There’s a ton of confusion over who creates the content for enablement. It’s usually an awkward grey area, with sales, sales engineers, marketing, enablement, and ad-hoc SMEs building stuff on demand.
But really, sales should be the generator for enablement content. I’m going to outline exactly why, and how to make that happen without taking your reps off the floor.
At the end of 2020, we predicted that enablers would see continued pressure in the new year to prove their impact on revenue. Then, almost as if we planned it, we provided a roadmap to revenue attribution.
Today, we’re going to dive into why – why does enablement need to start tying its effort to revenue goals?
I recently chatted with my LevelJump colleague Adriana Romero, Director of Enablement Solutions, in a live webinar about which enablement metrics you need to be paying attention to in 2021.
Here’s what you need to know.
We started by looking at some consumption metrics most enablement teams use, such as content views, video plays, course completion rates, quiz scores, and badges earned. While they all have a place in the enablement metric family, Adriana pointed out that they won’t tell you if someone knows how to overcome objections or position a value proposition. In other words, these don’t really nail down how much the needle moves. And that is what leadership teams want to see.
How do we know if we are moving the needle? How is enablement making people productive? Look at the sales process and where enablement can have an impact. What did the managers want to impact? Executives want to measure the time to revenue of a new hire and these were manageable metrics that create a solid overview of productivity.
Sales enablers need to tie their work to revenue. It doesn’t matter who sales enablement reports to – sales, ops, CRO, CEO, etc... – the function is too prominent, too visible, and most importantly, too expensive to not have a clear line between cost and benefit.
This article is designed to give you the ultimate roadmap to bridge the gap between enablement and revenue. But it’s essential to recognize what I’ve outlined here is a strategy and not a one-and-done method. No single number illustrates the impact enablers have on the bottom line. However, this is the blueprint for putting sales enablement performance directly in context of profit and loss.
A sales leader has to be a coach, cheerleader, and taskmaster all rolled into one.
Sure, hitting targets is at the top of every sales leader’s agenda. But in order to do that, you have to focus on your team as a whole, individual team members, processes, and on how you continue to develop as a leader.
Sales coaching is, without exaggeration, one of the most powerful ways to boost your team’s numbers and produce stellar salespeople.
Companies that provide an optimal amount of coaching see 16.7% greater annual revenue growth over those that don’t. That says a lot about the impact a sales coach can have.
Most of being an effective sales rep comes down to effective listening and asking good questions.
Questions get us to the heart of a prospect’s problem so that we can formulate the perfect solution for them.
But not all questions are the same.
The sales enablement community generated a LOT of content in 2020. And unless you were glued to your monitor reading research reports and ebooks 24/7, odds are you missed a golden nugget or two.
To make your life a little bit easier, we’ve compiled the best resources on one page. You can bookmark this and have the 2020’s top resources at your fingertips.
Everything you need to launch into the New Year feeling confident is here. From the state of technology to stand out thought leaders with profound insights, these free resources will help your team stand out.
2020 threw everyone for a loop, and sales enablement was not untouched. The good news is enablers are more important than ever before. Getting the right message to the buyer at the right time is mission-critical, and for some companies, it will define their survival in 2021.
We’ve analyzed data from the field and gathered the top minds here at LevelJump to predict the top four shifts for 2021. Here we go!
Sales collateral is necessary at all points of the purchase journey. And particularly beyond the Awareness stage, they can be a salesperson’s best friend.
In 2001, Daniel Goleman published a book called Primal Leadership. In it, he posits that there are six leadership styles –Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Commanding, and Pacesetting.
Of course, none of these styles are hardcoded, and no leader should stick to any one of them all the time. But a good leader must have the ability to exhibit traits of whichever style is best suited to the present situation and will get the best out of their team in that situation.
So you’re hiring a new salesperson for your team.
Do you hire for sales experience, or do you take a chance on a keen, albeit inexperienced, salesperson?
If you are in sales enablement, you know that marrying your measures directly to revenue outcomes is a never-ending challenge. It is the number one question we get asked on our client calls at LevelJump. Here we break it down for you in four steps that any enabler can follow to tie the two together.
The Gap — no, not the American retail store, this refers to the gap between where a prospect is and where they want to be.
I interrupt your regularly scheduled mundane scrolling with precious insights! I recently had the honor to interview Ray Owais, Retail Revenue Enablement Lead at Shopify. Shopify is the leading retail operating system for any size business that has helped 446,005 entrepreneurs sell in-person, online, social media, and even from the trunk of a car.
As a sales leader, it’s assumed that you’re good at adapting to change.
Which is important because the current environment needs great sales leaders who are nimble and can successfully pivot. Most sales forces have had to shift from in-person to virtual onboarding, but there are ways to make your team stand out and succeed despite the change.
A first-rate onboarding process will push new reps closer to their first deal and achieve the team’s goals. Consider also that effective onboarding can speed up the ramp-time to full productivity by up to 18%. Imagine having a team that gets their first meeting, opportunity, deal and consistent quota achievement faster.
You can make it happen by following the steps below.
Once you identify that your team has a sales cycle length problem, it’s time to do something about it. Here’s everything you need to know to create sales coaching programs to shorten your sales cycle.
Most sales leaders wish that C-level executives would view sales enablement as a necessity, not just an amenity for teams; but to get buy-in from the top can take some work. In a perfect world, enablement would just be a standard line-item on the go-to-market spreadsheet.
But we don’t live in a perfect world.
It’s often a grueling uphill battle for sales leaders trying to make a case for sales enablement to hard-nosed CFOs and other execs.
All too often, sales leaders are forced to build their case for enablement from scratch — articulate its value, paint a picture of the enablement function, and present evidence why hiring one enabler is better than just pouring that money into even more BDRs.
If you don't have enablement as part of your current system (but you know it's a good idea - because it IS a good idea), here's how you build a business case for sales enablement so that you can get buy-in from your CFO.
Charles Darwin said it’s not the strongest or smartest species that survives, but rather the species that’s the most adaptable to change.
Chuck might as well have been talking about sales enablement. Sales reps’ tactics often need to change to meet the required revenue goals set by leadership. And no matter how clever you think your programs are, leadership won’t care if they don’t get you closer to your revenue goals. And the only way you’re going to do that is to change seller behaviour.
