Sales Enablement Best Practices – 3 tips for successful sales enablement

3 sales enablement best practices by yours truly:

1. Align the way you name and structure your portfolio of products, services and solutions across all your regions/countries as well as audiences. This doesn’t sound sexy, but it is crucial. The bigger your enterprise is and the more mergers & acquisitions it has been involved in, the more likely you have confusion amongst your different audiences: Regional teams who translate materials into their respective language, partners/channels who you might have a somewhat disconnected portal for, new hires vs. experienced staff in your salesforce, the rest of your workforce or the workforce of companies you merged with, and the public/customers/media/analysts. All these different audiences might use different (old) names to refer to the same product, service or solution, they might not be up-to-date on portfolio/company restructuring, they might try to sell or buy things you have discontinued etc… You might never get to a point where you present the same single one taxonomy to all audiences but at least align and update! Doing that allows for a mapping from customer needs / buyer pain points to your products/services/solutions.

2. Make sure all your sales people and partners/channels have visibility to all cross-selling, up-selling, and other relationships between products, services and solutions in order to make sure no opportunity to sell more is overlooked. Most enterprises fail at providing this kind of data in a complete way because they try to do it in (multiple) Excel files which just aren’t multidimensional and only show a (rarely updated) small part of the highly matrixed organization based on which line of business authored it.

3. Make sure that no piece of collateral and no product/service/solution ever exists without a clear way to contact different experts (product marketing, CI/MI, pricing expert, training expert, etc.) in each region/language. Are you sure everyone in your organization would know who to call for expertise of the kind A for product B, sold in industry vertical C, in language D, in country E, to global account F… Most corporate phone directories and intranets cannot be drilled down into like this. Can yours? When subject matter experts of different types are always shown with their contact details in the context of every piece of collateral and each product/service/solution then people can interact with them to ask questions, leave comments / blog posts… Basically all that knowledge is being created in context and nobody ever feels left alone without experts at their finger tips.