Sales Enablement Not Working?? "Say It Ain't So, Joe!"

Much focus has been given to the topic of sales enablement during the past couple of years by consultants, research firms, marketing and sales automation vendors, and marketing and sales operations teams. Not to mention the associated financial investment that accompanied these efforts. So with all of this attention to the discipline of sales enablement, how much of an impact has it had on sales' relationships with customers?

First of all, here's IDC's definition of sales enablement to ensure that we're all on the same page:

• "The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward"

As one of many indicators of sales enablement's progress, IDC tracks IT buyer experience with sales and marketing teams on an annual basis. In early 2009 IDC's Sales Advisory Service provided the following output from a survey of 200+ IT buyers: IT buyers indicated that over 50% of sales reps are unprepared for their initial customer meetings. (57% to be exact) The same buyers indicated that sales folks need to "put away the generic pitch" and engage in more of dialogue with customers. This is old data and not applicable any longer, right?

IDC recently completed an update of this study. IT buyers now indicate that ~54% of sales reps are unprepared for their initial customer meetings. A marginal improvement over 2009, if you could call it that. "Say It Ain't So, Joe!" Why hasn't all of our effort and investment in sales enablement paid off!

Well, bad economy aside, I do see some reasons why we aren't seeing greater levels of improvement in this study year over year. Here are just a few of those reasons:

1. This data is an average across all IT buyers surveyed, and includes IT buyers' views on many different vendors; many of which have yet to even begin a comprehensive sales enablement initiative. A question for you. . . Are you surveying your specific customers to gauge their level of satisfaction with your sales teams' knowledge?. . . . And gauging to what extent this impacts revenue, share of wallet, etc? How has this trended over time?
2. Sales enablement initiatives are only in the early stages of execution. Many companies are just starting to put the right resources in place to support this effort, from a people, process and technology perspective. (contact me for a copy of a recently published document regarding guidance for a sales enablement organizational framework)
3. Sales reps still need to be held accountable for leveraging all of the resources that a company provides to aid in their success. They say that "you can lead a horse to water, but can't make it drink." Well, the horse will eventually have to drink the water to survive.
4. Sales enablement is not the panacea for all of sales' productivity challenges. Other key elements for productivity improvements as detailed in IDC's Sales Productivity Framework include: customer intelligence, sales management, sales methodologies and talent management.
5. Let's refocus our analysis on the customer. Customers are becoming more sophisticated about technology solutions and vendors prior to sales even having that first meeting; and IDC customer experience data proves this statement. Thereby increasing the importance of "Customer Enablement" before, during and after real-time customer engagement. Yes, marketing (corporate, product and field marketing) do matter. . . and more than ever.

Let's be clear, sales enablement must remain a top priority for your organization in 2010, for sales and marketing. However, sales enablement should only be part of your overall strategy for sales productivity improvement; and development, execution and governance of these initiatives across large, complex organizations takes a lot more than one visionary and some great PowerPoint slides.

Please feel free to comment on this topic below as well as sharing what you're seeing "in the field".

Also, our Sales and CMO Advisory teams will be at the upcoming IDC Directions events in Boston, MA and Santa Clara, CA in the next couple of weeks, presenting more insight into how sales and marketing teams can improve their productivity and overall effectiveness. Go to the link above to find the agenda and more details!

Don't Let your Account Plan Sit on the Shelf This Year!

2009 is finally behind us.  We've shifted our sales resources to improve productivity, reorganized our sales teams and completed our account plans for 2010.  And initial sentiment on the street indicates that we're in for a better year.  But like many of our New Years resolutions, I'm wondering if all of our good intentions and plans to improve sales productivity that were put in place in 2009 will continue into the new year should business improve?  I recently completed a post on Maintaining the Momentum for Sales Productivity Improvements in 2010, so let me get a bit more specific here: account planning.

Account planning was identified as a top 5 priority in IDC's 2009 Sales Barometer study. (contact me to participate in our 2010 Barometer study which is currently in the field) For the purposes of this discussion, account planning is defined as:

• Developing a strategy to optimize the long-term relationship, revenue, and profitability with strategic and key accounts — for the vendor and the client. This strategy and plan is developed between the sales reps and their managers and, in some cases, in collaboration with the customer.

