Organizational Challenge in Implementing Sales Enablement

Trishla
Trishla
Jul 21, 2017 · 4 min read

Organizational structure is that part of the planning process that all companies must consider and carefully plan, especially when they are growing rapidly. If there are several big teams involved in the sales process, it’s crucial that teams explicitly understand the processes and policies that go along with the structure.

There are various types of organizational structures that either already exists in today’s corporate world or are beginning to emerge as feasible choices for the future of work.

What is organizational structure?

Organizational structure helps a company design a pyramid that outlines roles, responsibility, and supervision. It’s the plan that shapes who reports to whom and who is responsible for what. It’s usually chronicled and shared as an organizational chart that contains job titles and the reporting structure. In the sales department, this applies to how and to whom leads are distributed, who leads and supports demos, and how leads passage through the buying process to different parts of the organization. Depending on the size of the organization, there are numerous levels of organization that helps in the delegation of responsibilities and creates a dynamic structure. An organizational structure will have all of the different sales teams reporting up to the VP of Sales, but Marketing, Alliance teams, Customer services all come in to play for sales at different times.

Challenge

Every employee involved in sales developments and operations does not report to the same person, which means that while the final goal of these teams is the one — generating revenue. But each employee goes about it in a different way and supports sales through many different functions. It is not the primary goal of other teams to support sales reps with sales efforts because that is not their job responsibilities are. This can often make it difficult for the sales reps to get the help they need in a timely manner, especially in large companies.

Steps to Instrument Sales Enablement

1. Identify internal stakeholders

Define your internal customers, which is the sales force of the organization. Just like any organization, one needs to understand the customers for success, so the foremost thing is to identify, define, and pursue to understand the needs and barriers to the success of the customers your sales force is looking to help.

2. Identify organizational needs — and how sales enablement can address those needs

For a sales enablement team to be effective, the organization should first understand their supreme goals and then explore how sales enablement can help simplify those goals. Sales enablement goals must always align with overall company goals, which means specific enablement processes are going to be different for every organization. The outline can be similar, but the details and the sales enablement functions are always going to be conditional to the organization.

Once the goals have been decided, you must decide sales enablement services with quantifiable metrics. This will consent you to determine if the efforts of sales enablement team are reaching goals and are effective. Once it is quantified, one can easily identify where errors are made and barriers occur, and you also have the structure to measure the improvement after changes are implemented.

Striving toward sales enablement goals is not a one-time process; it’s ongoing. The goals should be decided in a way that they are incremental, build on each other and must be measurable.

3. Define how sale enablement will help the organization

The first thing that comes to the executive’s mind is the cost involved when they are presented with the possibility of implementing sales enablement. They see these processes as cost centers rather than revenue-generating potential. For sales enablement to work truly, organizations need to understand the financial worth of sales enablement.

As with goals, there is no guarantee for every company but the question is how to get executive sponsorship? The overall approach should be tying sale enablement’s goals to revenue-related goals. This will prove the direct and constant worth of sales enablement (from a financial perspective). If it is not in terms of bottom line and the pivotal metrics to measure that progress, one risk executives terminating of sales enablement as nothing more than a costly addition to the organization structure.

Organizations pay for training and new software in the hopes of increasing revenue down the line. To sell the idea of sales enablement, one needs to show that they provide the same value and remove those fundamental barriers to revenue generation.

Establishing sales enablement doesn’t need to come with huge overhead. It doesn’t essentially require hiring an entirely new team. People already within the organization can take on these roles — with the possibility of one or two new hires to facilitate the process.

Solution

Sales enablement teams help representatives by linking and affiliating with all other departments when training and onboarding. It is important for companies to have well-established and agreed-upon networks for communication so it is clear who should be held answerable for certain errands. Another way to raise collaboration among different departments within the organization is by giving sales support teams (marketing, services, etc.) the opportunity to help in building the overall sales process. This way they have a say in the processes in which they are involved, and can ensure cross-departmental interactions are documented and agreed upon from the inception. The most important part of a functional organizational structure is the open collaboration it fosters.

Sales enablement focuses on boarding and certification, sales asset management, sales communications, and coaching and training skills. Sales operations, on the other hand, handles planning, territory optimization, compensation, sales analytics and technology adding fluidity to the organizational structure. Deciding to invest in sales enablement is a big step towards truly quickening customer acquisition efforts.

Originally Posted On: www.knobis.co

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