At the core of every great company is a motivated and engaged sales force.
Best in-class-companies direct significant resources toward selecting and upskilling these teams to effectively connect with potential customers, understand problems, and articulate and discover value every day.
Great companies have sales enablement strategies that focus on sales processes, management, people and supporting technologies to ensure their team maximizes their potential.
company leaders must be actively involved in the sales function and provide daily reinforcement of the strategy and direction to the sales team.
This may seem like micro management? Surely the Sales Team and the Business Development manager can just get on with it and sell our stuff? After all we are busy with Strategy and Product and Cool Marketing Stuff!
Sales must just Sell!
Well if you’re in any kind of complex sell and solution sell then this doesn’t cut it. The sales team need to constantly be aligned with value proposition, strategy and product and be able to TALK to your customers about that!
The eBook linked below has several good perspectives on Sales Enablement and driving this function across the company.
They lay out four key components of any sales enablement strategy that must be in sync to create success.
- The organization should have a clear and effective sales process.
- Salespeople should have easy access to curated information about their products and services and the competition.
- There should be an impactful, multi-modal sales training strategy that focuses on knowledge transfer, practice and sustaining the behavior change.
- Company leaders must be actively involved in the sales function and provide daily reinforcement of the strategy and direction to the sales team.
These may sound simple and obvious but when I work with companies and their sales teams, there is inevitably some key aspects of above that are not in place.