marketing
Are You Achieving Best-in-Class Sales Enablement?
In 2014, Adobe published the Closing the Deal: The State of Sales Enablement report. It’s a short but fascinating glimpse into how sales managers view sales enablement.
The report found that 91% of U.S. sales and marketing managers believe their sales enablement strategies are on the right track. That’s awesome!
Here’s the not-so-awesome part: less than 30% are actually implementing the sales enablement solutions they deem important.
A lot of companies genuinely believe they’re achieving sales enablement… until they realize just how complex and varied sales enablement can be. They’ll implement one sales tool and check off the “sales enablement” box while ignoring sales and marketing misalignment, sales visibility or other vital areas of sales.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. The good news is that there’s no deadline for sales enablement, and it’s actually pretty easy to find out whether or not your company is hitting best-in-class standards or falling behind the industry average.
The super easy way
Take the sales enablement assessment. It’s a five minute quiz covering the five main areas of sales enablement:
Sales Training and Coaching
Sales Execution
Sales Visibility
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sales Tools
The assessment tool will generate a sales performance report that compares your performance to the industry average, outlines the areas where you’re doing well with sales enablement and offers advice for improving the areas where you’re falling behind competitors.
While this report is obviously not as detailed as a one-on-one consultation, it’s an excellent way to identify the areas of sales enablement where your company is missing the mark. After all, knowing there’s a problem is the first step toward fixing it, right?
The in-depth, comprehensive way
Do a sales enablement audit. Bring in a sales enablement consultant to assess every aspect of your selling environment, from the sales methodology you’re using (or should be using) to the quality and completeness of CRM data to the amount of content created by marketing that’s currently being utilized by sales reps.
A personalized sales assessment by an expert in the sales enablement field is the most reliable way to ensure your company is doing everything possible to streamline sales.
Know where you stand
Don’t be one of those sales managers who thinks your company is golden when it comes to sales enablement yet has no sales enablement tools or strategy to back up that belief. Instead, approach sales enablement with a strong understanding of where your company excels and where you can strategically improve in 2016.