Key account planning challenges include: process development, process adoption (especially by first line sales managers), increased collaboration with customers, establishing a cadence across the organization for account planning and connecting account planning to other processes across the customer creation process.

I'm current interviewing sales teams regarding their best practices in this area so please do contact me if you'd like to participate.  Key success factors(KSFs) are certainly becoming evident in this research; however, one specific area comes to mind as we enter the new year.  After spending weeks if not months developing or updating the annual account plan, how are your sales teams intending to update this plan and actually use it as part of their quarterly, monthly and/or weekly activities?  Practices implemented by best practice leaders include:

• Leveraging the account plan throughout the year to solicit additional resources
• Incorporating the plans are part of account update calls/meetings
• Ensuring that the plans are action-oriented (i.e., maintaining their strategic elements while also including more tactical elements)
• Updating the plan throughout the year to ensure that it is truly a "living" document

More to come in this area since I'm only just starting to compile some of our key insights from best practice leaders.

Have you come across any KSFs within your organization for leveraging account plans throughout the year?  Please feel free to comment below, or participate in our account planning best practice research.

How Good is Your Customer Intelligence?

We've all heard the many stories about how bad a customer database can get, but my recent experience with this issue is just too good of a story to let pass by. My wife called me at work the other day to let me know about a nice gift that we received in the mail: an entire case of toothpaste from a consumer healthcare company. No hitch here, they just wanted to share some of their latest, greatest product with Dr. Gerard's dental patients as part of a free sample give-away. A few problems with this strategy though: 1) I'm not a dentist; 2) no one in my household is a dentist; and 3) my father, who had been a dentist for 40+ years, had retired over 25 years ago and unfortunately is also no longer alive. Maybe it was a special message from my father to get my kids to brush their teeth more. Regardless, another example of customer intelligence gone wrong.

This only happens in the BtoC space you say? From our research, I continue to observe that business IT buyers also perceive a lack of customer intelligence from their vendors. How does this perception take hold? A CIO panelist from a $10B+ company at one of our events indicated that he has to continuously teach vendor sales reps what he has purchased from them in the past. During the same meeting with a rep, the IT buyer notices that the rep is either unwilling or unable to let go of the generic PowerPoint deck and to engage in a deep and customer-specific conversation. Poor customer intelligence was a significant factor in each of these cases, leading to poor credibility on your front lines. (Sales enablement, talent management, sales methodology and sales management are other potential factors of concern in these examples.)

So what's happening across our marketing and sales organizations to result in this break-down of intelligence. There's plenty of blame to go around, from a people, process and technology perspective. But let's keep our efforts focused on fact-finding versus fault-finding. Here are a couple of places to start in improving these problems as well as some insight from our research of better performing sales organizations:

• Establish one team or organization to be accountable for ensuring that there's one source of truth for customer data – from a process and governance perspective, not necessarily controlling all input and editing of data. The following quote represents the position of many multi-billion dollar companies today: "Our company has many customer databases. Also anyone can create customer records and update data. The result is that it is very difficult to get to 'one source of truth' for customer data; and we also have severe data quality issues."
• Provide a process to update and edit your customer data, either centralized or decentralized. One example of this from a multi-billion dollar tech firm: "Our reps are responsible for creating and updating prospect and customer data. However, we also have a master data team to ensure high data quality.
• Leverage your customer data across the entire sales engagement process, from account planning up to and including the on-site customer/prospect visit. Another company example: "We have an up-sell wheel as a tool to help sales reps identify what existing customers own as well as what additional products and services from our portfolio may be appropriate for those customers."
• Embed customer data (internal and external) within your sales force automation platform to improve the ease of access and leverage of this data by your sales reps.

This is only the tip of the iceberg of course. Focus in on some key short-term wins as you improve the quality and leverage of customer intelligence, while in parallel maintaining your course along a longer term strategic path.

Please do reach out to me if you would like to participate in our ongoing research, including a best practices study in account planning for BtoB sales teams that is currently in progress.

