From the executive suite: Effective sales enablement strategies

Top of mind for sales executives today: How do I equip my sellers with the right tools and resources—at the right time—to optimize customer engagements and increase sales productivity?

Concentrix Catalyst recently hosted an Executive Leadership Roundtable in partnership with Highspot, with Senior Sales Enablement Executives looking to modernize their sales teams. The Executives represented companies that ranged in sales enablement maturity (from fully mature to undefined), but interestingly enough, all shared similar challenges around increasing productivity and efficiencies within their sales teams.

The number one common challenge: “How do I effectively build a sales enablement organization?” Sales Enablement encompasses a variety of core drivers. It is a strategic shift to enable sellers to effectively and easily approach buyers and increase sales productivity. There is no “silver bullet” for what is going to be most effective for your organization, but there are a few key things that help ensure you design sales enablement approaches that are focused on helping sellers increase revenue.

Designing an effective sales enablement strategy

• Gain buy-in from leadership: Executive alignment and support from the top down is critical to your success. Most fail without it. Work early to build leadership sponsorship, focus on one or two well-respected sales leaders allowing it to mature organically over time. Provide executives with a “virtual office” allowing them to easily hear and see what you are solving for.
• Align sales and marketing: Sales and Marketing must align on business goals and accountabilities. Build an alliance with marketing focused on establishing expectations, agreement on the go-to-market strategy, sharing common assets, and standardizing the taxonomy. Establish a “top gun committee” to meet once a month to review and refine strategies, while creating unity and removing isolated working groups.
• Establish governance on content: A sales enablement effort without a clearly defined content management strategy is most likely to fail. Invest in a content management system that will enable you to easily track delivery and score all your content and playbooks. Ensure that your sellers are provided contextual content—surfacing the most successful assets and plays to the top—allowing them to have the most effective content that drive sales results.

Leading companies say sales enablement is a key part of their revenue growth strategy for 2017. Sales leaders recognize that planning for sales team efficiency long-term will require a strategic shift. The big hurdle is understanding what to provide the sales team to drive better outcomes and improvements in performance. As a sales leader, your sales organization’s success is dependent on your ability to properly answer those questions and enable the salesforce.

To help with this effort, Concentrix Catalyst has developed a Sales Enablement Optimizer that will allow you to:

• Develop a comprehensive understanding of your key sales enablement drivers
• Better plan your 2017 sales enablement strategy with a holistic view of your company’s improvement opportunities
• Maximize your 2017 sales enablement budget with smart, high-value investments