4 Ways to Tell if You Are Enabling Your Sales Team.

You may be surprised to know that despite investing in marketing and sales automation tools, more than 50% of companies still fail to meet their sales targets! Unfortunately, this creates  the general sentiment that sales enablement doesn't work. “It  just complicated things and never really worked out,” everyone decides.  The problem here is that companies just don’t understand that sales enablement is not the same as automation.

Many companies equate sales enablement with automation and engage in automating certain portions of their sales process such as sales collateral creation or lead prospecting.

To know if you are truly enabling your sales team, you need to answer these questions…

Is your sales enablement process repeatable?

Are your sales enablement activities repeatable? Effective Sales enablement is one that uses technology to automate and repeat the activities that fall in its scope.  For example, a good lead scoring model should be designed so that it can be applied to any prospect. Similarly, lead segmentation or nurturing programs should be such that they can be used across the board.

Is your approach to sales enablement universal?

Sales enablement is not limited to sales alone. It touches various other areas such as marketing and customer service as well. Hence a global organizational approach to sales enablement is needed. This means developing  a single source of prospect data, created from inputs across the company, to enable sales advisors throughout the organization.

Are your sales enablement efforts monitored?

What mechanisms do you have in place to identify the gaps that exist in your on-going sales enablement efforts? Identifying the gaps and fixing  them promptly plays a key role in improving the overall effectiveness of your sales enablement efforts and your sales process.

Do you optimize your sales enablement process? How often?

For sales enablement efforts to work, there should be ongoing assessment to determine what is working and what is not. Based on the results of the analysis, the sales enablement framework needs to be revised to enhance sales efficiency and effectiveness.

For sales enablement efforts to be effective, you need to adopt a holistic approach to sales enablement. While random acts of sales enablement do help, for them to make any major impact, sales enablement has to be treated as a key process, and not a one-time effort.