Is Sales Enablement just lipstick on a knowledge management pig? So asks Gerhard on his Selling Power blog. He takes some potshots at sales enablement vendors and the industry analysts who cover them. Many of them are deserved, others are not.
Maybe the question he meant to ask is "What do I have to do to get those sales enablement vendors to sponsor the Sales 2.0 conference?" I've shared my opinions on that directly with Gerhard because I want to see those conferences prosper.
For one thing, sales enablement vendors want to sell to VPs of Sales who believe in scalability and repeatability, are willing to do the work to make it happen, and recognize the role that enabling technology can play. They are out there, I've worked with many of them. And one thing they know is that you can't just throw "Sales 2.0" technologies at the problem and expect sales performance to improve overnight.
Gerhard starts a great discussion about whether sales enablement can impact sales productivity, and asks if sales enablement has a future? As long as Jim Dickie's data shows 40% of reps missing quota, and Lee Levitt's research shows buyers think sales reps actually slow down their buying process...then the answer is yes.
Gerhard says that "The noble purpose of Sales Enablement companies is to help sales organizations save time finding relevant information, create and organize sales content and create quick access to all experts across the enterprise." I disagree. Those aren't noble, those are by-products. Not too many VPs of Sales care about content.
The real purpose of sales enablement companies (both technology and services providers) is to help the VP of Sales address an issue that keeps him/her awake at night: "How do I scale my sales organization, to generate more revenue with fewer resources?"
As I've written here before, sales is like any other business process. The only way to scale it cost effectively is to drive repeatable behavior. The only way to drive repeatable behavior is to surface best practices - the activities, strategies, and conversations that are proven to work in different selling situations, so that every rep can do more of those things. That's the role of sales enablement.
If you truly believe that best practices are not resusable, then your only choice to scale sales is to hire only gifted A players. We know how well that works. You've got to enable the B and C players to be incrementally better.
The sales enablement vendors all try to surface best practices, but they do it in very different ways. Some are focused on delivering a better sales portal, some are using Web 2.0 capabilities to automate the inefficient ways sales people work today, while others allow you to guide sales reps through the customer's buying cycle using proven playbooks. The best approach for you depends on your culture.
Don't let the vendors fool you, there's no way to enable sales without hard work. But I for one would rather have a sales enablement person spend one hour to save 1,000 salespeople an hour each.
