Sustainable sales enablement depends on accountability



Your sales team connects your company to its clients, your solution to their pain. The rest of your workforce helps sales find better-fitting clients, better-connect to those clients, and better-serve those clients with relevant messaging and products.

We discussed what sales enablement does and what it does not do earlier this month, but today I am going to answer how you — whether you are the CEO, CSO, CPO, CMO, CRO, etc. — can ensure sales enablement works toward your revenue performance (i.e. your bottom line) for the long haul.

Introspective Accountability

As a business leader, you help encourage that the cogs in the sales enablement team continue spinning. The tiniest shortcoming from yourself or an employee threatens to upset the whole sales enablement machine and to hurt your revenue performance.

Here are some strategies for holding yourself and your internal team accountable to sales enablement and revenue performance:

  • Keep dialogues with your team open about what is and what is not working in the buying journey.
  • Engage with your team and with other teams to discover insights and align messaging, efforts, etc.
  • Meet with clients to grow your first-hand knowledge about their current situation, desired outcomes, solution alternatives they are considering, how they are buying, etc.
  • Participate in sales trainings and reinforce the learnings with sales teams multiple times after those training sessions.
  • Talk to partner channels and listen to what clients are telling them about how your solution could help add additional value for the client.
  • Hold a quarterly sales council with your top sellers to discuss what they are hearing from buyers and what their sales team needs to succeed.

Extrospective Accountability

While the onus of your team’s accountability lies with you, there are a number of external factors you cannot very well control — but ones with which you must hold yourself and your team accountable to stay atop.

Here are some strategies for keeping ahead of external factors influencing your sales enablement efforts and sustainable revenue performance:

  • Talk to thought leaders, advisors, analysts, customers, client advisory boards and other outside influencers to get and keep a pulse of the market.
  • Ask tough questions, like “Are we meeting and exceeding client expectations?”
  • Look toward the future and honestly assess the pains your clients may experience, how your solutions may need to adjust to those changing demands and what other threats or opportunities may crop up.
  • Keep reviewing and adjusting your go-to-market strategy per the market and market forecasts.

It takes a leader who practices accountability for sales enablement to truly impact a company’s revenue performance. Be that leader. If you need assistance or a third party to hold you accountable, contact me.

 

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