Salespeople directly feed your revenue performance, and sales enablement feeds your salespeople. But who in your company feeds sales enablement?
The answer is everyone.
Sales enablement is not:
- Sales training programs
- Marketing content
- Sales process
- Client insights
- Market pulse
Sales enablement is all of these components working together as a well-oiled machine.
It is each department of your business preparing your salespeople to meet the client face-to-face with relevant messaging, specific insights and sincere solutions. It is the salespeople preparing themselves with better skills, deeper knowledge and more. When your salespeople are enabled by the collective strength of the rest of your company, they are able to find the “moment of truth” conversations and excel in those dialogues with your buyers. These are the conversations that land deals and sustain your company’s revenue.
And sales enablement is just part of the whole equation.
To best serve your clients, you must leverage the interdependent operational disciplines of:
- Demand progression
- Solution marketing
- Solution management
- Sales operations
- Sales enablement
Sales enablement in practice.
Ariba, a $450 million software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, lacked the support required to develop and enable their salespeople and had no consistency in sales process, which limited its ability to scale globally. Mereo principals helped reposition the company by partnering the marketing and sales departments, as well as the product team. Together, the teams gained a deeper and shared understanding of the buyers and embraced a compelling value proposition for those buyers. In the end, the global sales team was equipped not only with a compelling message but also a full package of sales tools to help them reach a “moment of truth” in the buying cycle. The result was a big lift in sales from 3% year over year in 2009 to a CAGR of 11% in the following three years.