What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a philosophy that asks you to focus on providing the tools, training, and other appropriate supports to your sales team. It can include providing training sessions and workshops, investing in new tools, creating a rewards program and better compensation, and sales coaching.
Your program, however, shouldn’t focus on your salespeople. Instead, think about making your sales enablement program customer centric.
The idea of enabling your salespeople to sell more certainly sounds like it benefits those on your sales team. After all, they’re the ones who are getting the tools and training they need to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
Given this context, it can be difficult to imagine why your efforts in this arena should be customer centric. The answer is that sales enablement ultimately benefits your clients.
How? By giving your salespeople the tools and training they need to be better sales professionals, they’re also going to serve your customers’ needs more effectively and efficiently. That’s a huge win for your customers.
This move to creating customer-centric programs is a shift in mindset for most sales professionals. It’s part of a larger shift within sales, one that moves from focusing on the sale itself to focusing on the customer experience and relationship.
Today’s buyers don’t want to be sold to. Instead, they’re looking for added value and solutions. They want to know your salespeople can help them solve an issue they’re experiencing. They’re not interested in the pitch for your product until very late in the buying process.
By shifting your enablement activities to focus on the customer, you’re reflecting this larger move in sales. It’s no longer enough to empower your salespeople to sell more. You need to help them focus on winning customers and building relationships with your clients.
This all sounds very good in theory, but sales enablement is still about providing support for your salespeople. How can such a program become more customer centric?
The answer is by focusing on how the tools and training you’re providing can assist your team members in building their relationships. Yes, a tool that allows them to create automated follow-up emails could help boost sales. It might also help them build relationships with customers.
The right tools can help your salespeople locate the right content to share, and it can even help them determine when to share it with a prospect.
The right training also comes into play here. As your salespeople are trained on the latest techniques, they’ll begin to adjust more to the modern buyer’s mindset. Understanding their leads and current clients will help them connect.
By shifting your enablement mindset to focus more on your clients’ needs and wants, you’ll still be able to accomplish what you set out to do. In short, this shift in focus still helps you improve your sales team’s performance by allowing them to boost sales.
By focusing on how your efforts can better serve the customer, you can continue to exceed customer expectations and win them over. Making sales enablement more customer centric is one of the best ways to enable your sales team to achieve even more.