Implementing Sales Enablement

David Batup, founder of perperitus.com sums up Sales Enablement as “a range of activities, disciplines and thinking focused on removing the barriers that often get in the way of successfully closing deals”.

“Sales enablement is all about maximising the outcome of the opportunity development time a salesperson has, and minimising the time spent on activities that can only be described, unkindly by some, as sales procrastination. To do this, sales enablement is about preparation for, the holding of, and follow-up from customer meetings to ensure the salesperson has the greatest chance of success, where success is moving the sale forward or closing.”

“Central to sales enablement is the idea of harnessing the knowledge and best practices of your best salespeople (the so-called ‘rainmakers’), to the benefit of the whole sales operation. And it is also about approaching the sales cycle not from the perspective of your company’s products and services, but from your customers’ perspective.”

“I suggest the major steps for sales enablement are:

• Understand how to articulate your products to customers’ business needs, buying cycle and information needs. Engage with your top performing salespeople
• Overlay the ‘moments of truth’ (MOT) onto the customer’s buying cycle to create an MOT map and include the levels of responsiveness required to meet their needs
• Define the sales enablement problem from the perspective of the customer and salespeople’s needs. Identify the collateral, tools and solutions that will support the salesperson before and after the appointment
• Invest in developing or aligning your assets to meet the customer’s business and process needs. Deploy the assets in a way that makes them easily accessible to sales, ensure they are in the context of the sales cycle and where appropriate provide customer self-service […]”

“[…] Sales and marketing teams may say, “So what, this is what we do already, isn’t it?” But there is evidence that there is still a big shortfall in the way salespeople are prepared for and conduct themselves in front of the customer, relative to the customers’ expectations.[…]”

• 57% of customers felt the salesperson was not prepared for the meeting
• 33% of customers say deals could have been won if the salesperson had been better prepared
• 65% of sales time is spent not selling
• 7 hours a week is what the average salesperson spends looking for relevant information to prepare for sales calls
• 70%–90% of marketing material goes unused by sales
• 50% of information is pushed through email
• It takes an average of 7 months to ramp up a new salesperson.