Yesterday’s BrightTALK day-long webinar series highlighted various perspectives from thought leaders in sales enablement. I was honored to participate in a round table discussion, hosted by Nancy Nardin with Joanne Black. This rapidly evolving and cross-functional discipline focuses on bridging theory, strategy and execution, typically of marketing and sales processes and practices.
Thought leaders are in agreement that enabling sales is hardly a straight-forward matter. With the focus on aligning marketing with sales initiatives, I also wonder whether you are leaving many of your company’s own internal subject matter experts out of the party.
Focusing on throughput, while you are enabling and aligning assets and resources, may be the key to driving your company’s productivity and profitability.
Your internal resources in finance, operations, engineering (all the left brained folks your right brained marketing and sales teams dread working with) provide the opportunity for you to throughput the concept of sales enablement within your corporate culture.
We’ve talked a lot about this before, you and I.
Your internal resources handle account maintenance, day-to-day operations and implementation of solutions. Your internal resources are in the best position to identify upsell and expansion opportunities.
Your left brained internal resources are close to the Voice of Your Customer. Do you marginalize or exclude them from your sales enablement and alignment initiatives?
Those of you who work with, for, or sell to technical decision makers and investors know what I am talking about. Your internal subject matter experts enable you to prospect and sell to these potentially lucrative accounts. They are your own sales enablement team.
Do you have your own internal sales enablement team? You know, the folks you utilize as resources to explain the stuff you don’t know? The left brained subject matter experts who move your own grey matter a little over to the left?
When you take what you know, and receive the collaboration hand-off from your internal enablement team (your sales posse, if you will), you are throughputting knowledge. It’s like that 4 x 100 meter relay race, except it’s run in less than a straight line.
You’ll be hearing more about sales enablement processes and practices from many of the fine folks whose blogs you read.
Sales enablement systems and practices streamline resource selection in one, easily accessible place. These resources seek alignment with your own sales process and cycle, as supported by your sales training organization and CRM tools.
After all is said and done, however, these resources, tools and processes may make the most sense when discussed with your own set of internal resources.
Depending on where we sit around the business table, we see the same things differently. This week, identify the non-sales and non-marketing folks in your organization who might become great cross-functional collaborators with you.
Find out how your internal team, including you, “sees” your business issues and challenges. Determine what theirs are. Figure out, using information throughput, whether collaborating on your sales enablement resources makes good business sense. I bet it does.
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, catalyzes business transition, startup growth, and professional development. She works with non-traditional sellers, engineers, manufacturers, and technical startups on developing collaborative strategies that drive revenue and investment.
Leave a Reply