Where Sales Enablement Matters Most

As marketers we hear so many buzzwords, so much jargon, that the words often just fly by us without much notice. For some, that’s the case with Sales and Marketing Alignment and Sales Enablement. They’re not sure what all the “excitement” is about. 

Truth be told there validity to the skepticism. Tension has always existed between marketing and sales. I’ve seen it in big corporations and in tech startups. I’ve seen the power of sales and marketing working together. Felt the pain when they are at war. In both cases, the real impact is not on the organization, it is on the customer.

In reality, Sales Enablement is not about sales or marketing it is about the customer. It is Customer Enablement. We need to enable our customers or they will enable themselves.

Customer Enablement through Sales Enablement requires leadership vision, cultural change, enabling technologies, knowledge, skills, training and tools.

That’s what we have in store for you next week at Demand Metric’s first Virtual Summit on Sales Enablement. We’ll look at Sales Enablement from all angles. We’ve got industry leaders to share their visions, customers sharing success stories, and more than 80 practical resources for implementation.

On the technology side, we are planning a deep dive into six foundational solutions for Sales Enablement:  CRM, Marketing Automation, Enablement Knowledge Management, CPQ, Sales Communication Tools and Sales Intelligence. 

We’ve done some ground-breaking research in each of these areas to provide you with practical knowledge and advice that will help you develop a Sales Enablement leadership vision and strategy that will get marketing and sales working seamlessly together for Customer Enablement.

Here are a few highlights: 

·         Our Demand Metric Sales Enablement Framework shows the impact of Sales Enablement on six key areas of the organization: roles; responsibilities; processes; technology; content, and metrics.

·         Our Solutions Studies cover Sales Enablement systems and applications from six solution categories to help your team choose the right vendors and applications for your needs:

o   Enablement KM, creates and distributes the knowledgebase sales needs to confidently present company products and services.

o   Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solutions enable sales to custom configure product solutions from large inventories, price for profit and streamline the proposal process.

o   Sales Intelligence solutions enable marketing and sales to monitor, measure and predict customer engagement and sales performance.

o   Communications Solutions have evolved from audio conferencing tools into solutions that offer comprehensive audio, web and Webinar platforms to support activities from sales meetings to full scale 3D virtual tradeshows.

o   CRM Solutions that provide the foundation for sales performance have expanded through vendor acquisition and feature enhancements to integrate much of the core functionality for full-scale Sales Enablement for sales operations.

o   Marketing Automation Solutions that provide the foundation for marketing performance also have expanded through acquisition and feature enhancements to include much of the core functionality for full-scale Sales Enablement for marketing operations.

I’ll be blogging more about each of these as we lead up to next Thursday’s Virtual Summit.

Our research shows that Sales Enablement can make a significant and positive impact on the organizations that are employing it when they do so by following best practices and processes.

What’s been your experience with Sales Enablement? Please comment and let us know.