Sales-Enablement

Sales Enablement primarily means a wide array of activities that goes into facilitating sales - from ground up to deal closure. Effectiveness and efficiency of these activities decides the output of the entire sales process. In this sense, Sales Enablement is a holistic concept that comprises strategizing, analysing, implementing and evaluating to achieve desired returns with optimal utilisation of resources.

History

Sales is an age-old activity – we all know barter systems, then the stone age and the coin system that made its foray in human civilization. Any activity that furthers the output of the sale – mainly revenue increment with optimal resource utilization – is sales enablement. These activities mainly help the salesperson to identify, understand and communicate with the customer in order to increase sales.

Elements of Sales Enablement

Sales enablement activities are varied and, depending upon the business need and capabilities, one or more of the activities can be harnessed for the desired output.

• Telesales - Backbone of consultative sales, it is long used as a primary tool for lead generation and also rating leads’ positioning in the sales funnel – hot, warm, or cold.
• Feet on Street (FoS) - Age-old method of selling which is personalised, customised and carried out face to face by sales reps. This is one method that has the ability to reach the target audience in the remotest corner of the world. Incredibly high on manual efforts and time-consuming, much of its success depends upon personal sales skill.
• Technology - These days, a lot of the manual efforts going into selling are being minimised through technology leverage. Understanding the purchase history of the target customer, their requirements and sentiments can be analysed and evaluated much before meeting the person, impacting the frequency of sales attempts and also rapport building with the potential customer. New age CRM tools, sales process automation tools, data analytics, Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are all coming together to give a boost to sales.
• Digital Marketing - The world is a global village now with booming internet adoption, and this laid the foundation of Digital marketing. Customer-centricity, influencing influencers, and re-targeting the customer have all become important in selling. Also, digital marketing has become the mainstay of kickstarting and sustaining brand conversations with the target audience.
• Marketing activations - Very important for driving inbound sales as it mainly caters to promote on-spot sales. Experiential marketing is one way to do it, that helps deliver immersive customer experiences as well as creating brand mindshare.

Process

Starting from the basic and evaluating the seller’s journey - the most important thing for a salesperson to know is - the customer. Where are they? Now, there is an existent market pie from which every player is trying hard to increase their share, essentially biting into the competition’s share. But the size of this market pie is not stagnant! It is ever increasing, and a sales enablement partner helps you go beyond this market pie and identify your potential customers – those that are untapped, thereby increasing the sales funnel.

A sales enablement partner then helps in identifying and delivering BANT qualified leads – essentially Budget, Authority, Need, and Timelines – to help its client sell. Primarily, this means strengthening the sales funnel. Sales Enablement activity doesn’t end here. Connecting the threads of this entire process that leverages technology, processes & manpower, it helps drive optimal utilisation of these resources – cutting down the input cost and increasing the margin. Further, a sale is not an end in itself; it needs to be evaluated in the context of its ecosystem for sustained customer engagement, replicating the best practices and also delivering customer service post the sale. In any B2B or B2C sales cycle, this complete cycle remains the same.

Sales and Marketing alignment for Sales Enablement

Looking at the need for this alignment from ground level - Marketing’s job primarily is to identify prime customer segments and develop resonating brand and value propositions. Also, to create and circulate materials, collateral, and messaging across relevant channels. Sales’ job primarily is to sell.

The junction where the ownership of this customer relationship switches from marketing to sales essentially defines the relationship outlook of marketing and sales function in the company. In an ideal scenario – marketing content should address customer’s needs and the sales team answers those questions for the customer. To know what customers’ needs are, marketing needs to collaborate with Sales and how to answer those questions, Sales needs to collaborate with marketing – both can’t work in silos. The knowledge of the sales team needs to be at the heart of the marketing content if that content is going to be used to generate the sale. Here, a sales enablement partner dons the dual role of sales & marketing – directly impacting sales.

Global Outlook

While Sales Enablement in itself is a holistic concept, there are very limited players in the world market catering to sales enablement at every junction of the seller’s journey. While some focus only on manpower deployment, others focus only on CRM tools for managing and enhancing customer relationships, and still others only at managing partners. There are very limited players that conform to the ‘Sales Enablement player’ tag.

References

This article "Sales-Enablement" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Sales-Enablement. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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