Sales Enablement? No, it’s Sales Engagement!
As more and more companies enter the “Sales Enablement” space, more and more confusion occurs within companies.
The buzzword “Sales Enablement” is being spoken not only by analysts and bloggers, but marketing and sales leaders are using it — all saying, “We need sales enablement…” with many of them having no idea what it really means and what it will really do for their company.
Few think about the affect it will have on their sales reps — like CRM, it is great for leadership (both Sales and Marketing), but for the individual, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Here’s a description I found on the web for Sales Enablement:
Unlike other sales and marketing functions, sales enablement is a relatively new function that continues to evolve within B-to-B companies. Sales enablement’s goal is to ensure that every seller has the required knowledge, skills, processes and behaviors to optimize every interaction with buyers.
Unfortunately, this falls short of reality.
And here’s why — if you were to take the description of sales enablement as described above, it talks about “optimize every interaction with buyers” — which unfortunately, can be said of your dentist, who wants to see as many patients as possible in a given day to make as much money as possible. The dentist needs the knowledge, the skills, the processes and behaviors in place to optimize that, right?
Well, I’ve been to a few dentists in my lifetime, and the ones that I remember are those that actually took the time, energy and effort to get to know me — to understand what my problem is, to make me feel comfortable as well as to make we want to continue to do business with him (or send my family there or friends) — you get the idea.
On a side note, I recently went to see my dentist (needed a crown) — haven’t seen “my” dentist in over two years. When he came to see me, the first thing out of his mouth was, “How’s your father?” — he remembered that my father was a dentist also. WOW! (Don’t think I am so naive that he didn’t write this down on my chart, but, hot-damn, that one question made me remember that this is why I came back to him — he immediately set me at ease and with the next few minutes of conversation, he understood everything that allowed him to empathize with me (my tooth really hurt!!!))
For us at Illumineto, we call that Sales Engagement. If a sales professional isn’t building trust and empathy with their prospect, they are falling far short of what sales truly is. You may have product knowledge, you may have “skills,” you may have a marketing team throwing documents at you every day and you may even not be a sociopath but, you still have to make your prospect feel special, that they are the only ones in your world — you need to engage.
Don’t let your sales and marketing leaders keep saying, “We need sales enablement.” Tell them that you want sales engagement and that everything that they “require” of you should be done with this in mind.
Good luck selling.
