Lack of Sales Enablement.

 

What is sales enablement? Getting the sales force ready to deliver the new product revenue quota.

 

Sales Enablement has 3 objectives:

 

  • Deliver the new product revenue quota
  • Hit short-term revenue goal while moving to new product.
  • Get to reference-ability quickly. (land a couple big accounts to act as references)

 

There is a growing body of work on sales enablement. The first is the Sales Rep Playbook. One of the key outputs of the Sales Rep Playbook is a Buying Process Map. To build a buying process map, you must start with buyer persona research. The key with buyer persona research is doing it across each individual buyer that touches your product. Buyer personas are fictional representation of your ideal customer profile down to the individual level.

 

4 key objectives when you build buyer personas:

 

  1. Conduct Buyer Interviews—go to the buyers and understand what market problem your product solves. What is important to each individual buyer and what is standing in their way that your product helps remove?
  2. Gather and Analyze Insights—what trends did we notice between the users and buyers?
  3. Build Buyer Personas and Scenarios—build fictional representations of each buyer that the sales team can use, real time, while in a sales campaign. Getting inside the head of the various buyers is something your reps have been trying to do forever.
  4. Map to Buyer Goals and Buying Process– How can marketing create relevant content that speaks to what the customer is thinking at key points in the buyers journey. You have to be able to market to the buyers when a sales person is not present.

 

What is the Impact on the VP of Sales? You lose your job because if you can’t help monetize this size of investment, what good are you?

 

Check out these stats:

 

  • On average, these companies have spent between 11-29% of revenue on R&D
  • 18-24 months in getting the new product “ready”
  • Hours of grueling questions at the board meeting about why the overinvestment in this product is necessary
  • 600-700 hours in “all hands” meetings speeding up the timeline for launch
  • 12-14 people in  focus groups, task forces and panels during alpha and beta
  • Millions of dollars by marketing building use cases and ROI

 

sales enablement new product launch

 

If you are looking for a quick way to build a buying process map download this buying process tool.

 

Sales Enablement is a trend that is not going away; it is one of the fastest growing trends inside sales organizations. 

 

Follow @MattSharrers

Follow @MakingTheNumber

Matt Sharrers on Google+

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matt Sharrers

Leads the firm's focus on the CEO’s role in accelerating revenue growth by embracing emerging best practices to grow revenue faster than the industry and competitors. 
BIO
ALL PEOPLE

Matt Sharrers is the CEO of SBI, a management consulting firm specialized in sales and marketing that is dedicated to helping you Make Your Number. Forbes recognizes SBI as one of The Best Management Consulting Firms in 2017.

 

Over the course of nearly a decade at SBI, Matt Sharrers was an instrumental early partner guiding SBI as the Senior Partner. Matt’s functional responsibilities included acting as the head of sales where he led SBI’s double-digit revenue growth, and was responsible for the hiring function to build SBI’s team of revenue generation experts.

 

Prior joining SBI in 2009, Matt spent eleven years leading sales and marketing team teams as a Vice President of Sales. Matt has “lived in the field.” As a result, he is the foremost expert in the art of separating fact from fiction as it relates to revenue growth best practices. CEOs and Private equity investors turn to Matt’s team at SBI when they need to unlock trapped growth inside of their companies.

 

 

Read full bio >