I've got some news for you that may be a bit surprising - you will never sell anything to your prospects and customers. The reality is that your prospects and customers buy from you and "selling" them will have little to no impact on whether or not they buy from you.
Sales enablement is a series of actions you take that make it easy for people to buy from you. An effective sales enablement process:
Makes it easy for qualified buyers to find you when they're in an active buying cycle.
Educates all participants in the buying process and addresses their unique concerns.
Reduces the element of risk for buyers in their buying process.
Creates an atmosphere of trust in which buyers seek out your expertise to help them solve business problems.
In order to grow your company in the modern business environment, it's important to structure your sales and marketing processes to embrace the concept of sales enablement.
Remember the key element of retail selling from the old brick and mortar days? It was location - if you're store was not easily visible and accessible, few people would take the trouble to find you. A similar concept applies to modern knowledge-based businesses like professional services and technology companies. Buyers need to find you in order for you to make the shortlist in their buying process.
The old school way to get on buyers radar screens was to blast email lists with self-promotional messages and cold-call hundreds of potential buyers in hopes of getting one or two meetings. These methods simply don't work anymore. The most probable outcome of these approaches is that your email or voicemail will be deleted without being heard or seen. Worse yet, if you use these tactics, you will likely be labeled a spammer by the email providers making the deliverability of your messages impossible.
So just how can you make it easy for buyers to find you?
While many business executives don't invest in content marketing because they don't see an immediate return, those who do are eventually rewarded with a continuing flow of potential buyers to their websites. Here's an example of how our content drives a monthly flow of new qualified prospects to our website.
The reality of modern B2B sales is that the buying process is taking longer and more participants are involved. It's no longer enough to play golf with the CEO and ignore other participants in the buying process. An effective sales enablement process takes all players in the decision-making process into account and addresses the unique concerns of each.
A typical buying process will include the following roles.
In today's complex buying process, the economic buyer is increasingly relying on input from user and technical buyers before signing off on a purchase decision. That's why it's so important to recognize all the players in the buying process for your solution in your sales enablement.
Making a bad purchase decision can have enormous consequences for a business. The wrong choice can result in businesses missing revenue targets, losing customers and getting people involved in the decision fired. You can bet that your buyers are considering these risks in their decision-making processes. That's why it's so important to reduce the element of risk in your sales enablement strategy. Here are some things you can do to reduce perceived risk in your sales enablement process.
The B2B sales paradigm has shifted from selling to enabling qualified prospects to buy from you. This is the essence of sales enablement. Those that stick to the old school hard-sell routine will not be successful because they are not creating relationships based on trust. By using the tactics described above and monitoring how buyers interact with your sales enablement process, you will create a repeatable, scalable revenue generation machine.