Sales EnablementSales Enablement Sales Enablement is a strategic process that provides a company’s sales professionals with tools, technology, training and other resources that improve their performance at customer engagement and at generating value for all stakeholders in the sales process. Platform: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and What It Should Be
In the last few years, there has certainly been a lot of talk about sales enablement—it’s one of those trendy terms that came around and has definitely remained. It has come to the point now where software vendors are promoting a new type of solutionSolution Solution is a combination of ideas, strategies, processes, technologies and services that effectively helps an organization achieve its goals or hurdle its challenges. called a Sales Enablement Platform (SEP). In one respect this is great news, for salespeople have never needed more enabling than they do today. There’s only one problem: just what is a Sales Enablement Platform?
There certainly is no sales enablement “magic bullet”—you utilize it and bang! instant results! People today will jump on any train when they hear it will bring immediate positive painless change—even as they know there is no such thing. It’s like trying to win a gold medal without doing any training, even though you know that can never happen.
So what is sales enablement, really, and where is it going? Is it just a buzzword that becomes an umbrella for various solutions? And what exactly is a sales enablement platform?
Depending on which vendor you reference, an SEP sounds an awful lot like a CRM. But at least one vendor I found goes well out of their way to say that their productProduct Product refers to anything (an idea, item, service, process or information) that meets a need or a desire and is offered to a market, usually but not always at a price., this SEP, is most definitely not a CRM. Yet that same vendor states that their SEP has “CRM characteristics.” Another SEP calls itself, “The Sales Enablement CRM.” Other SEP vendors spell out benefits that sound exactly like those of a CRM application. What gives?
However we define it, sales enablement is very important today, and will become more so in the future. Why? Because even if you have a top performer, how much better are they going to be if they have the right tools?
Let’s have a look at what sales enablement really entails, and what a Sales Enablement Platform really is, and what it should be.
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Additional Resources
This ebook is on the subject of “Win Together.” It falls under the same context as“win-to-win” described in my book Network Selling: Guarantee Success for the Digital Age. Today, this aspect of sales is more important than ever, and must also be part and parcel of CRM solutions.
“For some years I’ve been saying that, as a society, we’re in the midst of a transformation. Given what’s happened in the last couple of years, there’s no one left who is disagreeing with me! It’s become very obvious.”
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when it comes to emotions. But just as with our Network Selling model, E.Q. isn’t just for sales, either. It’s actually the missing factor in human interactions, for confrontation—a common “tool” in human interactions—doesn’t actually handle anything.
“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”