Anybody who has ever been involved in helping sales teams to be more successful knows how complex the process to improve their performance can be. Getting sales teams to sell more requires both consistent coaching, training, prodding and yes, some pushing. The challenge is often the human cost of all this work can be more than the business can support. Plus sales-as-a-science hasn't really worked yet for many. Sales is still an art form that organizations have had trouble codifying and optimizing.
So, what if there was a way that companies could start to move the sales process pendulum more towards the sales-as-a-science approach but without the associated links?
Today’s sales enablement tools have been designed to do exactly that – to help sales teams get access to the right materials and help the individual sales person improve win rates and customer service. However, turning that into real business improvements tends to be more difficult than the marketing brochures for these systems tell us.
If improving sales team performance is about implementing sales enablement tools that actually work, what do sales management professionals need to do to get the success they require in this fast-moving and competitive economy?
At Bigtincan, we believe that it's all about how the sales enablement tools are implemented that makes the difference. Key to that is creating a sales enablement system that can adapt to fit your organization’s specific sales structure and process. It's no good using an off-the-shelf system that is designed to provide 60 or 70 percent of your real world requirements and just ‘hope for the best’ – you won’t get the adoption or success that you need. That’s why the Bigtincan Hub platform has been created with the built-in ability to create a completely customized structure that delivers for each unique business.
Think about this – your sales process requires a sales person to check in with a customer to get details on their latest purchases or customer delivery issues before presenting the new product details or proposals – a system that just provides your sales team with lists of PowerPoint and PDF sales collateral isn't going to help reps be successful. Similarly, a sales process where sales reps have to understand hundreds of different products and be able to suggest the best fit to a customer requires a complete guided selling experience with tools that help the rep with suggested questions to ask to identify the right product. A set of folders with files inside is only going to leave the sales person adrift.
But just as important as the ability for sales enablement tools to adapt to these business needs, is for sales enablement tools to be able to provide a way that the success of each sales person can be used to improve the likelihood of success of others. We call this “creating a closed loop” where the system itself learns from the successful actions of sales leaders and helps others to copy and replicate those actions.
Successful sales enablement requires a new approach – one that focuses on the ability for the tools to tailor the selling experience to the real-world needs of the sales team, but also one that can adapt, grow and help all sales people improve their performance.
For sales professionals, sales management, sales ops, and even marketing teams getting to sales success is a complicated process and implementing sales enablement is a key part of the journey. Keep your focus and always think about the real impact you can have on your sales team, and you will be sure to get the success that your teams expect from you.