The Importance of the Email Signature

In past blog entries I've discussed sales enablement, sales productivity, the need for sales reps to get closer to customers, etc.  Let me get a bit more tactical here . . . in fact, much more tactical.  The Email Signature.

I can't tell you how many emails that I've received that lack even the most basic information in the signature part of the email.  I recently had a need to contact a vendor to get a quote from them for a project I was working on.  The sales person at this vendor had recently reached out to me after I met her at an event.  As I opened up her email to phone her, I was dismayed to find that there was no phone # or other information in her email.  Yes, I did have her email address, however, in my rush to get a quote for this project, I wanted to simply pick up the phone and call her.  I suppose that I'm a bit old fashioned in that sense.  I did eventually email this vendor and get their full contact information, however the lack of an email signature did inhibit my ability to reach out to this salesperson. 

The point here is not that you'll lose every deal if you don't put your full contact information in the signature part of your emails.  However, in this digital age you want to make it as easy as possible for your partners, prospects and customers to connect with you; either by email, phone, Linked-In, your web site, your blog or other means.  That said, we also need to be careful about including too much information in our email signature, leaving your readers thinking "that's more than I wanted to know about you".  (here's a relevant blog with additional information: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/18/creating-an-effective-email-signature/)

Here is what I think are the bare essentials to include in your email signature:

Name, Title (helps your contacts understand your role in the organization as well as your business needs/interests)
Company
Phone #
Web site
Legally Required Information

And for you crackberry addicts out there, have you updated your email signatures on your mobile device recently?

Any good or bad examples to show?  Please share below.

Best Regards,
Michael

Michael Gerard
VP, IDC Sales Advisory Practice
Phone: 508-988-6758
Linked-In:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelgerard
Twitter:  http://twitter.com/michaelgerard
Important Email Information: The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended only for the recipient(s) listed above. If you are neither the intended recipient(s), nor a person involved in delivering this to the intended recipient(s), then you are prohibited from  disclosing, distributing, or copying the information in this transmittal. If you believe you received this in error, please notify me immediately and dispose of this email.

Salesforce.com's Chatter: The New Collaboration Cloud

We've seen many examples of the power of social media in the BtoB space, however, few companies have been able to truly leverage social media within their own organizations.  I've written about this quite frequently across our CMO and Sales Advisory Service blogs. (e.g., How Social Media Helps Enterprises,  Rise of the Social Media Function) This has also been a key growth area within one of IDC's five sales productivity levers: Sales Enablement.  That is, how can sales organizations best leverage new social media capabilities to improve their productivity.

Well, with much fanfare and pizzazz as part of its recent Dreamforce event in San Francisco's Moscone Center, Salesforce.com announced its newest offering to help companies leverage the power of social media: Salesforce Chatter.  Chatter, which will be officially launched in 2010, is both a collaboration application and a platform for building social cloud-computing applications. Please refer to Mike Fauscette's blog review of this new product/platform for a more comprehensive analysis of its capabilities.

This new SF.com platform will provide sales organizations with the capability to better leverage social media across their organization; not just pulling in market, customer and competitive data from publicly available social media sources, but also better connecting individuals within the organiztion. (e.g., sales reps, presales, sales ops, product management, marketing)  The potential value add here for sales organizations is improved productivity; for example, sales reps will be able to more efficienctly use their SF.com deployment (e.g., you can be notified regarding updates/changes in opportunities or other parts of SF.com); competitive information will be more easliy accessible (e.g., internal CI communities can be established within the SF.com application); communication amongst sales teams and managers will be enhanced (e.g., status updates will be available); and sales reps can be better connected with customer interactions (e.g., updates from other applications regarding product fulfillment). As with any new application, the true productivity enhancements will depend upon companies' abilities to quickly adapt to this new and evolving paradigm and leverage it's capability for their unique situations.

How much will this additional offering cost?  Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com.  A new Chatter Edition will be sold for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com.

