Why Sales Enablement is a Must-Have in Your Company
Sales has changed significantly in the past 20 years, and the material handling industry is not immune to these updates. Buyers seeking more information online before ever contacting a sales team has created the need for updates in the sales process. Rather than scrambling to make that happen, companies are beginning to find the function of sales enablement is a critical new component of their process.
Simply put, sales enablement does just that: it enhances the ability of a sales team by giving them more information, resources and tools that improve productivity. This can include everything from creating materials for them to providing sales training, making each employee more competent when it comes to the product.
Sales enablement solutions can be formalized or informal, but they all have these aspects in common:
They Focus on the Customer
What do your customers already know? What do they want to know? How do they want to find it? When your sales team knows this, they get to use that information to become more capable evangelists of the product. This is the kind of thought process that lean companies already use, and extending it into the sales process makes sense. When you are always thinking about the next stakeholder and the customer, your organization has already taken steps to become leaner.
It Enhances Collaboration
Because two minds are better than one, and 20 minds are better than two. Sales enablement connects the sales team to every function in your company, from IT to engineering to marketing. Creating more digital content, better sites, functioning applications and other materials that can help the sales team means collaboration across the board.
It Creates Continuous Improvement
Sales enablement isn’t a one and done process. It means continually reevaluating sales practices and finding new opportunities to reach out to prospects. This means more efficiency and more effectiveness. For instance, what materials and training create the best return on investment? Equally importantly, what materials, training or processes aren’t working? Sales enablement allows for insight into these materials, and when you stop using your resources to produce them, you get to utilize those resources elsewhere.
It Creates Visibility
How do you know what kinds of materials and training to produce? You track the data. Tracking key performance indicators to monitor the success of different strategies creates more visibility into the process itself. That means–you guessed it–more efficiency, effectiveness and a better return on investment.