The Future of Sales Enablement

January 28, 2021 Stan

Sales Enablement is the process used to help sales improve the lead management process and, ultimately, assist in the achievement of revenue goals. In today’s environment it can be difficult to navigate effective processes while reducing cost and providing value. Things are changing rapidly with recent world events, and the way we sell is quickly evolving.

Smaller, more focused sales teams are becoming the norm. One hot trend is quality over quantity, biggest is not always better, and we are seeing many customers streamline their sales teams. Remote selling is replacing on site face to face meetings. Sales is focusing on the ‘human’ side of the job where one on one conversations are closing deals and they are leaving the technical work to the tools.

Account based selling is huge. Oracle now has an account-based version of Profiler on the horizon. Sales are using tools that help gather info on voids they can fill for their customer accounts (upsell/retarget). More than ever, business is competitive, and we need to understand that gathering the correct data prior to engaging in active selling is important.

Many of our customers are using this extra work from home time to engage in Sales Training. Statistics show sales loses 80% of what they were trained on after one month of non-use and/or no re-training. The time when sales reps were resistant to change or not following the best practice process is over! Ensure you have a documented lead management process that sales understands how to use. Additionally, using call scripts and providing background info on campaigns launching helps to ready the sales staff. New challenges arise quickly so you must ensure your training is dynamic enough to identify needs, and you must roll out solutions in weeks not months.

We see an uptick in using Artificial Intelligence to predict your customers next move and assist in the pre-sales process. Think of AI as a helpful companion. AI can help you seek out and pre-qualify new customers. Since it costs more money to acquire new customers than it does to keep old ones, this is a good place to invest your money. For example, can you go to any website nowadays and not see a virtual chat bot? Aside from online chat, AI can include things like reading buying signals, communications, and personal data. We have the best CRM tools at our fingertips, and many jobs that used to require sales personnel can now be machine automated.

Taking sales activity data and migrating it to an IT managed platform such as AWS or Azure where it can be unified and used to analyze buying behaviors and ROI is another big trend for 2020. Understanding how all the data from a customer fits together (marketing, sales, customer service, etc.) helps teams to mobilize an effective sales & marketing strategy. Over 50% of deals dry up in the pipeline because the buyer journey gets no value add, and sales processes are not well managed. And side note, if you don’t already own a CRM, you are at a disadvantage so start there!

Many Sales Operations departments are now seeing the true value of Sales Enablement and agree it’s a must have function in operations. Successful businesses are already dedicating tools and people to the enablement process. These protocols and tools are proving their money’s worth and becoming extremely effective ways for sales to gain insight and experience dealing with their target accounts and prospects.

Collaborating with sales to achieve goals should be top of mind now more than ever. Relationship One is well versed on the sales enablement process so please reach out to us for more information or if we can assist with any Sales Enablement projects you are queuing up in 2020.

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