On focus.com, LinkedIn.com and other places discussions about the definition of the term Sales Enablement keep on popping up. This question is from November 5, 2010:
“Sales Enablement – It’s not all the same. What does it mean to you?”
What do we mean by the term “sales enablement?” I was at an executive level meeting on Wednesday in the Silicon Valley area, where a comment was made by a senior VP of worldwide sales, that the term would need to be defined for the sales force, because it meant different things to different people. What does it mean to you?
Here is my answer:
Every analyst firm and every business has their own definition. On focus.com and LinkedIn.com you can find many of them. Some use a very broad and all encompassing definition, some a very narrow, and some do not use the term Sales Enablement at all. I like the saying “You are either in sales or you are in sales support!” Basically everyone in a business should make sure that those who directly touch accounts have more valuable conversations with them and have everything they need to close.
You can have philosophical discussions whether the “support”/”enablement” should be spearheaded by the sales leader or the marketing leader, you can talk about “sales and marketing alignment” or you can get to work and put people, content, processes and technology in place that make sure that everyone (no matter whether they report to global, a regional team, a product line or a business function) can contribute the following:
- Contact details of subject matter experts per specific intersection in the matrixed organization,
- Knowledge about up-selling&cross-selling opportunities,
- Knowledge about customer pain points in specific industry verticals,
- Tools (like ROI calculators),
- Insights from the field (like customized presentations that resonated well and why),
- Collateral / marketing assets (branding approved vs. generated in the trenches) in different languages
- Comments / blog posts / questions
- Leads
- Pricing information for specific scenarios
- News etc…
When everyone globally can access, contribute, rate, and comment in an “Enterprise 2.0″ fashion then all that searching and re-creating/re-formatting that costs your sales people so much time can be cut down and through the wisdom of the crowd they will be better prepared to face the buyer who thanks to “Web 2.0″ is also better informed than ever. Now that terms like “Buyer Enablement” start to emerge, the buyer who is in the driver’s seat will not put up with the generic pitch and only listen to sales people after a lot of research which means the questions asked will be so specific to the buyer’s pain point that only the sales person who can tap into the wisdom of his/her entire organization can answer them.
Important is that all this knowledge is not tagged/labeled/structured in random ways and not all thrown in the same pot. Only if you provide people a context and semantic structures to contribute into and search in, you will allow for the knowledge to be accessible and to become wisdom. Without a semantic (web 3.0) approach where the systems knows what kind of information it is storing you would not be able to do things like presenting a sales person with all collateral that make sense in the sales step he/she is currently in. If you left this up to free tagging/naming by the hundreds or thousands of people who contribute, you would never get consistency and always miss some collateral e.g. per sales step.
