“Whether you’re an organization looking to start a sales enablement program or an organization who’s looking to revamp your processes and take enablement to the next level, these five best practices can help you achieve your goals.” – Rekha Thomas in today’s Tip 897
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Seismic
2021 Global Benchmark Report
Rekha Thomas on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Rekha Thomas. Rekha leads Web & Content at Seismic. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and has held marketing leadership roles at DocuSign, Adobe, and Hewlett-Packard. She’s passionate about helping brands deliver exceptional digital experiences for their customers. Here she is:
Rekha Thomas: If you’re in the B2B world, you know that buyer preferences have changed dramatically. B2B buyers increasingly demand the engaging, personalized, and timely experiences of their B2C counterparts. Many organizations who want to deliver these engaging experiences to their B2B buyers are turning to sales enablement to empower their go-to-market teams to deliver buyer experiences that not only delight their customers but ultimately drive revenue. But not all businesses are the same stage of sales enablement maturity. Some are just getting started, while others are already scaling best practices across their entire go-to-market teams.
Recently, Seismic published their annual sales enablement benchmark report that examined the organizational environments and sales enablement practices and technologies that are most correlated to successful business outcomes. The top tier of organizations or visionaries, as they were labeled, exhibited five distinct dimensions that set them apart from the rest of the pack. Decoding the practices of visionaries in these five areas gives organizations that are in early or mid-stages of enablement maturity, the clues they need to ascend on the maturity curve and elevate their sales enablement efforts.
Let’s take a look at these 5 dimensions.
1. Position sales enablement as a strategic priority. Getting buy-in from senior leadership may be the most important aspect to building an effective sales enablement program. 90% of sales enablement visionaries said that their sales enablement program is championed by the most senior leadership in their company, compared to only 62% of laggards. Having a champion in the C Suite makes it easier to establish the organizational environment that can reinforce effective sales enablement practices. And it can help secure the budget necessary for sales enablement teams to succeed.
2. Drive go-to-market alignment by applying sales enablement across the entire customer lifecycle. Although we found that most companies use enablement during the sales stage, we found that visionaries begin their sales enablement efforts early and then continue those efforts throughout the entire customer lifecycle. In fact, 97% of visionaries use sales enablement in the presale stage, compared to only 41% of laggards. Starting off the customer journey with sales enablement might just be the secret to close more deals and continuing enablement efforts. Persil may be the key to customer retention.
3. Avoid tech silos by leveraging well-integrated GTM tech stocks. If your organization is struggling with tech silos, you may not be getting the most out of your sales enablement capabilities. When sales, enablement, and content solutions are well integrated with CRM and other sales intelligence data go to market teams are better aligned and can improve overall productivity. For example, 70% of visionaries we surveyed reported that their organization had a well-integrated tech stack. Only % of laggards could say the same thing.
4. Encourage the adoption of sales enablement platform capabilities. This one might seem obvious. Ultimately, technology is only as effective as its usage. We were surprised to find that only 52% of all the organizations we surveyed said that their sales teams have fully adopted the sales enablement tools in their tech stack. Visionaries set themselves apart because they actively encourage the adoption of sales enablement technologies, but they do much more than that. They also track activity and engagement metrics to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of their efforts.
5. Use insights to scale best practices across the organization. Visionaries know that there’s always room for improving sales enablement efforts, and they use data to actively pursue improvement. 71% of respondents said that they had organized ongoing processes to analyze learnings from their top sellers and incorporate them into regular ongoing enablement efforts. The difference in the use of data by visionaries and laggards is stark. 84% of visionaries rely on data to optimize their sales processes, compared to only 19% of laggards.
Whether you’re an organization looking to start a sales enablement program or an organization who’s looking to revamp your processes and take enablement to the next level, these five best practices can help you achieve your goals.
Scott Ingram: For the full benchmark report you can click over to DailySales.Tips/897 and we’ll have a link for you there.
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!