Many companies are in the midst of their sales kickoffs right now. Everyone is excited about the New Year, and the new strategy. But what happens when you get back? How do you ensure that your sales strategy actually gets executed?
That’s where sales enablement comes in. SBI recently spoke with Bill Quinn, the chief operating officer of the global sales organization at Broadridge Financial Solutions. Bill discussed how to drive excellence through sales enablement.
What is sales enablement?
“We define sales enablement as everything that supports the sales organization and the front line sales teams,” says Bill. At Broadridge, they’ve built three centers of excellence with the sales strategy and operations group. They are made up of sales support enablement and effectiveness, sales reporting and analytics, and sales learning and development. Within sales enablement, Bill’s focus is how to streamline and support the sales activity. This includes a wide variety of things – content development and delivery, business case analysis, process improvement, and many more.
Bill went into further detail on how exactly his team does this, starting with content creation.
How do you develop sales enablement content?
Content creation is a must for sales enablement. There is a never ending desire for more and more content. Sometimes the resources needed sit in marketing. Bill has established a collaborative relationship with marketing in order to meet their content objectives.
Another important type of content needed to execute their strategy is sales playbooks. “We do believe in sales playbooks,” says Bill. “We create them around specific initiatives, offerings or solutions where we think we have something unique in the marketplace that’s differentiated.” They have created a sales playbook methodology which is essentially a roadmap for the sales person. It allows them to talk about the offering, and also to understand what the business driver is in the marketplace.
There is one other piece that cannot be overlooked. How do you make sure the reps know what tools are available to them?
Communication is Key
“It’s all about constant communication,” claims Bill. Both informal day-to-day communications, as well as formal communications. There should be weekly meetings, monthly meetings and quarterly business reviews with key leaders in the organization. He also recommends constantly gathering feedback. This will help you understand what’s working and what’s not.
It helps with adoption of sales enablement programs. He explains, “It really helps the adoption, if you’re communicating and you’re working together to figure those things out in the best way. That’s, to me, the best way to improve and optimize the adoption of anything you’re trying to do.”
We asked Bill to sum up 3 things you can do immediately to improve your sales enablement efforts.
First, he recommends really understanding who your customers are. Understand the sales organization, the products they’re selling, how they sell, and what their needs are.
Second, develop both short and long term objectives and deliverables. Identify and celebrate quick wins.
And finally, monitor progress along the way. Get feedback to ensure you’re on track.
At the end of the day, the goal of sales enablement programs is to increase the revenue per sales site. This can only be accomplished by developing and executing a sales enablement strategy. If you want to know what a good strategy looks like, register for our workshop here. We can help set you up for success in 2016.
