The New Sales Enablement Mandate

Gaps in Sales Enablement

When Gartner speaks, people listen...and this time, it has released a new mandate to tackle what it considers to be the 3 distinct gaps holding Enablement back.

So what are the gaps they have identified and how are they tackling them?

Gartner believes that the 3 gaps are:

• A limited focus on strategic vision
• An over-reliance on training
• An inability to measure impact

Overcoming Enablement Gaps

Focusing on seller behavior change correlated with commercial success is key to solving these challenges. But how can you make this a reality?

Let's break it down...

• Identifying the behaviors needed for success is a key starting point in the journey. Walking backward from your business goals and identifying the lagging indicators that would signify success is your first step. However, you then need to go further to understand the leading indicators or the first green shoots you would expect to see along this journey.
• The next step is to identify the skills, behaviors, and knowledge that underpin these leading indicators and are critical to success. What should your sales reps be doing to drive these outcomes and what competencies would they be exhibiting? Don't forget that Top Performer Analysis can also add a layer of insight here - which attributes do your top performers share?
• Now you know the competencies to focus on for maximum impact. But blanket Enablement should be a thing of the past so how can you identify where gaps exist in these competencies amongst your team? A benchmarking exercise is the answer here but consistency and objectivity are key to ensure your analysis is accurate and will help you to deliver the best results. Be clear on the positive and negative indicators for each competency (and this should be adapted to cater for every level of sales rep), and spell out the expectation for each level of the rating scale.
• Last, and by no means least, you have to be able to measure the change in these competencies and importantly the impact it is having on your business goals. Now you know the skill you want to focus on and the sales metric you want to influence, you can use tools like Richardson's Accelerate Sales Performance System to prove a correlation between them.

As you can imagine, we think that putting competencies at the heart of your Enablement approach and measuring the impact of behavior change on business goals is the ideal way to deliver maximum value. But remember, your approach to achieving this also has to be sustainable. With the best will in the world, an Excel spreadsheet that has to be manually updated with data that takes hours to extract from your tech stack is not going to stand the test of time. And the chances are, by the time it is up to date, you will already have lost valuable time to act on some of its learnings - take it from our many customers who have tried before they saw the light and turned to e4enable for help.

If you would like to follow their lead and see how our platform can analyze your data and provide intelligent recommendations then get in touch - we would love to show you!