How do you enable your sales team to go about selling new products? Perhaps a quick training session, a few brochures outlining the new product or maybe some presentation slides? While these tactics may be informative, they act as a contributing factor to the gap between strategic initiatives and closing sales, as Destination CRM explains.
To close the gap, companies must consider utilizing a sales enablement approach to maximize opportunities to cross-sell.
In a separate article, the news source points to International Data Corporation’s definition for sales enablement – “the delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.”
Empower Your Salesforce to Properly Engage Consumers
This means eliminating random acts—in other words, giving sellers just enough information to be minimally effective without actually implementing a strategy that’s designed to align organization activities to optimize success.
“Random acts don’t have the power to transform your corporate success,” the media outlet states.
Instead, you need to provide your sales force with brand-compliant materials that contain the most up-to-date information about new products, while at the same time outlining how the items fit within your company’s broader portfolio and why your customers should care about them.
Applying this method will go a long way toward empowering consumers to purchase your products because, in many cases, the more informed they are, the more confident they’ll feel about buying an item.
However, a recent Forrester Research blog post suggests that companies should look beyond the general theory that sales enablement is simply equipping sellers with the skills and tools to do their jobs better. This, at times, can result in multiple uncoordinated efforts to assist the sales force, without any true results.
“If there is a sales enablement function in organizations that views the role in this way—they are likely to be understaffed and constantly putting out fires across the organization,” the blog states.
Increase the Productivity of Your Sales Team
Another way to look at sales enablement is the process of making the sales organization more productive. This means supplying sellers with resources designed to drive productivity and save money. The media outlet uses the example of process-modeling, which can allow leaders to document an engagement model that details roles and responsibilities of sales people to streamline resources that meet the clients’ requirements.
Finally, try looking at sales enablement as a way of making the process of growing the sales line items on your income statement more efficient. This way, you’re arming your sales force with all the tools necessary to handle the complexity of B2B selling. This may include devising new sets of metrics, measures and processes to configure portfolios differently, and would help bridge the gap between an organization’s strategic vision and its execution.
In essence, in order to effectively implement an advanced sales enablement model, one must step back and look at how his or her company defines sales, and if it carries a clear identity. This will ensure all parts of the organization are aligned and that strategies are executed to produce maximum revenue.