What is a Chief Sales Officer’s biggest gripe about their forecast? Many point to CRM algorithms used to identify at-risk opportunities. These don’t improve visibility because they’re dependent on data input by sales reps, and sales reps only tell sales leaders what they want to hear. As a sales manager, I need to know the productivity of my teams, a deal’s likelihood of closing, and when it’s necessary to intervene on a deal.
Companies make significant investments in sales training and methodologies they hope will improve the sales organization’s effectiveness and productivity. When it comes to adoption, your top sellers may not, but you give them a pass because they produce. The challenge is selling the 80% of sales reps, whose productivity you need to improve, on the new tools, assets, and sales training. You need the average sales rep to accept the prescribed sales training or methodology before you’ll see organizational change.
Sales managers are responsible for hitting a number. At the same time, they need to ensure that their teams are leveraging the appropriate company resources to bring real value to clients. Is the average sales rep presenting your products and services effectively? Are they presenting and delivering the value that other customers receive from a top sales rep?
Sales Enablement Tools Drive Adoption of Best Practices
If sales leaders could get all sales reps to apply best practices, the adoption would impact both your organization’s productivity and brand value, which, in turn, would positively impact your customers’ experience. That is the centerpiece of the Richardson-SAVO partnership: our joint vision is to help our clients improve overall business results by enabling them to be more effective at delivering greater value to customers.
Sales enablement platforms used to be a storehouse for digital assets. Sales reps would have to sort through hundreds of files just to build a 30-minute presentation deck. Luckily, sales enablement has evolved dramatically over the years to meet the needs of today’s sales reps. A mature sales enablement strategy empowers individual sales reps to be efficient, effective, and engaging.
Within a sales enablement framework, a sales rep’s tasks should be focused on applying the Three E’s to these two main areas of productivity:
- Preparing for a client meeting
- Executing during a client meeting
The goal is to shorten sales cycles, increase the value of deals, and help sales reps improve their productivity as measured by reaching quota. Sales managers using sales enablement strategies will see metrics above the industry average because they focused on this productivity model and invested in tools focused on serving the individual sales rep.
