Sales organizations are facing a crisis. With increasingly high buyer expectations and the ongoing struggle to secure the right talent for their business, it’s little wonder only about half of salespeople today hit their quotas.
With a mountain to climb, sales enablement (or SE) leaders are looking for help. Certainly, there’s no shortage of proposed solutions, with technology at the fore. The SE platform market is forecast to be worth $2.6 billion by 2024. Like magpies, it seems we’re most attracted to shiny, new things. The temptation to believe that technology is the fast fix to solve our problems can be overwhelming. But is there any evidence that these solutions deliver what they promise?
It is easy to see the appeal of new software, particularly in this age of digital transformation. But it is important to question whether technology alone can improve the intrinsically human and emotive process of buying and selling. Before being railroaded by marketing hype and organizational pressure into buying the next shiny, new technology, SE leaders should stick to what they know to be true and remember two important things:
• Technology alone has yet to fix a human behavioral problem.
• Sales enablement leaders are still the experts and should allow themselves to trust their experience and instincts.
I work for a company that sells an SE platform, but as a sales enablement leader first and foremost, I believe a more open dialogue is required.
In Praise Of Fast Solutions
Today’s SE platforms, including my own company's, promise many things, including efficiency and automation gains, particularly:
CRM Automation: A 2017 survey by Introhive found that 70% of salespeople spend roughly four hours each week manually entering contacts and activities into CRM systems, and another 60% spend 4 hours per week making sense of that data. (That equates to more than a month spent on data entry and analysis over the course of a year, the survey pointed out.) CRM automation gives sales teams back their selling time, which they can spend on other revenue-generating activities.
Content Management: Analytics capabilities serve content, such as suggestions for next steps or recommended content, to salespeople for their sales situation, faster.
Just-In-Time Learning: Intrinsically linked to sales results, on-the-job training increases selling time, improves information and skills retention and helps build better behaviors.
But, once you’ve given your team more time to sell, customizable content and sales training at the very point at which they need, what's next? Will these services effectively address any performance issues your team has, or will it only exacerbate the situation by making them more efficient at making the same mistakes, faster?
I’ll say it again: I believe tech alone has yet to solve human behavioral problems, so why would it start now?
In Praise Of Human Intelligence
In our eagerness to adopt the next great thing, we risk falling for the trick of the "emperor’s new clothes." One of the greatest enhancements to SE platforms in recent years is not data analytics or artificial intelligence (AI). Instead, it is the ability to construct standard sales models.
As I wrote in a previous Forbes article, a standard sales model "enables organizations to construct a sales model based on how it believes their ideal sales opportunities should be constructed to achieve business goals, not just how they have been constructed in the past." To my mind, it’s one of the most important developments in the sales process since the introduction of CRM.
Using a standard sales model, a sales enablement team can outline the ideal customer engagement and align it to the customer buying process. The model can include the ideal number and types of job titles to engage on the buyer’s side and the optimum interaction cadence for each persona. It can outline the steps a salesperson needs to take to win the deal and even help you meet the needs of channels in new places and industries.
Using intelligent technologies such as AI and analytics, SE platforms can then see how close each sale is to the standard model and help you learn from it. But critically, the standard sales model requires human intelligence to define what that model is. Human intelligence is required to:
• Understand the company strategy and the deals needed to win to achieve it
• Create a standard model based on how the team needs to sell in the future, not on historical sales data
AI works with human intelligence. Not instead of it. Without human insight, an SE platform is just a machine that can spot and replicate patterns that might or might not be the route to sales improvement.
In Praise Of Sales Enablement
Sales enablement leaders walk a tough line; they're caught between trying to engage a sales team that would rather be out selling and delivering sales improvements for an organization that doesn’t give them the time or budget to enable those improvements.
The allure of the shiny new technology and all it promises is understandable. But it is important the sales enablement leaders call out the "emperor’s new clothes." Their experience is key to getting the most out of any technology investment.
Important points for an SE leader to remember when considering investing in new technology include:
• There is no magic bullet to solve sales performance issues.
• Start with the end in mind, and be clear about what sales enablement issues you are trying to solve.
• Take the time to work with a sales enablement specialist that can help you identify the issues and the best way to solve them.
• If you need wider organizational buy-in, ask your specialist to identify some quick wins that are a stepping stone to the bigger goal.
• Only introduce your "shiny new tech" once you’ve established good sales practices.
With these principals in place, technology can help save your sales team time, save your business money and save you from the headache of having to justify some very expensive shelfware.
