Sales enablement 2
If you don't really understand what sales enablement is, this is for you
Sales enablement is another role where it could sit in a few different places depending on the company’s preference, but in the absence of a dedicated specialist, falls to marketing.
A sales enablement person may enter the business if there is a need to:
Shorten the sales cycle
Improve the win rate
Drive continuous improvement and learning in the sales team
I recently had someone ask me if sales enablement was a responsibility of product marketing, and not a role in itself. My answer was that it’s a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap, but there are things a sales enablement person would do that a product marketer wouldn’t and vice versa, so if you are cashed up and increasing headcount, these can definitely be two people. And two heads are better than one anyway.
Sales enablement sits between marketing and sales, and is a dedicated resource for assisting the sales team. In the same way I spoke about the customer engagement marketer looking at all customers, identifying patterns between them, and creating tools/content that assists the CS team at large, the sales enablement person does that same pattern recognition amongst the sales team.
They’re looking for common problems or hurdles that are being faced by the sales team at large, and then they fix them. Those problems could be fixed with:
Content (videos, ebooks, blogs, etc)
Training (pitching, qualifying, presentation skills, product knowledge)
Competitor insights (battlecards, training)
Email templates
Manage the library of resources
Find and replicate what’s working well
I’ve also seen sales enablement specialists who do general, company-wide training. It’s all dependent on the needs of the organisation and the maturity stage of both the product and the team.
I think a lot of what makes someone great at sales enablement is actually the coaching side of the role, helping sales people deliver their pitch in the best possible way, have more confidence, and ultimately be more persuasive to win over your competition.
Typically if there is a sales enablement person, they’ll report to sales, but in the absence of one it always falls to marketing. So in the spirit of that, what can you as a marketing function do to help?
Listen to their calls
This will forever be my first piece of advice for anything sales related. If your organisation is not currently recording every sales call, you are missing out on so much from so many perspectives.
Once you’ve got the recordings, you will need to set aside time to actually listen to them (as many as you can - this is hard to make time for but you get so much out of it) and take notes. In the past I’ve used spreadsheets to track which persona was on the call, what their questions and objections were, and anything interesting they said. This tracking helps you build persona-based content too!
You can keep a separate spreadsheet for sales rep performance. You might find some of them promise to send things over but forget and don’t write it in their notes, others might go too light or too deep on a topic, some might be not so great at active listening.
Once you’ve picked out what’s needed, you can get started.
Recommended resource: Active listening is a skill that needs to be acquired, I’ve recommended this before and I still stand by Listen Like You Mean It by Ximena Vengoechea.
Get some essential skills training in
Yes, active listening training is on this list, but so is really simple things such as email etiquette, basic writing skills, how to evade questions, just basically an Arts degree.
You should never assume someone just “has” these skills. Especially for younger teammates or ones looking to be promoted to corporate sales, how these skills are applied changes on the recipient.
If you can create a safe, no judgement space for this type of training, you’d be surprised at how many questions people actually have around this. Especially as you might be returning to in-person sales meetings, the face-to-face skills might be a little rusty or even non-existent for team members who joined during the lockdowns.
Finally, two recommendations.
Look through gong.io, they have really good resources.
Klue looks really good (I don’t have an account and haven’t previously used it but I want to get budget for it) and in the meantime they also have a podcast (by the same name) that is pretty legit.
One link
Seeing this Transport yourself ad after Sydney’s current transport situation is just the quintessential “bad taste ad”.