L&D's Role in Sales Enablement | Sales Training Tips | Wilson Learning Worldwide

L&D’s role in sales enablement

What every learning professional needs to know today to impact sales results tomorrow

L&D’s role in sales enablement

Скачать PDF

First published on TrainingMag.com, March 2016.

If you are a learning and development professional who supports a sales organisation, chances are high that your title and/or team name have changed recently. In the past few years, more and more companies have started to establish sales enablement functions—and the talent at the core of those functions is often the sales training team.

What is Sales Enablement?

Recently, Forrester Research defined sales enablement as “a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimise the return of investment of the selling system.”

In other words:
Sales enablement is an approach that bridges the gap between the sales strategy and execution and provides the sales-force with all the information and resources they need to generate revenue.

Why Does Sales Enablement Matter?

The emphasis on sales enablement grew out of pain. Sales executives across industries report that one of the biggest challenges their people face is information overload. Sales executives say things like:

  • “Our internal functions are competing for our salespeople’s time.”
  • “Our salespeople receive conflicting messages from different sources within our own company.”
  • “I see time being wasted in training that isn’t relevant to my team.”
  • “We struggle to make sense of it all and our salespeople are wasting precious selling time.”

As companies sought solutions to this problem, people started to use the term “sales enablement” to refer to an approach in which all parts of a company work together to drive better sales results. Of course, it’s one thing to call a person or team “sales enablement”—it’s another to actually have a positive impact on sales performance.

My Title Is Sales Enablement—Now What?

It may be tempting to assume that L&D fits into sales enablement because L&D owns anything that has to do with sales training. This interpretation limits the potential for L&D to make a significant impact.

Based on Wilson Learning’s ongoing work in the arena of sales effectiveness, we have identified four elements that must be aligned with a company’s go-to-market strategy and integrated with one another in order for any sales enablement approach to be fully effective:

  1. Sales Processes and Systems
  2. Information and Resources
  3. Learning Strategy
  4. Leadership Practises

Integrating these elements requires dialogue, shared commitments, agreements, and accountability among multiple functions. That’s where we as L&D professionals come in. Rather than just reorganising or renaming sales training, genuine sales enablement requires us to re-frame our role and rethink our work.

1. Re-framing the Role: Breaking Down Silos

According to a Forrester report, “. . . you need to develop a team to work across traditional organisational boundaries and reporting levels within your company—and that’s a big challenge. But eventually, to be successful with sales enablement, you will need to break down the walls between organisational silos to get customers the information they need.”

Improving the alignment of the core functional elements, the go-to-market strategy, and the customer experience is the ultimate objective of sales enablement. Accomplishing this triple alignment requires coordination across multiple functions, including:

  • Learning and Development
  • Sales Leadership and Management
  • Sales Operations
  • Marketing
  • Product Development/R&D
  • Legal/Finance/IT

Fortunately, the ability to facilitate is right within our wheelhouse as L&D professionals. By stepping up and facilitating cross-functional collaboration, we can help our organisations:

  • Identify barriers and supports to sales effectiveness
  • Break down organisational silos
  • Achieve alignment around the goals of the sales enablement function or team
  • Build buy-in and commitment to an agreed-upon approach and work processes
  • Identify and agree on short- and long-term priorities and action plans
  • Implement action plans and evaluate effectiveness

As L&D professionals, we do not need to be experts in marketing and technology. However, it is critical that we partner with sales leadership to drive and facilitate alignment and coordination across all of the functions and people who support sales.

For example, an L&D leader in the tech industry offered to be the point person for a cross-functional sales enablement team. As the team looked at the problem of information overload and field confusion, they committed to coordinating efforts so that multiple initiatives weren’t launched to the field at once. This particular team also agreed to allow individual functions to create their own sales tools and resources, yet they were required to follow templates and guides to ensure effectiveness and consistency.

2. Rethinking the Work: It’s About Performance, Not Programmes

If you ask a roomful of learning and development professionals what the business needs from them, many will say things like “sales training programmes” or “human performance improvement.” If you ask top executives and sales leaders what they need from training, you are more likely to hear, “help equipping our people to drive sales.” Truly equipping people to drive sales involves not only designing and delivering training programmes, but stepping into the shoes of salespeople and sales leaders and adopting a problem-solving mindset. What is it like to be a salesperson in your organisation? What gets in the way? What do I need to be effective—more skills, more tools, more clarity? All of these are areas that we can influence, if not control.

In order to support sales enablement, L&D needs to:

  1. Develop a learning strategy that is aligned both with the organisation’s go-to-market strategy and with the vision for the desired customer experience
  2. Partner with sales leadership to define the behaviours and mindsets necessary to execute on the organisation’s specific objectives and go-to-market strategy
  3. Equip sales with the knowledge and skills to engage prospects and customers and drive sales forward
  4. Ensure sales leaders are equipped to coach salespeople toward higher levels of performance
  5. Act as performance consultants, helping to identify barriers to successful sales performance and drive solutions that go beyond training and development
  6. Provide learning and performance support tools in addition to instructor-led training
  7. Play the role of content managers, ensuring information is available in bite-size chunks when the sales team needs it, and in a format that is easy accessible

When these steps are employed, the results can be significant. For example, one organisation adopted a new sales enablement-focused learning strategy and was able to increase sales productivity by 15%. They achieved this by reducing time out of the field, increasing available selling time, reducing travel costs, and providing enhanced technology that made it easier for sales representatives to find and share resources based on individual buyer needs.

Enhanced Impact and Business Value

The growing emphasis on sales enablement provides an exciting opportunity for training leaders. By driving and demonstrating a collaborative, cross-functional approach, L&D professionals can help their organisations:

  • Speed time to productivity for new hires
  • Minimise disruption of both sales and sales support functions
  • Reduce time out of the field
  • Ensure consistent messages to the market, regardless of channel
  • Positively impact customers’ perception of their experience

Delivering business outcomes like these will ultimately elevate the role of learning and development and increase sales.

To learn more, contact Wilson Learning Worldwide | Phone: +44.1494.678.121 | Email: info@wilsonlearning.co.uk

об авторе
Wendy Mack

Wendy Mack

Wendy Mack served as Director of Consulting Services for Wilson Learning Corporation. Wendy led the team that is responsible for diagnosing client needs and designing comprehensive solutions that result in sustained behaviour change and performance improvement. Wendy’s work blended her expertise in learning and development with her extensive knowledge of human performance technology, change management, and communication. She was a popular speaker at national conferences and client events and has coauthored three books on the topics of learning, leadership and change.

Read more by Wendy Mack

Subscribe now and receive new content directly to your inbox! Please complete this form to agree to receive ongoing information via email from Wilson Learning.

* необходимо заполнить

Wilson Learning wishes to use your details to send you communications regarding our products, services, and insights into leadership and sales training. Your data will not be shared with any third parties and will only be used by Wilson Learning Worldwide, Inc. and its subsidiaries, agents, and authorised distributors.

 I would like to receive further marketing related email communications from Wilson Learning.
Wilson Learning respects your privacy under the General Data Protection Regulation.

I agree. I do not agree.

This site uses browser cookies and pixels to enhance your browsing experience. Learn about our cookie policy here.

I grant permission to use browser cookies and pixels on this site.

Конфиденциальность | Все права защищены