The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

What are you spending on sales support?

I always knew companies were wasting a ton of money on ineffective and disjointed sales enablement programs, and now Forrester's Scott Santucci has put a number on it in his report Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of Sales Support.  His research shows that:

"Technology vendors are spending, on average, 19% of their selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs or $135,262 per quota-carrying salesperson in support-related activities."

Yikes. How has this gotten so out of control?  Forrester found that the costs are spread around different budgets and programs across the company, from sales, to sales operations, marketing, product development, and even human resources groups. 

I think this is a symptom of my point that in a B2B organization, you are either in sales or you support sales.  CEOs are demanding that all parts of the company are contributing to revenue generation, but the result is disjointed, redundant efforts.  Scott calls these "random acts of sales support."

So what do you do?  Forrester says you should organize your sales support initiatives around four core sales activities:

• Gaining access to the right people in the buying organization
• Conducting great sales calls that make buyers want to do business with you
• Helping buyers visualize how your solution can solve their problem or deliver a desired outcome
• Enabling buyers to build a business case that leads to buying

Sounds a lot like the first of my New Rules of Sales Enablement, in which sales enablement is not about creating more collateral and throwing it into a portal, rather its all about enabling your sales people to have relevant, compelling conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process and want to buy from you.

I'd like to hear from you, where are you spending on sales enablement.  Comment here.

Holding out for a playbook

Kadient's Amy Black (@amyblack) released her new music video about a salesperson who goes from zero to hero. 

New definition of sales enablement

I wish I had a dollar for every person I talk to who thinks that sales enablement is nothing more than pumping out more collateral and deploying a better sales portal, with no regard for the buyer’s information needs.

We need a new definition of sales enablement, but before defining what sales enablement is, let’s consider the desired outcome of effective sales enablement.  A well-enabled salesperson can:

• Get access to the key stakeholders in the buying process
• Understand the customer’s marketplace and business issues
• Help the buyer envision solving their problems using his or her products and services
• Get stalled deals moving again
• Sell newly launched or acquired products, and cross-sell unfamiliar products
• Frame the buyer’s evaluation criteria so that the competitors are at a disadvantage
• Help the “buyer champion” justify the purchase and sell within his or her organization
• Overcome objections raised by the buyer
• Respond to the tough questions immediately and with credibility
• Do all this within three months of being hired rather than seven months

What do all these abilities have in common? A real give-and-take, back-and-forth, you-and-me kind of groove. Something all humans recognize in that wonderful thing called a “conversation.”

So recognizing that sales enablement is about relevant, valuable conversations, the best definition I've found for sales enablement comes from Lee Levitt at IDC's Sales Advisory Practice (See IDC Defines Sales Enablement):

Sales enablement is:

The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward

What I like most about this is the context of moving a specific sales opportunity forward.  Sales reps are already overwhelmed with general information, but as you can see from the desired outcomes above, the conversations they need to have need to address the specific issues their buyer is having, and how the rep can make those issues go away.

New Rules of Sales Enablement: 1. Conversations, NOT Collateral

If your company is like most, you equate sales enablement with collateral and sales tools.  You’ve treated sales enablement as a task—loading your one-size-fits-all sales and marketing collateral into a sales portal or intranet site and giving your salespeople a login. Then you ring the dinner bell, cross your fingers and wait for the magic to happen.

One of my clients is a large technology company with five businesses, a field sales department, and a corporate marketing group. Several years ago, they launched a sales enablement initiative.  The product folks within each business unit had to compete for the attention of the sales team to try to get them to sell the new and updated products they kept launching. So they would work with corporate marketing to create a ton of product collateral and 75-slide PowerPoint presentations.

They created a sales portal, which their salespeople could access by clicking a big blue button right on the front page of the corporate intranet site, and they posted all their collateral to the sales portal.

I asked my client how often the reps use this content. She said there was no way to know.  So we polled some of the salespeople and shadowed a few experienced reps on sales calls.  We heard the same story from each rep. It sounded something like this:

“When I first joined the company, I got a couple of documents and presentations from my sales manager. Every time I have a meeting, I take these files and modify them for the current opportunity.  I now have dozens, no, hundreds of versions of these documents and presentations on my laptop.  The sales portal? I don’t remember how to get to it or what my login is.”

Can you imagine what the conversations are like between this salesperson and his customers?

OLD RULE:  Sales enablement is about putting the sales and marketing collateral rack online

NEW RULE: Sales enablement is about ensuring salespeople are able to have valuable conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process

We need a new definition of sales enablement, which is the subject of my next post.