By Laura Valerio, Principal Consultant EMEA at Highspot
It’s not uncommon for people to assume that sales enablement is only for salespeople. You can’t blame them – it has the word sales in the name after all! However, that’s not the case. Sales enablement benefits the whole business and is an essential function in times of growth, as well as in times of survival.
With the term ‘sales enablement’ being relatively new in the UK, it’s important we debunk the myths that act as barriers to implementation.
Enablement is for everyone
A common misconception about sales enablement is that it’s only there to benefit and support the sales function of the business.
If that was true in the early stages of the function, its scope has now expanded. To reflect the change, its name is evolving from ‘Sales Enablement’ to ‘Revenue Enablement’.
A modern Enablement function is in fact a centralised intelligent orchestration of all initiatives, processes and tools that empower customer-facing people to be consistently successful and win the market.
Business functions tend to work separately, and each has its own language. Despite their good intentions, this doesn’t always translate perfectly across teams and leads to misinformed, overwhelmed, frustrated customer-facing colleagues.
It’s the sales enablement role that curates and translates this department-specific vocabulary and makes it easy to digest for the customer-facing teams, resulting in consistent well-informed messaging and ultimately happier prospects.
In times of economic uncertainty and geo-political unrest, businesses and especially go-to-market teams need to quickly find new ways to manage, adapt and embrace change, be ahead of the curve, anticipating new customers’ needs and behaviours. By bridging teams and streamlining processes, Enablement also impacts how quickly key business milestones are met.
It doesn’t just organise your content, it provides contextual guidance to accelerate scalable sales engines
In uncertain times, it comes down to thinking about how businesses can do more with less, for leaders, this is measured in profitable growth and scalability.
Having one strategic function, such as sales enablement, that streamlines multiple functions to work more efficiently is critical. Business leaders can boost productivity, by developing highly cross-collaborative teams resulting in effectively achieving shared company goals.
Enablement doesn’t just impact the way salespeople work, but when you have good alignment between sales, marketing and operations you can obtain the data to really understand what is working well in your business, and on the flip side, what isn’t working well. This added value allows you to quickly replicate the successes of your teams, whilst highlighting areas for improvement.
Insights lead to meaningful action, and added value isn’t something businesses can afford to ignore.
- It’s more than efficiency
The added value of implementing a sales enablement technology accelerates productivity and efficiency across the workforce. Having sales enablement as a core function will help businesses not just survive the current economic headwinds but thrive.
With 67% of UK sales and marketing professionals identifying the cost of living crisis as one of the issues likely to have the greatest impact on their KPIs over the next year. Businesses should be looking to do whatever they can to support both of these key business functions.
This can be done by making each sales rep more efficient by giving them time back via content management and simplified curated comms from the rest of the business. Consequently, this allows them to spend more time talking to potential prospects, upskill themselves and ultimately achieving targets quicker.
Enablement technology helps you operationalise your strategy, make decisions faster and quickly understand through real-time data and insights what you need to do next in order to improve velocity in execution. Sales enablement professionals work with other functions across the business to assist go-to-market teams on how they can get from point A to point B, using the insights the technology provides.
The secret to productivity is enablement. It helps improve efficiencies across the organisation, helping the business to make decisions faster and leaders to forecast better.
So, what are you waiting for?
72% of sales and marketers equally agree that implementing sales enablement to support sales and marketing is something they believe their company should consider in the near future. However, there’s a lot of education needed on how sales enablement can help business leaders and their companies, but we as enablement enthusiasts need to be showing the value sales enablement brings with hard numbers.
We’ve seen businesses that invest in an enablement function thrive in trying times and recover quicker from economic downturns. Sales enablement isn’t just for growth, it’s for stability, and it’s a long-term commitment to your teams and business.
Uma Rajagopal has been managing the posting of content for multiple platforms since 2021, including Global Banking & Finance Review, Asset Digest, Biz Dispatch, Blockchain Tribune, Business Express, Brands Journal, Companies Digest, Economy Standard, Entrepreneur Tribune, Finance Digest, Fintech Herald, Global Islamic Finance Magazine, International Releases, Online World News, Luxury Adviser, Palmbay Herald, Startup Observer, Technology Dispatch, Trading Herald, and Wealth Tribune. Her role ensures that content is published accurately and efficiently across these diverse publications.