Delivering on Customer Experience—Your Technology Is Only as Good as the Strategy It’s Supporting

For some time now here at SBI, we’ve been describing the measurable benefits of taking a more holistic approach to customer experience. Taking a broader view of your customer’s experience usually requires an expanded line of sight for marketing – seeing beyond the funnel metrics and being able to work cross-functionally with sales in a more strategic manner.  At SBI, we have seen how the concept of Revenue Enablement can extend the principals of Sales Enablement to every facet of the organization. This approach provides the means for revenue leading companies to enhance customer hand-offs and elevate the customer experience.

Building a world-class Revenue Enablement organization to create and enhance your customer experience approach is critical to making your number today. Our Revenue Enablement Tool can help you get started by turning your organization to an outward-in thinking organization.

High-touch sales processes include some combination of digital and personnel-heavy touchpoints. From lead generation at the start of the buyer journey, through the early stages of discovery, the process requires ongoing effort to answer questions, overcome objections, and close the sale. Even with sales automation tools, these touchpoints are critical to delivering the message of your products or services in a clear, compelling, and consistent manner.

Because these complex sales processes require pre and post-sales engineering, sales executives, account managers, and others, Revenue Enablement should be a part of your organization. Among other important functions, equipping sales teams with highly relevant and up-to-date content (battle cards, personas, playbooks) ensures a consistent message across every customer encounter and helps the sales team succeed. Complex sales also typically involve engagement with multiple customer personas to be successful. With the proper content, training, and coaching, sales teams can communicate clearly and consistently across all phases of the sales process.

Content: Your teams rely on having relevant and engaging material to capture their customer’s interests and help communicate the brand promise.

 

Revenue Enablement content includes everything from the CX strategy and vision that everyone can rally around, to customer personas, sales playbooks, and everything that the sales and marketing teams need to align their communications across the entire organization. A robust charter document, for example, provides a foundation from which all other revenue enablement activities and processes can build upon. Creating compelling content for sales and marketing requires considerable effort, especially when it comes to the ongoing upkeep and refresh task. By developing and maintaining relevant and updated content, the front-line sellers can consistently deliver the value proposition to their prospects and customers at every step in the buyer journey.

Training: From Onboarding to certification, a robust training program is vitally important to ensuring your team is well-versed in the brand promise and can represent it in their customer encounters.

 

Similar to the development and maintenance of content, training your sales and marketing teams on the company’s methodology, as well as on the company’s products and services, is critical to give the sales teams a foundational basis for their success. From the moment a sales executive is hired, the investment a company makes in these resources is a critical factor in whether they will be ready to answer questions they face in the sales process. This will also determine how quickly they can become a productive part of the revenue engine at your company. Ongoing investment in the form of refresher training, certification courses, and product launch training is crucial to continued success and achieving company revenue goals.

Coaching: Developing a coaching culture will help reinforce the importance of delivering on the brand promise.

 

Lastly, a high-performing organization also must deploy a coaching methodology to help front-line managers reinforce the strategy and tactics that are detailed in the content and training. Frequently, this element goes overlooked and can be an essential factor in whether sales meets or misses its goals. Revenue Enablement can close this gap by developing and delivering leadership and coaching training to its managers – empowering them with skills that will also serve to motivate and energize the sales teams on their mission to make their number.

Remember that developing your content, training, and coaching plans can only be effective after you’ve developed your Revenue Enablement strategy. Without it, you run the risk of developing these activities in uncoordinated silos. Once the strategy and overall direction are known, these critical areas can be developed and implemented.

For more assistance with Revenue Enablement planning, leverage our Revenue Enablement Tool to ensure you get the right content, in the hands of the right sellers, at the right time, to move an opportunity forward

Or schedule a visit with my colleagues and me at SBI’s Executive Briefing Center, The Studio, to accelerate your Revenue Enablement planning.