Bray Cory - The Sales Enablement Playbook

The Sales
Enablement Playbook

The Sales
Enablement Playbook

Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey

2017 Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1546744762
ISBN-13: 9781546744764
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017908986
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina

Table of Contents

Introduction

Sales Enablement Is an Ecosystem

Sales Enablement Goal: Define sales enablement and set the stage for the rest of this book.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954

I t is difficult to have a conversation about revenue with a CEO in any industry today without the subject of sales enablement coming up. While conducting research for this book, we posed the question What is sales enablement? and heard answers such as strategy, onboarding, pricing, technology, sales methodology, training, I dont know, and many more valid and insightful responses. The sole commonality was that every definition supports the customer-facing employees engagement with a variety of stakeholders, which requires cross-functional collaboration. We call this an ecosystem.

The Ecosystem

Eco in Latin means environment or habitat, while system is defined as a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole. Sound a bit like your organization? If you are competing for revenue in todays marketplace, it should!

That said, everyone is clamoring for a definition. How do I talk about this ecosystem in a way that avoids buzzwords and brand bias, and is instead measurable and transparent? Based on our research involving conversations with thousands of people in sales, marketing, customer success, and executive management, weve found that:

Sales Enablement is the concept of extending a prospect-centric mindset to all departments within an organization.

How to Use This Book

This book is a reference product. While the assumption is wed focus on sales, a lot of what we cover is not sales specific and branches out into other departments within the company. It is divided into stand-alone chapters to allow you to find whats relevant to your role and your organization. Because sales enablement is an ecosystem, we encourage executives to share the book with their peers to create opportunities for collaboration and alignment around sales objectives.

CEOs can use this book as a means of benchmarking best practices while fostering a sales enablement ecosystem and culture. Sales executives can use the collaborative strategies and tactics in this book to ensure that their sales team is equipped, efficient, accountable, and skilled. Non-sales executives can identify ways in which their role and department can support customer acquisition, retention, and growth. Sales enablement practitioners can leverage this playbook as a reference and a tool for initiating interdepartmental conversations, assessing opportunities for greatest impact, and outlining tactics for execution on a daily basis.

Many people are trying to define sales enablement in hopes of creating head count, justifying budgets and salaries, selling the latest technology, and posturing for competitive advantage. Our goal in this book is to identify the opportunities that exist inside of a sales enablement ecosystem, the origin of these opportunities (trends and analysis), and the means by which high-performing organizations execute for greatest impact. Youll learn how sales enablement is meant to be applied as an ecosystemnot a technique, a role, or a technology platform exclusively, though each of these plays a part.

A required competency for effectively managing a sales enablement ecosystem is coaching. We struggled with whether or not to include a chapter on coaching and decided that a single chapter does not do the subject justice. The ability to move a process or individual from a current state to a target state is essential to the success of sales enablement.

MetricsEach chapter includes recommended metrics. Until now, quantifying the effectiveness of enablement programs has been an enigma. Transparency and metric-driven outcomes are the path to budgeting, success measurement, and true organizational impact.

DiagramsWe didnt get fancy because the concepts are not complicated. We are thankful to Jillians in San Francisco for the gallons of iced tea we consumed there during countless evenings and weekends while compiling this book, and the napkins upon which our diagrams were drawn.

LanguageThe words product and demo will frequently appear throughout this book, though the concepts are meant to extend to companies who offer services and dont include a demo as part of their sales process. Additionally, sales development rep (SDR) refers to someone who prospects and starts a sales conversation (opener), whereas account executive (AE) is a closer.

PlaysIf you have a ton on your plate and this book will likely sit in your bag for three months before you get to it, then just check out the Plays at the end of each chapter. These summaries will give you actionable quick-and-dirty tactics.

Additional MaterialYou can find more helpful resources on our website, SalesEnablementPlaybook.com.

Chapter 1

The Evolution of Sales Enablement

I n the 1980s, selling systems such as IBMs Strategic Selling, Miller Heiman, Sandler Sales Training, and others were all the rage. They gained prominence in organizations that discovered that buyers were becoming more sophisticated and more vendors were coming online, which required sellers to move from being peddlers to becoming consultants.

In the 1990s, the Internet began to make buyer-seller communication easier, to introduce new models of advertising, and to make information readily available like never before.

As far back as 2008, articles were published about the concept of sales enablement and the necessity for sales support in the B2B sales organization. In 2010, research firm Forrester published a 20-page analysis that announced Sales Enablement Is the Bridge Between Go-to-Market Strategy and Tactical Execution, warning that inefficiencies left unchecked will eventually wreak havoc on balance sheets.

Folks Started Paying Attention

Catalysts were obvious: the Internet rapidly changed B2B sales. Where a trusted adviser relationship, expertise, and availability won the day previously, sales reps now had to adapt to a nimble and well-informed buyer with access to many options. For better or worse, e-mail became both a marketing and a selling tool, and the poorly used PowerPoint became the bedrock upon which many unnecessary presentations were built.

Proposals were churned out like popcorn, websites proliferated, videoconferencing allowed for tedious demos, webinars delivered superfluous information, prospect lists became commoditized, cell phones allowed prospects to be reached anywhere, and white papers and case studies could be published and distributed with ease. And then, of course, came the tool of all tools: customer relationship management (CRM). Now we could keep track of everything in one place, automate processes, run reports, monitor progress, and feed the beast.