Maintaining your Momentum for Sales Productivity Improvements in 2010

With the end of the year quickly approaching, many sales and sales operations executives are once again establishing their investment strategy for the coming new year. A significant part of many companies' strategies is their sales hiring process; or should I say, their "revolving door" process. Too many organizations have spent too few resources improving their overall productivity during the past several years, more satisfied with simply trying to hire an entire sales team filled with "A" players. Yes, that is a state that we all yearn for; and this may be possible for smaller organizations. However, if you're a large organization with 00s or even 000s of sales reps, you're better off playing the lottery than trying to achieve a sales force with all "A" players. Not only is there an insufficient supply of these unique individuals, but even if there were, do you really have enough confidence in your hiring process to identify who these players are?

This brings us to the dilemma of how do we, as sales and sales operations executives, elevate the skill-sets of our existing sales force while simultaneously matching the correct competencies with the current and future needs of the organization as part of our hiring process. This may lead many folks toward the path of "Talent Management"; however, this is only part of the sales productivity formula, as presented below in IDC's Sales Productivity Framework. Other areas requiring our attention include Sales Management, Sales Methodology, Customer Intelligence and Sales Enablement.

Acknowledging the need to focus on these key areas to optimize the potential of our sales force, still brings us to the challenge of how we more tactically execute this strategy across a $1B+, multi-national organization? No doubt that the downturn created a true sense of urgency across many companies to begin real investment in productivity improvement, but these initiatives will be in jeopardy at companies that fail to grasp the longer-term importance of improvement in their sales organization for survival in an increasingly competitive environment.

Here are just a few examples of what the better sales organizations are doing to maintain the momentum for productivity improvements:

• A sales operations team has been put in place to focus on the key levers of productivity, including taking a process and technology perspective of each of these levers.
• Key wins are achieved and highlighted in the short-term to demonstrate the real impact of productivity improvement initiatives and to demonstrate the potential future impact of related initiatives. (e.g., "We have launched a productivity newsletter to publicize our successes and impact across the organization and enable sales reps to gain a greater appreciation of the potential output of productivity-related initiatives." [$1B+ software company])
• Time-motion studies have been completed to identify and focus on areas of improvement to free up sales reps' valuable time; however, this is only the start. The next steps include helping sales reps to best use this "time saved" while in parallel articulating the value and impact of these changes to management. (e.g., "Impact of our productivity initiatives will be measured based upon: time (rep time savings in hours per week), cost avoidance and reduction, and customer satisfaction." [sales operations executive, $1B+ hardware company])
• Putting in place a Sales Performance Measurement strategy to better measure more traditional areas such as pipeline health, as well as beginning to better quantify the impact of productivity improvements. (e.g., through efficiency and effectiveness metrics)

Much of these efforts require a longer term approach than 1 month or 1 quarter; and the better sales teams will maintain their investment in productivity improvements, regardless of the fact that not all related strategic initiatives in this area will yield immediate results.

Other ideas? Please join the discussion below.

Also, please do reach out to us if you would like to participate in our ongoing research. (mgerard@idc.com)

Bringing the Right People to the Table

In my prior blog I spoke a lot about the need for sales to have deeper, two-way conversations with customers.  As I have these discussions with sales operations and sales executives, there's much discussion about sales enablement for "sales reps" and "sales teams"; however, the need for sales reps to better leverage their own immediate and extended team(i.e., sales, marketing and engineering) as part of the sales process receives little attention.

I included a chart in my last blog from some of our customer experience research indicating that one of the top messages buyers are telling us is that sales reps need to "bring the right people to the table". This may be intuitive and standard practice for the "A" reps, however, how are we ensuring that we're making this as easy as possible for the "A" reps and equipping our "B" reps with the knowledge and capabilities to accomplish this task? Are you expecting your front line sales individuals to know too much?  And to what extent are you providing these reps with the knowledge and capabilities to best leverage expertise within your organization to approach clients with the best "team"?

