Sales enablement can be one of the greatest investments you can make in your organization to drive top and bottom line growth. When done correctly it will turn your sales force into a well oiled revenue machine and drive market share growth, higher average sales, and greater sales volume.
There are three major areas we need to focus on to properly empower a high-performance sales team. Each of these areas should be assessed to identify any gaps, and sales decelerators that can then be prioritized for improvement.
Neglecting any of these pillars of sales enablement will lead to either decreased average deal size, decreased sales volume, or both.
The three pillars of sales enablement are Sales Skills, Sales Operations, and Sales Resources.
Sales Skills
Front line managers are usually promoted because they were successful sales people, and most organizations rely on them to mentor their team and pass on their sales skills to them.
This can work well, but in many organizations, especially in today’s business climate, sales managers are asked to do more tasks, and cover more ground than ever before. Inevitably this leads to some tasks being sacrificed for corporate initiatives, and the area we see being negatively affected most often is the mentoring and training of their sales reps.
The managers are working hard, and trying hard, but there are only so many hours in their week, and mentoring and training is usually one of their least monitored activities.
Top tier organizations sometimes augment this mentorship with some sales training by a third party, and although this can be powerful at motivating the team and giving them a couple of new strategies, people will usually quickly revert to their old patterns of behaviour fairly quickly.
All high performing teams in any sector, be it sports, the military, or sales, have dedicated management and dedicated coaches. This division of focus is one of the main reasons they can maintain their high performance over the long-term.
When you are planning your sales enablement strategies we suggest that you incorporate an in-house or third party sales coach who can assess the individuals on your sales team on a weekly or monthly basis, and teach them how improve their skills just as regularly. This will ensure that your sales team is constantly evolving and adapting to changing market needs without reverting to their old patterned behaviours.
Sales Operations
Efficient and accurate sales operations leads to greater sales volume. When sales opps is inaccurate and inefficient it is like strapping lead shoes onto a sprinter. I have seen hundreds of hard working, highly skilled sales reps slowed down by sales opps that couldn’t keep up with their ambition and drive. Here are the key areas of sales opps to examine first:
Strategic Comp Plan
Sales reps are coin operated. The first thing they do when they receive their comp plan is calculate what they should focus their efforts on so they can earn the most money.
A well designed comp plan will align sales reps’ financial incentives with corporate strategies. Unfortunately, I have seen many comp plans that do the opposite. They pay the reps less for selling into the company’s go-forward strategic areas of focus.
Regardless of the structure of the comp plan, the company’s leadership team will still want the sales force to focus their efforts in these key strategic areas, and this creates an immediate internal conflict within the organization. In these cases the managers, lacking the carrot, usually need to rely on the stick in order to get the sales teams to focus their efforts in these areas. This inevitably leads to poor morale in the front line and management ranks, and increases your churn rate.
Clean Data
The second ares of sales opps to examine is your CRM data. A high-performance sales team thrives on clean data. Stale, inaccurate, and duplicate data slows them down and decreases your pipeline build and sales volume.
Is your data fresh? Have you eliminated duplicate records? Have you flagged your top competitive targets? Can your sales team easily flag non-target accounts in the CRM? Start with these questions to see how clean your data set is.
Order and Approval Processes
The next area of sales operations to assess is your order creation, processing, and approvals processes. Your sales team should be able to generate accurate order paperwork as quickly as possible, and it should be processed just as quickly. Required approvals should be automated, trackable, and pushed down to as low a level on the authority chain as possible. Having your sales teams spending hours on documentation and approvals will not grow your pipeline.
Sales Resources
The highest performing sales reps have all the knowledge they need at their fingertips. Unfortunately, more often than not the top sales reps have to compile this information on their own. I have spent countless hours doing so myself in many different sales organizations.
A comprehensive list of resources can be found on our website reillysalesconsulting.com.
Before you being updating and creating materials I strongly suggest you meet with your sales teams and ask them what they need, and what they don’t. There is often a large difference between what other departments think the sales force needs, and what they actually need.
Assumptions in this area will cost you time, money, and market share.
Any collections of resources such as case studies, references, and competitive matrixes should be catalogued in a database or spreadsheet so that your teams can find what they need in a moment, and don’t have to waste time wading through a repository to find what they need.
Arm your sales team with powerful, concise information they can access quickly so that they can be prepared for any meeting with any client in minutes, and send the client follow up information after the meeting just as quickly.
Where to Begin?
First, meet with your front line sales reps. Review all three of the above areas with them. Ask them what is slowing them down. What resources do they use? How can they be improved? What are they missing? What is wasting their time? What are the non-revenue generating activities they are spending the most time on?
Then review the sales resources list on our website and see which gaps exist in your organization.
The goal is to empower your sales force. You want to enable them to compete faster and more effectively than your competitors, and for new reps to ramp up as quickly as possible.
Investing in a well executed sales enablement program will increase your company’s top and bottom lines, and increase your market share.
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