Sandeep Pandit asked the following question about Sales Enablement on LinkedIn Answers and got the great answers below:
“What are the best practices of Sales Enablement? Also please list down the activities which are required to enable Sales in IT industry.
Sales Enablement is the fine art of enabling Sales function with the tools, knowledge, resources and processes so that Sales community can go and book orders, get the same delivered and subsequently be ready to service it.”
“[…] Each aspect is focused on providing the customer facing teams with the material to have a real conversation with the target customer. They may be the CEO or a telecoms manager but all of them will likely be involved in the buying decision and will talk. Therefore consistency in the message is key and you should invest time to get this message clear and relevant.
From my experience the materials that helps most are those that give confidence in those conversations; this can come in the form of training, collateral, fact sheets, account planning, deal/opportunity strategy etc. Ultimately the value of what you are offering needs to be expressible in terms that the customer would understand, recognise and be able to act on.
A clear description and information on customers likely issues will help the client facing teams to engage in conversations to understand the customer better. they can then probe further for evidence and supporting facts to build an offer that is more compelling.
Also, a clear articulation of what you do, backed with the SO WHAT? answers and suitable proof points will also help to build credibility with the client.
When I speak with clients and buyers, each of them say the same thing. Broadly there are three stages to the buying process:
- you have to help the customer to understand that they have a problem that can be solved. and it is important enough to invest resources in to fix.
- you have to help the customer to explore the options available to them in solving the problem and demonstrate why the option you have is best suited to their need.
- you have to prove that your organisation is best placed to deliver this option in the competitive marketplace. […]”
“[…] Sales enablement is – as you’ve no doubt concluded – a critical success factor for B2B companies. I’d suggest that there are four key elements that need to be mastered:
- Clarity about who your best prospects are and how to recognise them
- A deep understanding of the business issues that are likely to cause them to take action
- Clear insights into the sources of information they trust when they start researching solutions
- A profound appreciation of their decision making process and how and why they choose to buy
In my experience, it is critical that sales and marketing work together in a truly collaborative fashion to develop a common agreement and a common language in each of these areas.
If you can develop a clear picture of the buying decision process that your prospects go through, you’ll be in great shape to create the tools and programs that are going to have the most impact on facilitating the buying process.
You’ll also avoid the huge amount of wasted effort that most companies put into the creation of sales and marketing deliverables that at the end of the day have no impact what so ever the on chances of a prospect buying the solution. […]”
I would like to respond to the discussion above with a slide by BizSphere. It shows how the Sales Enablement approach I have worked with [at a corporation with over 4,000 sales people world-wide] provides a context sales and marketing can collaborate in to equip the customer facing teams, who have to sell very complex portfolios, with the right…
- core messages;
- resources;
- internal contacts;
- and [cross-selling/up-selling] relationships
…for the right audience at the equally complex client:
B2B Sales Enablement and Sales Tech SaaS 
It’s so great to see so many insightful thoughts and best practices shared around the area of Sales Enablement. This is an area that’s increasingly gaining traction and awareness as a true imperative for b2b organizations out there selling complex solutions. I would echo nearly all of the best practices below, and I would also add that embarking on the Sales Enablement journey can feel daunting, however taking a “start where you are” approach is really the way I have seen companies be most successful. We ask each of our customers to identify the critical sales behavior they need to enable immediately in order to meet their revenue goals. Is it displacing a competive threat? Is it moving to a solution or value selling model in order to attrack higher level decision makers? Is it penetrating existing accounts through up-sell and cross-sell? What do you NEED your reps to start doing tomorrow? Build a strategy around that behavior first and then branch out. Don’t try to “boil the ocean.” Sales Eanblement is an iterative process.
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