How to Make Smart Sales Enablement Investments

Insight selling, consultative selling, methodology, systems, tools, insourcing, outsourcing for many people in a role tasked with supporting sales, are overwhelmed to understand what they need – let alone feel confident they are investing in the right products, services and / or solutions.

Sales enablement and how organizations support sales teams is undergoing significant transformation and it’s an exciting time to be in this field, but this is only adding complexity for those trying to select and make investment decisions.

Unfortunately, legacy approaches for sales support are quickly becoming irrelevant, and with 90 percent of sales organizations increasing sales budgets for 2017 and win rates below 50 percent, the status quo is no longer an option! It is now imperative to change the way we sell, to make our numbers with more knowledge and less methodology training. (For more on the status of sales today and the challenges they face, check out our recent podcast here, and don’t forget to download the infographic!)

The emerging sales enablement function is the next generation of selling that can replace legacy-methodology-based training. It consists of three main elements:

1. the knowledge that salespeople need to compete at the speed of change at every stage of the sales process
2. content management technology that delivers real-time knowledge and insight at every phase of the sales process, in formats sales people can use
3. enablement in the form of skills training to synthesize the knowledge into customer conversations

This approach offers help building organizational competency to support sales, as well as the individual knowledge and skills needed for sales in today's world. By creating a conduit from the strategy of leaders to the tactics of sales, salespeople make decisions in line with shifting management priorities while leading customers to higher value decisions biased toward their solution.

To make better selling decisions, take the lead on customer decisions, and guide customers at every step of the sales cycle from qualification to close, salespeople need real-time knowledge. Here's why:

• to make pursuit decisions in line with shifting management priorities, which impact pipeline and forecast
• to gain access to executives and create demand using compelling market trends and insight that executives value most
• to add value and influence the customer's decision process, rather than simply understand it
• to know how their solution maps directly with client needs better than the alternatives
• to make better negotiation decisions at the end of the deal cycle

So, all that sounds great – right? But, as I started this blog, navigating the wide variety of tools, products, services etc to select one for your organization can be daunting. That is why we created a sourcing guide. This guide will walk you through step by step, the reasons why sourcing solutions needs to change (for everything you buy!) and then give you guidelines for stakeholders and criteria you can use to objectively compare sales enablement alternatives and select one for your business, giving you the confidence you need that your investment decisions are sound.

To download this sourcing guide, click here