Tag: Sales Enablement

What is Sales Mastery? Is it the same as Sales Enablement?

Sales Mastery vs Sales Enablement What is Sales Mastery? Sales Mastery is more often than not construed as ‘building a good relationship’. Period. Nothing can be further from the truth. A good sales job is not just about building a good relationship with the prospect or customer, but about sales mastery. Today, sales is more about value selling than anything else. If you are able to convince the prospect that you have value on offer, he is more likely to bite, read buy. Buying, after all, is all about selling value. Sales mastery is about 3 things: Being a domain expert Creating perceived and real value for customers Tapping technology to its fullest to build in efficiencies and effectiveness Being a domain expert All of this takes a lot of hard work and burning the midnight oil if you may. Being a domain expert means you are using most of your spare time and non-working hours in catching up on the domain/industry that you are selling to. This is digging into your own time for research and learning. Only if you know more about the domain of your customer, will you be able to speak, persuade, sell with conviction. Conviction and leadership come with knowledge Talk about how you can add value to his business Talk about numbers, because business, whether you like it or not, is about numbers. Tell your prospects what difference you can make to their business numbers, how it will benefit their business, in how much time and what cost. Talk about the risks and how they are managed, talk about case studies – your best case studies of the past and how they benefitted you. Talk technology Technology needs to be leveraged in order to maximize its potential. In the modern world, data is assuming not just importance but criticality. This data can be used fully to work for sales. The data that is collected can be analyzed to glean a huge amount of valuable information which can go a long way in winning not just sales, but also your customers. Moreover, the customer will know and perhaps appreciate that you have done your homework before you met him. Sales Mastery is about an individual, but sales enablement is about how the organization works to make the individual salesperson work on his sales pitch. It is about using the CRM to work with the marketing team in lead nurturing. It is about a lot of things that we will see below in short. What is Sales Enablement? Sales enablement is a set of tools, techniques, processes, and technology that ‘enable the salesperson’ and the organization’s sales force to make the most of their sales skill sets and move from being good to being great. It is the stepping in of the organization and the stepping up of the areas which will help take the salesperson on the growth path in the value chain and the buyer derive more value at every sales point. Sales enablement is a support system that stands rock solid behind the sales person to deliver efficiencies and effectiveness with the right framework. This framework is chiefly about the sales methodology, process, and technology. This framework is centered around how, by using these three, your sales team can thrive. More in detail, in our forthcoming blogs.

In Complex B2B Selling, Sales Enablement Makes A Huge Difference.

What are the critical elements of sales enablement? They are the sales procedure or methodology, sales process or execution, and technology deployed for reinforcing the process and methodology. Sales Procedure: This is the overall framework, the combination of the way ahead, a larger roadmap, how to do it and, the decisive actions that need to be taken to ensure we go with the big picture. It covers competition analysis and strategy, risk assessment, relationship mapping with key influencers highlighted, and how you leverage them and position how you will deliver value that is seen as ‘value’ by your buyer. There are various procedures and methodologies available, such as Miller Heiman and TAS, but it is more important how you use the one you select for training the team, than which one you select. Sales Process and Execution: In Sales Enablement, this part is the one that needs a lot of detail. It begins with creating the right sales funnel and ends at the execution of the sale. It is about qualifying leads based on deep discovery, working on the right proposals, demo selling, closing (this is critical and often neglected), getting into a contract, starting work, reviewing, and so on. The process needs the right account planning templates, which are tried and tested and proven, yet are flexible to changes – a tool for qualifying inquiries/leads, questionnaires for discovery, proposal templates, review forms, planning templates, call planning, and scheduling calendars and schedules and account plan templates. Technology: It is the technology platform to be used for automating your planning and delivery, and other parts of the process. It is a combination of the standard inquiry and delivery platform as well as the Key Salesforce Account Planning, which needs more than a CRM. What is of the essence here is a single window, a single platform that enables your sales force including your Key Account Managers to have a bird’s eye view as well as a hawk’s eye on the normal and critical movements in the accounts. A platform that is more than a CRM is essential, one which helps you map the relationships along with the pipeline and forecasting that a CRM affords. Sales transformation and Sales enablement are about having a tech platform that places the customer at the center of all your sales and account management efforts, procedures, practices, and delivery. To mastermind all of this, an organization cannot forget good sales management and sales leadership. Explore our blog on cross-selling and up-selling in which we’ve elaborated how it can be used to grow business in 2021.

A Look at Sales Enablement Trends of 2015

Organizations are rapidly becoming aware of the importance of adopting marketing and sales technologies in giving a fillip to their sales growth. Sales enablement is a function that companies are warming up to in order to aid sales teams in their jobs. Backing this is data from B2B research and advisory firm Sirius Decisions which signals a 63 percent jump in spending in sales enablement. So what are the trends governing this space? Social media to display content Social media has become an integral and indispensable channel of communication for businesses today. With buyers and prospects connected 24/7 to social media platforms through mobiles, tablets, and computers, the reach of social media is unimaginable. Whether it is research for a new purchase or reviews on their latest one, people take to social media channels. This avenue can be a powerful tool for sales reps and marketers too. According to Forbes, 78 percent of salespeople who made use of social media reportedly outsold their peers. Thus, marketing teams, when they develop content, should not just limit it to sharing via direct channels. They must utilize the plethora of tools available to make that content reach potential clients who are seeking information, finding answers to their problems, or looking for a switch from a product or service. Companies will thus gain visibility in the minds of audiences and sales reps will be viewed as authorities in the space. Strategically targeting data Only having data and not analyzing it is the waste of a valuable resource. Similarly, companies may have the best of content which can connect with the audience, but it needs to gain visibility to establish a connect with the audience. Content needs to be strategically targeted to the audience, so as to maintain credibility. This eases the transition of an individual from being only a prospect to being a buyer. Survey results of B2B buyers by Forrester showed that 70 percent of the content buyers indulged in prior to a decision was through self-discovery. Strategic targeting of suitable content by the sales teams is thus the need of the hour. Automation is key A 2014 study by CSO Insights on sales performance optimization highlighted that in a day in the life of a salesperson, only 37 percent of the time was spent on actually selling. The rest of the time went in administrative and account management duties. However, the increasing number of sales enablement tools available today can automate the sales process and free up sales for their core task of selling. These sales intelligence tools provide valuable and actionable insights and make the data they hold extremely accessible to sales reps. To get the most out of data, sales and marketing teams need to work in tandem. Companies need to make use of sales transformation and sales effectiveness metrics to understand which content is being consumed and shared or merely ignored. There can be knowledge sharing sessions held where sales teams identify and highlight loopholes in the content basket based on the feedback obtained from customers, and marketing teams can use the inputs to develop suitable content. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021