Questions to ask yourself about your current state in this area include:

1.  Are my sales reps sufficiently fluent in our customers' language (and needs) and our companies' products and solutions to have a deep conversation with customers?
2.  Do sales reps know when to bring in the right people for customer engagements? (e.g., presales engineers, industry specialists, subject matter experts(SMEs))
3.  How do sales reps access SMEs for questions? (e.g., SME access through your internal sales enablement application; leverage of internal social media capabilities to get questions answered)
4.  What process do you have in place to help reps justify the need for more resources for an account and/or opportunity? (e.g., through the account planning and opportunity management process)
5.  How do you ensure that sales reps always know where to go for information? (e.g., One sales exec. indicated at a recent Sales Leadership Board Meeting that "Our sales teams are not seeking information on a daily basis; therefore, they continuously forget it exists or where to get it.")

It's not always what you know, but who you know.  And leveraging expertise across the organization can, in may cases, be the difference between winning or losing a deal.

Survey Says: "Put Away the Generic Pitch!"

Do you still rely on the Generic Pitch with your Prospects? Don't!

As a young engineer in the 1980s, I called in a vendor to get some information on their products for an upcoming project of mine. George (let's assume this is his real name) was a very nice, older man who had a significant amount of experience with his firm. Upon meeting him, he carefully handed me a large, black leather book that contained all of his company's products. He cautioned me that these expensive books were very rare, and that I should cherish it since very few were distributed. I must admit that I was initially excited at the opportunity to display this valuable item on my bookshelf to impress my colleagues; but then my cynical side kicked in. Did I mistakenly call in an encyclopedia salesman?
 

At that point, George, as any well-prepared salesman back then did, pulled out his wheel of slides, slide projector and spare light bulb to review his company's standard corporate presentation. It was quite an impressive presentation; however, after 1 hour, I still didn't know if their company had products that would meet our company's needs. And more importantly, I wasn't sure that George even knew what my needs were or if he even understood our industry.

 

You're probably thinking at this point that we've come a long way since back then, having clearly shifted our selling strategies to focus more on the customers' needs. Have we? In a 2009 IDC customer experience study, IT customers were asked to identify the #1 thing that a sales rep. can do to improve the value of their relationship with the sales team and the vendor that they represent. Survey said?. . . "Put Aside the Generic Pitch". The reasons are widespread for reps relying on this crutch when interacting with customers; including reps being insufficiently prepared for their initial meetings with prospects due to a lack of knowledge, a lack of skill-sets and competencies to engage their prospects, etc.. Customers want to have deeper conversations with their vendors. They're looking for a trusted advisor and partner. What's the opportunity here?. . . Not just a product sale, but the opportunity to create a long-term customer as well as to establish a competitive differentiator.

 

 

How do we, as sales and sales operations professionals, better prepare our sales teams to capture such an opportunity? IDC's Sales Productivity Framework provides a good foundation for evaluating where you can have the greatest impact in your organization, assessing five key areas: Talent Management, Sales Management; Sales Methodology; Sales Enablement and Customer Intelligence. Let's focus on sales enablement for now:

"The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward"

Does your sales enablement effort provide your sales reps with the right language and fluency that's relevant to your customers? Are they confident enough in their ability to let go of the corporate PowerPoint deck and have that deep discussion that's desired by their customers? Here are just a few thoughts to help you along your sales enablement journey:

• Focus on understanding your customers' needs, including: their business and technology needs, what should drive their sense of urgency for addressing these needs, and their buying process.
• Stop the insanity of the one-way push of products to your sales teams (e.g., PowerPoint decks, marketing assets). Better understand your sales teams' explicit and latent needs, and what it will take to improve their ability to connect with customers.
• Assign accountability for your sales enablement initiatives. (e.g., establish a sales enablement lead who's responsible for creating, executing and governing the process)
• Integrate sales enablement with the other parts of the sales productivity framework.

Potential initiatives to focus on?

• Intelligence delivery: Do you know that over 40% of marketing assets aren't being used by sales; and the #1 reason for their lack of use is that sales cannot find these assets! There's too much material, the content is old and the delivery technology is outdated and/or lacks support. Establish one source for delivery of knowledge which has a customized front-end based upon sales teams' roles - including traditional assets, newer sources of information such as searchable video and social media, and the ability for reps to rapidly connect with subject matter experts and get their questions answered. 
• New rep on-boarding process - a great opportunity to establish new ways of thinking and new habits across your organization.
• Innovative sales plays (e.g., develop an electronic sales playbook; deploy a whiteboard strategy that eliminates reliance on the corporate pitch deck)
• Establish and govern an asset management lifecycle to ensure that the knowledge you're providing to sales reps remains up to date and relevant.

