Is your sales team bowling strikes every time?
By Elliott Fey
A Note on Accountability in a Downturning Economy
According to Salesforce research, nearly 70% of sales professionals say selling is harder now than before the pandemic, and 82% report having to make changes to adapt to this new landscape. Amid these economic headwinds, sales teams must be more in touch with their prospects needs and better equipped to win the right deals.
Modern sales enablement[1] is key to help teams meet the challenges a downturning economy. It’s important that reps are trained and informed in the right ways so they can build trusted customer relationships and maximize the impact of their work. This means marketing must provide sales teams with tools and information that reveal a deep understanding of what they are selling and their customers’ needs. The tools that have traditionally delivered this knowledge have not kept up with the demands of the cloud and data centric environment that defines today’s team work.
In times of economic uncertainty, enablement’s role in improving sales performance, proficiency, and productivity becomes even more essential for businesses to protect their return on investment. As organizations look to assess the impact of enablement’s efforts through a more critical lens amid shifting economic landscapes, it is vital that practitioners prove their ability to move the needle on priority business outcomes. Doing so can help solidify enablement’s role as a necessary function in the organization.
Today’s marketing teams must provide their sales teams with the most current enablement assets and best practices in real-time. These assets must now be accessible at any time yet they must be secure. Sales teams need to be equipped to bowl strikes most every time in order maintain the growth rates that are demanded of them. Batting 1000 isn’t possible for all sales reps unless enablement is loaded with all of the winning plays shared by the lead sales reps via enablement materials in the cloud. Whether you use a bowling or baseball comparison, you know that there is almost no room today for error. In the aftermath of the recent layoffs[2] in the thousands, there are fewer people available to make the wins necessary to survive the downturn and come out the other end celebrating.
"Sellers have to be able to position their product in a way that helps solve problems that weren’t top of mind a month or a year ago." –Jody Kohner[3], EVP, Global Sales Enablement, Salesforce
“Sellers are being pulled in every direction and need to streamline and centralize communication,” said Ketan Karkhanis, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce’s Sales Cloud.
Historically, sales enablement KPIs have been limited by consumption data: how many people took the course, what’s the CSAT score, how many clicks on a CTA did we get? But the business doesn’t really care about those metrics. They want to see how learning converts to sales, which increases revenue. In the past, using legacy tools, we couldn’t identify those correlations.
The future of selling is providing teams with the right tools and enablement assets, all in one measurable, digital platform. Another Salesforce research paper reports there has been a 300% increase in people on LinkedIn with sales enablement in their job title since 2015 and it’s evolving quickly. Our partner, Salesforce, has created a tool called the Accountability Performance Matrix[4]. We are excited about this because Pagedip contributes a huge amount of content consumption data back to stakeholders so they can refine enablement and improve sales outcomes in spite of the pressing need to do more with less. Pagedip, alongside other enablement tools like Highspot and Salesforce, helps everyone along the customer journey to be accountable and that accountability is what makes the performance difference needed in today’s economy.
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Sales enablement is the set of tools and content provided to your sales teams to help them sell smarter and sell more. But sales enablement also includes the processes that marketers undertake to help sales reps sell.
The pressure is on for sales leaders to create enablement that makes a real impact on revenue goals, and prove that it’s working.
Sales pipeline should be your biggest driver for growth. Here’s how Salesforce’s Sales and Marketing departments align to make it happen. (see article)