When designing a kitchen, you need to consider your available space as well as your cooking style and the types of meals you most often cook. This allows you to create your culinary masterpieces most effectively by optimizing the processes you follow. In cooking, just as in sales, technology matters, too. Choosing appliances, such as an oven or refrigerator, with features that support your approach to meal preparation, makes a big difference.
A fool with a tool is still a fool
Unfortunately, sales leaders often look at tools differently than do master chefs. They sign contracts for expensive sales technology that promises to deliver results before defining what those results look like in their business context and how the organization needs to prepare. These investments almost never pay off. But, just like a poorly designed kitchen, it isn’t the technology that failed. It is the sales organization that failed to take the time to think through how the technology needs to support their strategy. According to the data from our 2016 Sales Best Practices Study, these tools often fail to deliver. For example, only 28% of all respondents reported a significant increase in sales productivity due to the use of sales tools as compared to 78% of world-class sales performers.
The functional layer sits between the customer’s journey and the salesperson’s journey.
Before sales enablement can drive performance from enablement technology, the organization must have a deep understanding of the customer’s journey and align internal processes (marketing, sales, and service) to it. As evidenced in our 2015 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, the better this alignment, the more successful organizations have been across several key performance metrics such as quota attainment (+13 %) or revenue plan attainment (+10%).
There are as many customer’s journeys as buying situations. The key to success is to identify the relevant gates on an aggregated level. When world-class sales performers map their internal processes to the customer’s journey, they ensure that every gate on the customer’s side has an equivalent gate in the internal process chain.
Sales force enablement’s core responsibility is to equip the sales force with the required skills and competencies, the right knowledge, and the right strategies to create more and better business. Within the functional layer, there are three sublayers, each with unique requirements for enablement services:
Skills and Competencies or “How to Sell”: This bottom layer is independent of the organization’s products and services portfolio and includes all of the general skills that impact sales success, such as communication, listening and questioning, negotiation, presentation, and social skills. These skills are relevant throughout the entire customer’s journey. Training services are the primary enablement service in this layer.
Expertise: Capability and Situational Knowledge or “What to Sell and How to Sell”: The capability knowledge focuses on what salespeople need to know about the organization’s portfolio of products and services. These knowledge prerequisites should center on what these products and services mean to a customer rather than what they are or what they do. This understanding translates “what to sell” into “how to sell.” Enablement services include various internal enablement tools (playbooks, value messaging guidelines, briefings, etc.) as well as client-facing content assets (success stories, references, presentations, etc.).
Situational knowledge is based on the organization’s methodologies and processes. Acquiring situational knowledge salespeople have to connect the dots between their research and the information they get from conversations with buyers in the specific context of a buying situation to draw the right conclusion for the right moment.
Sales Insights or “How to Coach”: The sales insights layer covers all information regarding the specific customer situation and the analytics related to the current interactions with the prospect or customer. Once sales managers have mastered the coaching skills, the better the data, the better the impact they can make through coaching.
The technology layer is derived from the functional layer by translating the functional areas into different technology categories and creating a set of systems capability requirements.
Learning Management Systems: This layer includes training and learning management systems for all available learning formats. Capabilities should include content creation for the training services to be provided as well as functionality for assigning, conducting, and tracking sessions and the issuing of certifications.
Sales and Marketing Technology Solutions: The next layer includes a variety of technology solutions. The focus here is on enablement technology, but marketing automation and SFA/CRM systems are essential as well, and ideally, all three systems are integrated.
Sales enablement content management solutions handle a wide array of content types from internal enablement content up to client-facing content. The best content management systems provide a broad range of functionalities including management, distribution, and access, as well as analytics for content usage and effectiveness in sales interactions. However, to drive world-class performance, the system must go beyond and adhere to the “Be Inspired” principle, serving up content suggestions to the salesperson—when they need it; where they need it—based on the specific selling scenario and customer’s journey stage.
Sales Analytics Systems: There are three types of analytics in this layer: descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. In dynamic, ever-changing B2B sales environments, sales analytics become more and more important. Not only do they improve strategic decision-making among sales leadership, but they also help salespeople gain as much relevant information as possible about targeted prospects and existing customers so they may engage them in the most meaningful, relevant, and valuable way.
Sales enablement technology is a significant investment. To make the most of it and drive the performance improvements they are looking for, sales enablement leaders must collaborate with their colleagues in sales operations. Before purchasing any system, they must define the functional layers to derive their technology requirements.