulag labour camp.

The key is that the crack team uses sales enablement, whereas the salespeople work as randomly-selected 15 individuals based on past performance..

Marketers don’t try to be armchair marketers, but work with the sales folks to integrate field-collected information into their marketing programs.

And this leads us to…

The Main Benefits of Sales Enablement

Sharing Collected Information

Marketing can provide valuable information and insights to salespeople to prepare them for meetings with buyers. This information includes information on buyer’s behaviour, motivating factors, challenges, goals and several other pieces of information to help salespeople to better connect with buyers and giving them the best chance to do business and offer buyers what they really need.

Hint: The difference between what the buyer wants and what she really needs is the real value.

By nature, buyers seek the path of least resistance to a better state, but it can be just a temporary improvement after which the situation can be much worse than it was before.

The patient may want some painkiller, but the doctor, based on a thorough diagnosis, knows that the patient has gangrene, and his leg must be amputated from the knee.

Without the amputation, although the painkiller can bring temporary pain relief, but then the unavoidable permanent pain relief sets in, in the form of a premature visit from the Grim Reaper, which can be bad enough to ruin an otherwise nice day.

Building Deeper Relationships

Salespeople who are more familiar with their buyers’ afflictions and aspirations than their competitors are in better positions to have meaningful conversations with buyers and then have better chances to be selected to do business with.

She doesn’t have to resort to spewing some generic product pitches and hope that her buyers happen to want to buy what she has to sell.

And even before we go to the problem and the possible solution, is this buyer of the right kind of buyer?

Does this buyer fulfill our 5-star criteria?

Remember from my previous article, Why Inbound Marketing Works Better Than Cold Calling, the five stars are…

1. The buyer is willing to engage in honest dialogues.
2. The buyer is friendly, cooperative and candid during discussions.
3. The buyer is clear about what he wants to achieve and is willing to share it.
4. The buyer is moving forward on the purchase in the next 4-8 weeks.
5. The buyer is considering us to help.

If only one of the above points is missing, then you’d better dump the buyer and move on.

This is why you need a kick-butt lead generation system, so you have so many new incoming inquiries that you can easily abandon inappropriate buyers without worrying about possible financial hardships.

Sales enablement is the key to having all the necessary information your salespeople need to initiate and maintain peer-level (NOT vendor-level) relationships based on mutual trust and respect that have high probability of ending up as high-margin sales.

Read full post here.