After all, isn't our overall objective customer enablement - providing our customers with the knowledge and assets to help them excel at their job?

Other ideas? Please comment below. Also, please reach out to me if you would like to participate in our ongoing research. (mgerard@idc.com)

The Five Levers of Sales Productivity - Which Ones to Push on Now?

We're nearing the end of June, the end of the second quarter, the end of the first half of the year. If your organization is like most sales organizations, your numbers are down. You haven't reached your first quarter goals. You don't expect to make your second quarter goals. The first half of your year is shot.

The second half of the year is now staring you in the face. What you accomplish in the next quarter...what you do in the next couple of months...will determine not only how your year will conclude, but it will also set the stage for 2010. End this year strong and next year will go well. End this year weak and you will have less budget, less pipeline, less momentum for success in 2010.

What's a savvy sales exec to do? (No, it's not play the game entitled "Prepare three envelopes.")

To help you avoid that "deer in the headlights" look, I'll provide some context and a framework that will help you to move forward strongly.

In working with clients over the past several years, we have identified five major levers of sales productivity and built the IDC Sales Productivity Framework. The five levers include the following:

• Talent Management
• Sales Management
• Sales Methodology
• Sales Enablement
• Customer Intelligence

Each of these five levers incorporates a number of elements. In the interest of time, we won't go into those today. Additionally, we're going to leave off the discussion of the heart of the framework itself -- the issue of sales productivity.

Sales productivity is a meaty issue. Most B2B organizations have some definition of sales productivity and in our experience most of those definitions lead to one rathole or another. (Hint -- it's not the number of calls a rep makes or the amount of revenue delivered in a given time period).

For an initial discussion of sales productivity measures, please see the IDC best practices report on sales metrics and KPIs. This report will help you to start thinking about how you can collect the sales metrics and KPIs that allow you to measure true sales productivity and leverage that knowledge into action that improves your productivity.

That's an important big picture discussion, but not one that will help you to improve your performance next month. You need to balance the important and urgent tasks. If you ignore the important tasks, they will eventually become urgent...and how most sales organizations manage sales productivity is becoming urgent.

Today, however, the urgent tasks are becoming even more urgent. The steps to ensure improved revenue performance over the next two quarters boil down to the following:

• Sales people must have the right conversations with the right prospects now!

It seems so simple. Yet most larger B2B sales organizations are still thrashing around trying to figure out who owns sales enablement (Hint -- it's not marketing or sales operations).

If you can get past that discussion, here are the steps to take. They map to the three levers listed above in italics:

#1. Target the Right Prospects and Customers (Customer Intelligence)

This is simple. You have the data in your customer and prospect databases. Ask a couple of your best and brightest business analysts to answer the questions:

• Which of our prospects said "no" to us six to nine months ago?
• Which of our prospects has contracts coming up for renewal in the next three months?
• Which of our competitors is having a tough time in the market?
• What is the buying profile of our customers? After they've bought something from us, what is the next most likely purchase, and when does that purchase typically happen?
• Which of our prospects is growing fastest?
• Which of our clients is growing fastest?

Once you've completed this analysis (and you should be conducting it at least quarterly), you'll have a series of lists of sales targets and a good set of "stories" as to why a particular target will buy. Work with field marketing to deliver targeted messages. Work with sales operations to parse out the targets on a controlled, measured basis. Monitor the results carefully -- some of these segments will respond better than others, and you will want to shift your marketing and sales resources to the most productive segments.

#2. Deliver the Right Conversations (Sales Enablement)

As part of this initiative, you will need to rearchitect the sales conversations. Why should a given prospect buy now? Why should a client upgrade now? (Hint, it's not because you need the revenue!). Deliver these new sales conversations as scripts for territory reps and channel partners. Deliver them as podcasts for enterprise reps and channel partners. Validate those conversations by asking for feedback. Congratulations, you've now just improved your sales enablement capabilities.

