Every Sales Enablement Managers Crisis
Shivkumar sat down to make a fresh action plan that he had to roll urgently to enable his sales leaders to navigate a sudden new crisis. His mind was taking him back to the blockbuster leadership training and strategy program for that he had organised for the leaders just three months ago. Beaming faces, high adrenaline energy, detailed planning that every team member owned up, and the determination writ on their faces to nail the targets.
And now this new turbulence and headwinds were making the same set of leaders wobbly, worried and insecure.
Shivkumar took his role as the head of the Sales Enablement of the large MNC B2Bcorporation very seriously. A seasoned sales and marketing leader himself, he knew the critical support that every sales leader needed when it mattered the most.
‘We are the wingmen for the sales soldiers on the field. They fight the war and win the battle. And we give them the ammunition and ensure they never run out or found wanting’ Shivkumar had stated in the conference on the role of his Sales Enablement team.
Challenges of Sales Enablement
Even as Shivkumar pondered on his next steps, he knew that he had to address some of the larger challenges to make Sales Enablement meaningful.
1. How does he ensure that sales leaders learn to optimise the resources his team provides in the heat of the battle? How can he and his team nudge leaders to reflect and continuously leverage the learnings and plan actions?
2. Training and development programs are a critical part of his sales enablement strategy. However, the high energy and promise during the conference dissipates quickly when leaders head back to their workplace. Every sales situation posed a different challenge. What would work is a personalised resource for every sales leader that is available on the go and coaching and mentoring could happen without pulling the leader out from his work. There has to be a real-time solution.
3. Having been in sales leadership situations himself, he also needed to put in a system that highlighted which training inputs were working and those that weren’t. Surely technology can play a vital role in ensuring this.
The fundamental premise Sales Enablement is that it should help all salespeople whether you have a sales organization of one or 1,000. And Shivkumar was realising that whatever he implement had to serve 3 critical needs of sales leaders – it has to be contextualised, personalised and measurable.
The NWORX Edge for Sales Enablement
Which is why NWORX’s promise of professional development embedded into the flow of everyday and remote work makes Sales Enablement effective and sustainable in organisations.
Contextualised: NWORX syncs in with the leaders with their actual ongoing work in real time and does not disrupt their regular workflow. Training is where salespeople learn how to sell more effectively but as most sales training programs happen once a year, the results amplified best when it is continuous.
Personalised: NWORX builds on the operational context of the leader and nudges intelligent recommendations to help scale up the capability of every participant as per their specific needs.
Measurable: NWORX ensures the key metrics for leadership development are tracked and analysed for achievement of goals. The final defining characteristic of sales enablement is measurement. Even the best sales enablement programs can die a quick death if no one is watching how sales uses what’s been provided to them.
One of the best organisational rules of sales enablement is that marketing is a better creator and sales is a better enforcer and both the teams working in sync is critical. And the one thing that NWORX will ensure is that the sales enablement outcomes for the sales leaders and the organisation are not left at the mercy of chance.
It seemed to Shivkumar that he had found an effective sustainable solution to make his sales enablement strategy rock!
