How equipped is your sales team?
What does it have that it can do better at sales?
How can it improve its performance on the field?
Sales enablement can act as a game changer for your sales team, or rather, the right sales enablement can. Sales enablement, to those not in the know, is a term given to a set of tasks, tools, and processes that help raise the performance of your sales team. In B2B selling, this is the need of the hour.
B2B selling is not a linear process, it involves a huge investment in terms of time, patience and resources. Unlike B2C selling, where the selling norms, the rules are pretty set in their ways, B2B selling requires grit and perseverance. Right from creating a strong pipeline to identifying your warm and hot leads, to nurture them to the conversion stage, the process is tedious, to put it simply.
If some activities from this process are picked up and put down in an automated module, it only helps the selling process and the sales team. This is what is typically called as sales enablement.
While various companies may have different sets of tasks and tools under sales enablement, there are some guiding principles that help the team have the right sales enablement. Listed below are the proven three:
- Ensure your sales team has a good CRM to work with
- Step up the quality of the sales team hiring process
- Change your attitude from short term to long term
Good Sales Enablement begins with a good CRM enhancer
A good CRM does not alone promise or bring in good sales performance. The CSO must look out for good CRM enhancers which help you mine the data fed in the CRM.
A good CRM enhancer typically fetches a higher number of leads, more proposals and quotations dispatched, more conversion from leads and therefore, the highly celebrated target-achievement of the sales team, sometimes even beyond expectations. Most CSOs have to ensure that they leverage their CRM and use the CRM enhancers to enhance their team’s performance.
Good salespeople help in Sales Enablement
Having good salespeople in your team is an outcome of the right hiring process from targeting to selection as well as the right talent development with respect to clearly identified sales objectives and sales gaps. Not to be missed are the sales remuneration and incentive packages and process improvement, in a reverse order as may befit the organization.
Sales mastery is most certainly not the role of one man or woman. In fact, each of the team members of your sales force can develop skill areas in sales enablement based on their interest, experience, gaps in the skill sets and the needs of the company.
From the sales team, members may choose to become sales coaches, sales talent hunters, and acquirers, remuneration designers, CRM managers or any other role seen as a good fit. Some team members may choose the overarching mother-role of the sales enabler directing the entire team towards being better sales enabled.
With a concerted effort such as the above, the performance of the sales team improves multi-fold.
Changing your attitude from short term to long term
B2B selling never was and never will be a short-term process judged by the sheer length of the buying cycle it typically entails sales, therefore, has to be looked at as a long-term investment, enablement, and improvement.
Buyer profiling should not be restricted to online personas but should be made real through a face-to-face interaction between the salesperson and the buyer. This will aid the buyer data that is fed into the CRM, match the real buyer closely, which will help the sales team in its process from targeting to conversion. Sales enablement and sales transformation will pervade the entire sales process from the content function to the channel function to the demand function. The sooner we realize this and start taking action the better.
Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021.