#3. Ensure the Right Behaviors (Sales Management)

You've got a secret weapon in your sales organization. This secret weapon can be used to significantly improve sales performance and results, yet in most organizations this resource is spending most of its time filling out reports to deliver to management. Oops.

This secret weapon is your first line sales manager. When the manager spends most of his or her time coaching reps, rep performance soars. In the short term, lighten up on the managers' reporting responsibilities. In the longer term, rearchitect this role so that it is a coaching role rather than a data management role. For a deep discussion of the first line sales manager role and related best practices, take a look at this new IDC report.

Good luck out there. And please, take these issues on with the sense of urgency that they require.

And let us know how we can help you to be successful in this process.

P.S. Please also visit my personal blog on fundraising for cancer research

Why Your Sales Enablement Isn't Working

Conversations today are not moving buyers to action. Sales cycles are longer by 30-50%. The number of leads required to close a deal have increased by 50-100%. More deals are ending in "no decision." And importantly, fully one of three deals is lost due to factors within the control of the sales person.

Executives tell us that they are counting on sales enablement to address this decline in sales productivity (2009 Tech Sales Barometer: Remaining Optimistic in a Down Economy). However, in working with many companies on their sales enablement initiatives, we have identified a common (and unsettling) theme.

For most companies, sales enablement is not about changing the conversation reps are having with prospects and customers. Instead, many, perhaps most sales enablement projects focus on streamlining sales communications or reducing duplication of efforts between sales and marketing, or better management of marketing resources.

For these companies, it's all about internal processes -- ensuring that your 12,000 marketing resources, so painstakingly developed, at great cost, currently unleveraged, are more readily available to the sales organization. It's all about marketing doing a better job supporting sales. It's all about sales operations building more streamlined processes.

Those are all important goals and initiatives, but in 2009, in this challenging economy, the primary need in the sales organization is to create a qualitatively better experience for the individual customer or prospect. It's not about efficiencies or cost reduction. Your sales enablement initiative must primarily focus on changing the conversation (outwardly focused) rather than on streamlining sales communications or implementing a MRM platform (inwardly focused).

The focus on the latter will not deliver the results you need. These other initiatives enable good sales enablement, but they do not create good sales enablement.

Speaking of results...the results of an effective sales enablement project must be measured by:

• Shorter close cycles
• Faster time to revenue for new reps
• Higher rep, customer and partner satisfaction
• Larger purchase values and deal contribution margin
• Higher service attach rates

To achieve these results, the singular primary goal of sales enablement must be to:

Ensure the delivery of the right information at the right time, in the right place, to the right person, to assist in moving a specific opportunity forward.

In other words, sales enablement must focus on changing and improving the conversation sales reps hold with customers and prospects.

A sales enablement initiative that does not incorporate this as the primary focus is accomplishing little more than organizing the deck chairs on the Titanic. The good news is that sales executives are targeting the right high level goals for sales enablement; the bad news is that we've found a disconnect between these stated goals and the focus of the sales enablement initiatives underway.

You must get this right, this time. If you do not deliver on the results listed above, your organization will not have the appetite to engage in another sales enablement initiative.

In January, in the throes of this new economic reality, corporate IT buyers told us that sales people are unprepared, that one of three deals are lost due to factors within the control of the rep. Buyers also tell us that their patience is running short. They do not have time to waste on sales people who are unprepared, who don't know the customer's business issues or their own products. This problem is large and getting worse.

Realities of the New Economy

Welcome to the realities of the new economy. As the economy slowly starts to recover, and we are indeed seeing signs that we may have reached a bottom, buyers will not magically go back to their old ways of engagement. They will continue to expect greater selling precision on the part of their technology vendors and partners.

The good news is that you can use the economy as an excuse to drive greater selling precision. Sales enablement, as one of the five primary components of the IDC Sales Productivity Framework, is critical to get right. And our sales enablement best practice research has identified processes that help to ensure success. By the way, other components of the Framework, including sales methodology and sales management, are just as critical, or you'll miss the opportunity for greater leverage.