Here’s What Sales Enablement Leaders Should Prioritize in 2022
The New Year looms ahead like a massive tidal wave, ready to crash on the shore.
Sales enablement leaders have the chance to push ahead of the competition, because – let’s face it – we’ve all struggled in one way or another to adapt to the new world of hybrid sales.
If you can focus on the right priorities, you’ll be able to harness, saddle, and ride that tidal wave to the front of the pack. The metaphor is breaking down a bit at this point, but you get the idea.
Here are two simple things that every sales enablement leader should prioritize for the coming 12 months.
1. Consolidate Your Sales Enablement Technology (a.k.a. You Have Too Many Toys)
Everyone likes a shiny new toy. Even as an adult, there’s something you could unwrap that’ll make you ‘squee’ like a child.
As you know, a big part of sales enablement is giving sales teams the tools they need to learn faster and sell better. But with the absolute flood of sales productivity apps and onboarding platforms and CRMs and this and that, sales reps have too many toys. It’s actually hurting sales, not helping.
One thing you can do, then – and we know it’s painful to hear – is to figure out how you can consolidate all of your sales tools as much as possible and get rid of disparate systems.
Sales reps don’t have the time or desire to go back and forth between three, four, five, or more “things” in order to do their job. That’s why the CRM was invented, after all. So, your job in 2022 is to:
- Figure out the core, essential responsibilities you have for all your reps
- Find where they overlap and where redundancies can be eliminated
- See which current tools are actually being used and how useful they really are
- Break out your sharpest knife
- Get to cuttin’
You can’t give away unused sales tools like you can the hoard of toys that accumulates in every house that has children, but you can save valuable time for your sales teams…and get back a chunk of your budget.
2. Streamline Your Team’s Communication Process (a.k.a. Bringing People Together Without More Frustration Than Usual)
In this hybrid work environment where some of your team is in the office and some are at home, communication is more complicated than ever before.
Our first piece of advice is to fight the urge to kidnap all of your sales reps and relocate them to an underground bunker in Nebraska. We feel you need to be aware of the very real legal consequences you could face.
Our next piece of advice is to try and put all of your lines of communication – between sales enablement and sales leadership; between sales leadership and management; between sales management and sales reps; and between sales reps and customers – in as few places as possible.
Ideally, there’s one communication command center, a place online that can house as much of your internal dialogue (including onboarding and ongoing training) as possible. We’d call it the CCC, but Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, OR wouldn’t like it.
A CRM, if properly equipped, can be a wonderful tool, as can a project management platform. A lot of sales orgs use something like Slack for real-time talk, and of course there’s the ubiquitous Zoom for video conferencing.
One solution that would help immensely and not take a lot of effort is to bring your selling motions into your CRM (which is where they should be anyway). That cuts down on the number of places where vital account info is stored. This boosts collaboration between sales reps and their managers.
Bring These Selling Motions Into Your CRM:
- Key account management
- Revenue optimization
- Relationship mapping and org chart creation
- Content management
- Account planning
- Cross-selling and up-selling
- Updating prospect information
- Automating all of that stuff whenever possible
- Robots
With the exception of that last one, you can put all of the above into your CRM, like Salesforce. That will result in more productive sales as a whole, but also less stressful communication – and after what we’ve all been through lately, wouldn’t that just be, you know, grand?
The two areas we talked about are really focused on the same general theme : cutting anything that wastes time and adopting anything that creates efficiency.
If you can do these two things, that tidal wave of opportunity we talked about will – you know what, we’ll use a different metaphor.
If you can do these two things, the Uncle Scrooge McDuck’s vault of opportunity will be open and ripe for plunder. You’ll be able to hit your sales enablement goals faster, with less frustration, and with more simplicity. Who doesn’t want all of that?
Conveniently, you can get started by checking out how we at Prolifiq have the means to consolidate and streamline your work by getting those valuable selling motions back where they belong: in the CRM. See for yourself with a quick demo. (Warning: it may make you ‘squee’ like a child.)