How to Optimize Performance with Sales Enablement

Last week, we talked about the seven elements of sales enablement and their interdependence for creating a far more effective strategy than sales training alone.

This week, we will explore – how you can optimize your organization’s performance with Sales Enablement. To do so, we must establish that Sales Enablement is more than a strategy, it’s an ecosystem.

High-performing organizations view Sales Enablement as the maestro of organizational performance. Sales Enablement practitioners are highly skilled at creating harmonious relationships between five essential functions:

• Human Resources
• Sales
• Marketing
• Operations
• Finance

Let’s take a deeper dive into how Sales Enablement can influence each of the five functions.

HR

Establishing a good company culture is paramount to high-performance. Unfortunately, some companies confuse socialization with organizational culture. Organizational culture is not about ping-pong tables and beer kegs. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Organizational culture is the way you enable your employees to represent your brand. That’s not something any inanimate object will create.

Creating a high-performance culture requires a balance of talent and diversity. Hiring managers often hire the same types of profiles or someone they see as the “younger versions of themselves”, this is problematic. Not only is ethnic diversity essential, but diversity in thought, background, and experiences.

As HR’s business partner, Sales Enablement focuses on supplementing the existing organizational skillsets to create a well-rounded, diverse talent pool.

Which brings us to the next function of sales enablement.

Sales

Clearly, Sales Enablement has a responsibility for the sales organization. The mission is simple – to optimize the sales organization’s ability to engage with the customer.

This extends beyond traditional training and encompasses reinforcement, coaching, and measurement. This ongoing process ensures employees are developed, challenged, and recognized for their performance. It is not about the status quo practices; it is about fostering diversity. High-performing organizations inspire their employees to utilize their unique backgrounds and experiences to optimize business results.

Marketing

Marketing and sales are supposed to be a dream combo that brings in leads and turns them into revenue. Many times, though, they appear to be an old disgruntled couple who can’t stop bickering about who made a mistake or who is falling short.

If your organization is going to optimize its performance, it’s time for marketing and sales teams to get over their grievances. They must be both intentional and committed to serving the customer. This is an opportunity for sales enablement to facilitate bilateral support and establish a mutual understanding among the two teams.

Operations

Some of you may be looking at your screen sideways right now, but stay with us on this one. Operations have a direct role in the organization’s ability to meet a client’s needs; therefore, it’s a part of sales enablement.

If the organization produces an inferior product, it places undue strain on the sales team. Sales Enablement can serve as a resource for the development, implementation, and training of new products. They can also leverage their expertise in sales and leadership to analyze sales velocity and demand.

Finance

Although not commonly thought of as a part of Sales Enablement; finance plays a critical role by contributing to the budget planning phase. Finance can help secure resources to accelerate product development and sales strategies.

There you have it: the five functions of the sales enablement ecosystem that can optimize your organization’s performance.

We would be remiss to neglect the importance of leadership’s role in the sales enablement ecosystem.

Leadership must embrace, drive, and implement the strategies that optimize the ecosystem. Change can only last when inspired by passionate and diligent leaders.

Sales Enablement can help organizations establish a tempo and tune to deliver its best performance. When done right, sales enablement gets your entire business playing harmoniously, so your colleagues call for an encore!

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