What Is The Role Of Sales Enablement?
The capacity to standardize practice, boost the value of sales enablement professionals and the role delivered inside the sales function, and promote learning among sales enablement professionals are all made possible by initiatives like those of the Sales Enablement Society.
Some of the things I read and hear about sales enablement worry me more and more. Maybe it’s not the debates per se, but what’s missing from the discussions
Yes, sales enablement has a role in assisting salespeople in making more money per rep.
Yes, sales enablement must offer the reps support at every stage of their development through training, tools, platforms, programs, content, and onboarding.
The fact that sales enablement is not acting alone in this endeavor is what’s lacking in the dialogue. The goal of every department in the sales organization is to maximize each salesperson’s revenue by assisting the front-line selling in improving their performance and ability to sell.
- The goal of every member of the sales team who is not a front-line seller is to assist them in becoming better and increasing their sales.
- Optimizing each team member’s performance is the primary duty of front-line management.
- Senior sales management must maximize overall sales organizational performance when carrying out business strategies.
- Roadblocks to effective sales must be found and removed, according to sales operations.
- It is the role of HR to assist in ensuring that the appropriate talent is hired and that managers and other employees are making every effort to retain and develop that talent so they can realize their full potential inside the organization, both in the short and long term.
It goes beyond the sales department.
Salespeople can benefit from assistance from marketing, product management, customer support, finance, production, and even development. However, some of this is indirect.
In fact, the impact and efficiency of sales enablement are actually diminished by the absence of this acknowledgment in many of the debates surrounding it.
For instance, I just finished reading an excellent and passionate post about the function of sales enablement. Nothing about the organization’s other divisions was mentioned. Alarmingly, the Front Line Sales Manager was not mentioned. Unintentionally, perhaps, it gave the appearance that sales enablement was the only factor in determining how well salespeople performed.
Coaching shouldn’t be done via sales enablement.
A new tendency for sales enablement companies to take over sales coaching is even more concerning. The motivation is good; it’s a direct response to sales managers who either don’t teach or do so ineffectively. But instead of taking this responsibility away from sales management, the answer is to give them the tools, training, and training they need to execute their jobs.
A village is necessary.
It takes a village, to borrow a metaphor from another author, to generate sales performance. Sales performance won’t be driven by sales enablement alone. Sales performance will be fueled by the concentrated, coordinated efforts of everyone sitting behind the front-line sellers.
Maybe I’m being a bit picky here. However, the sales enablement role is too crucial to the organization and to front-line sellers to operate independently of the rest of the team. Sales enablement experts should be vying for a seat at the sales executive’s table in many instances.
We achieve this by being more inclusive in how we present ourselves and how our plans and initiatives are really implemented (and by including myself as a sales enablement practitioner, if not a professional). should understand that sales enablement alone will not be sufficient to do this. Perhaps even take the lead in inspiring others to participate in the creation and implementation of their plans or programs (for instance, front-line sales management.
Thankfully, I’ve had the chance to collaborate with some excellent sales enablement businesses and leaders. Instead of seeing it as a role limited to sales enablement, they realized their true
objective is to catalyze the entire organization around driving sales performance. For everyone else, they serve as the gold standard for sales enablement performance excellence.
Although I am aware that outstanding sales enablement experts have that as their goal, the conversations we have when it is not brought up do not serve us, our goals, or our “customers,” who are the front-line sellers and the rest of the business.
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