The Future of Sales Enablement
Where Is Sales Enablement Headed in the Future?
How to Effectively Advance Your Sales Enablement Charter
Companies that are having success today know that sales enablement is essential. Your sales team drives the revenue for your company, and if you aren’t strategically enabling them with resources, processes, and tools, you’re leaving potential profits on the table.
How is this discipline evolving, though, and how you can utilize the most up-to-date sales enablement methods to improve your overarching sales landscape?
5 Key Ways Sales Enablement Is Changing
Sales Enablement Is a Holistic Discipline
It’s important to think about sales enablement not as the individual tactics you implement but as a holistic, integrated, and strategic discipline. Sales enablement is less about that specific CRM or this particular coaching program and more about a shift in mind-set.
It’s about driving cross-functional alignment between your departments. Marketing and sales are natural places to start, but don’t forget to include sales operations, revenue operations, and even customer success. All these can integrate together. Open up your communication channels, and leverage the expertise of all your resources in order to drive toward your shared goals.
Yes, the individual initiatives you implement are going to be impactful and important, but they will only yield positive results if they’re within a more overarching, structured program.
The Customer Is More Important Than Ever
If you want to optimize the performance of your sales team (thereby boosting your revenue), you need to think through strategies and systems from the perspective of your customers. Use the insight of your sales team and anyone with direct contact to the customers to drill down and to identify those customer needs, challenges, and goals. What outcomes are they trying to achieve? How can your conversations, interactions, and touchpoints with them help them get where they’re trying to go?
The customer cannot be an afterthought in your strategic ecosystem. You need to start from your customers and ensure you thoroughly know who they are, what their challenges are, and what they ultimately want. If you can accurately identify that information, you put yourself in the best position to create collateral that resonates, provides value, and encourages a purchasing decision of your service or product.
Don’t forget to consider this process after the initial sale as well. Successfully managing your account strategy can lead to increased lifetime value from that customer.
Experiential Selling Is the Wave of the Future
If you’re thinking through your processes and strategies from the lens of the customer, then you’re going to naturally arrive at experiential selling. This is a way to create value for your customer through interactive and immersive experiences. When done correctly, it’s a highly impactful tactic.
Just make sure to never lose sight of your customer in your strategy and planning. Always have their goals and intended outcomes in mind when developing these experiential plans. Ensure that the messaging and branding within these endeavors is still leading with value, not product.
Align Your Technology to Your Processes—Not the Other Way Around
When it comes to sales technology selection, companies consistently approach this issue backward. They know they’re having a problem, so they select a specific sales technology solution to address that problem. Logically, this seems as if it should work, but in practice, it’s a reactive approach that leaves you consistently scrambling. More often than not, you’re left with poor tech adoption and lots of wasted resources.
As sales enablement evolves and the integration of technology to support that becomes more sophisticated, companies are realizing they need a structured, strategic, proactive plan for their sales tech.
This means identifying goals; thoroughly auditing stakeholders, existing technology, and capabilities; and creating an overarching digital ecosystem based on those findings. Only then, at the end of the process, should you assess potential tech solutions that align to those systems.
(Learn more about creating and implementing value-based sales enablement strategies here.)
The Introduction of the Orchestration Role
Sales enablement involves a lot of moving parts. It means managing individuals, departments, process development, communication channels, supporting sales technology, and so much more. Because successful sales enablement is a holistic discipline, there should be a specific role for an “orchestrator.” Just as a conductor brings together disparate instruments and individual players to create one harmonious performance, the orchestrator within sales enablement can manage these processes, lead individuals, and bring together departments to ensure optimized success.