What Exactly is Sales Enablement and Why is it Important for VPs of Sales?
Every VP of Sales knows that without effective Sales Enablement their teams won’t be as productive and effective in their jobs. But what exactly is Sales Enablement?
Sales Enablement provide sales professionals in the sales organization exactly what they need to increase their productivity and performance and helps make the sales force more effective in engaging the prospective customers throughout the buying process:
- focused on enabling the sales organization with the best practices, right information, content, overarching and tailored sales processes, quality effectiveness programs, deal management, selling motions, sales playbook, sales methodology education, selling training programs, competency models, capability and skills assessments, resourcing, selling tools, sales technology enablement and support, pricing, contracts, and any other assets that help the sales group sell more effectively
- overall enablement content creation and delivery, develop content and sales toolkits to roll out to business unit and country-based sales teams, supporting the sales adoption lifecycle, promote, educate and engage
- develop solution-specific training and certifications, as well as developing sales enablement and skill enhancement tools resulting in increased efficiency, productivity and/or cost effectiveness
- the sales enablement training and curriculum will cover things like GTM strategy, competition, different solutions, the sales process, selling system and methodologies, tools and all the required skills training
One of the things not frequently discussed is that good leadership and communication skillset is critical to the Sales Enablement role because you have to set clear expectations to the VP of Sales and the entire sales team while holding everyone accountable for compliance with such things as methodology, process, training certifications, etc. Success of this role is measured by the improved performance and results on top of the changing behavior of the sales team in terms of adhering to the enablement programs.
What else? What are some other thoughts on Sales Enablement?