And they're right. But there's a second definition of sales enablement, one that is much more actionable. It's a bit narrower, and it focuses on preparing the sales person to have the "right" conversation with the prospect or customer.
Sales enablement is:
The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward
It's short and sweet, and for those who have not yet been intimately involved in a sales enablement initiative, it's still way too broad. This definition doesn't yet illuminate the activities that cause that delivery to happen.
We've outlined some of those activities in the presentation below -- the process issues, the governance requirements, and the attributes of high performance sales organizations that are getting it right.
Take a look and think about where your sales organization fits on the sales enablement maturity curve. Are you delivering the right customer-focused sales assets to your sales people? Do they need to search for presentations for each call (or have they given up and created their own?)
It's important to get this right now. Customers are getting restless...they have less patience than ever for unprepared sales people and report that one of three reps blow a deal by being unprepared.
The likelihood is that some, perhaps many of your reps are losing deals that you could win...that you should win. How would you know? Win/loss analysis? Reported by the reps? Um, nope.
If you do a good audit of your recent losses (conducted by someone other than the rep), you will start to build a picture of what actually happens in the selling conversation. In our experience, even for top tier vendors in F100 accounts, there is a wide range of performance.
In this market you cannot afford to lose those opportunities. A focus on sales enablement, and its partner, sales coaching (by the first line sales manager), will help you to win more of those opportunities, at negligible cost to your bottom line.
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Definition of Sales Enablement
This blog follows IDC’s Lee Levitt’s definition of Sales Enablement as posted on his blog The Science of Selling on January 27, 2009:
"The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward."
Definition of Conversation Enablement
Building on Lee Levitt’s definition of Sales Enablement, Conversation Enablement can be defined as:
The delivery of the right knowledge(=information provided in context)
and the right questions to ask (“Conversations are about discovery”) to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific conversation forward.
Lee, I would add the following to complete your definition of sales enablement:
"The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place "and format" necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward."
This may seem trivial at first glance but its an essential element of sales enablement. For example, I may need a single quote from a satisfied client taken from a case study and inserted at an appropriate place in a presentation to move the opportunity forward.
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