How to Give Sales Enablement a Louder Voice in Revenue Talks?
Now more than ever, businesses need high-performing and productive teams. Knowing the impact of your teams’ efforts on revenue is essential to ensure long-term success and scalability for a business.
According to McKinsey, the race for excellence is becoming a sprint, and organizations with the fastest revenue growth rates are raising the bar in data, tech and talent. The only problem is that we continue to see enablement lose its “seat at the table” in the revenue discussion. Enablement is the software that allows businesses to manage content, messaging and training in one place. Using AI insights, the software can then tell sales and marketing teams what content is landing.
However, by starting with a revenue plan and following some simple steps, you can turn your sales enablement efforts into tangible business value.
First Things First: What Is a Revenue Plan and Why Do You Need It?
Sales and revenue planning often go hand in hand. Sales planning predicts cash flow and possible profit. Whereas, revenue planning decides where to allocate the money once it lands in the business account. Through revenue planning, organizations can plan their expenditure over time, but this vital step often gets left out.
In what is a turbulent economic climate, it has never been more important to plan. However, this usually means that net new investments for businesses aren’t prioritized, as the decision makers have no previous data to rely on when backing up the spending to the CFO.
Due to this, investment in AI productivity technology like enablement, which helps vital business functions like sales and marketing stay aligned, is still not being considered in revenue discussions. Now more than ever, organizations must lean into practices that will give them a competitive edge and impact business value.
Aligning Your Team Matters!
Business leaders need to start bridging the gap in messaging between their sales and marketing teams. Communication is vital, and the misalignment between the two teams impacts revenue negatively due to outdated, randomly-assembled material circulating to potential prospects.
This approach to new and existing customers tarnishes the relationship between prospect and salesperson and devalues the overall message the business wants to convey. The marketing team also suffers a similar fate. Marketers have no visibility over what material is landing with prospects in sales calls meaning they could be wasting time on collateral that isn’t driving results.
Enablement software facilitates this communication by allowing both teams access to the same collateral, training and up-to-date messaging in one convenient place. With enablement, businesses can keep their teams on the same page and ensure they know how they will reach the next milestone together.
Utilizing Your Analytics
Sales enablement software is able to provide your teams with the insights and analytics they need to do their job more efficiently. Whether that be measuring the ‘win rate’ when using a specific deck or recommending a ‘sales play’ to a salesperson before their big pitch, it all helps future-proof your business by knowing which metrics to focus on – not just for the overall business but for individual performance too.
Enablement software will help ramp up sales professionals’ performance. The AI-powered sales tool uses insights to recommend content based on where the customer or prospect is in the sales journey. It can also recommend sales plays and training based on the salesperson’s needs.
Enablement paves the way for business longevity by providing teams with invaluable sales and marketing insights. It keeps them aligned and ultimately helps the business achieve those long-term milestones, even in economic uncertainty. Business leaders who fail to embrace technology and see sales enablement as just a short-term strategy risk feeling the impact of uncoordinated teams, and are in for a surprise the next time they take their seat at the revenue table.
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