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.
