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    The MOST important thing to know about sales enablement

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    It’s not often that a piece of research comes out that really shakes the sales game. Recently, I believe that a CSO Insights report did just that.

    In their 2018 Sales Enablement Report, a number of really important data points were shared. Some of these proved what I saw in our consulting practice for years (I will share some of those thoughts in a moment).


    The absolute, most impactful data points were this:

    • Part 1: If you “do” sales enablement correctly, your quota attainment will outperform companies doing nothing at all by 23%.
    • Part 2: If you “do” sales enablement INCORRECTLY, your quota attainment will UNDER-PERFORM companies doing nothing at all by 11%.

    Go back and reread those stats for a moment. Because they blow my mind.

    This means that:

    • Being committed to sales enablement – but doing it poorly – will LOWER your performance.
    • If your competitor is doing it well – and you are not – you now have a 34% performance chasm to overcome (which also means less money to reinvest in your company compared to what the competitor is doing).
    • An increasing number of companies now have dedicated, in-house sales enablement (61% of all companies surveyed) – and some of those in-house teams might actually be doing harm to their own companies.

    This is astounding to me.

    Being committed to sales enablement – but doing it poorly – will LOWER your performance.
    Tim Ohai

    I have been an advocate for great sales enablement since before it was called sales enablement. And I am passionate about not only helping customers have great sales experiences, but also sellers having meaningful, productive careers. But this data says that, unless you are one of the companies doing it well, sales enablement still has a long way to go.

    In other words, too many organizations have just re-labeled their training/sales ops/marketing players as "sales enablement" and are not seeing expected results. The data clearly shows that doing sales enablement in the right way will drive win rates and quota attainment.

    We have to change the narrative, folks. The most important thing to know about sales enablement is that you MUST do it correctly - because doing it incorrectly will hurt your business.

    So, what does “doing it” correctly look like?

    Here are some of the insights from the report that answer this question:

    • Get your executives involved. Companies that have sales enablement set up with a formal approach and charter experience have 30% better win rate. I believe this is because true enablement requires the kind of functional integration that only executives can drive.
    • Align enablement to the customer’s path. We have long advocated that this is a fundamental requirement for successful sales enablement, and I was delighted to see this point validated by the data. Again, quota attainment grows significantly from 44.9% (customer’s path not considered) up to 58.5% (an actual increase of 30%).
    • Sales coaching is still your best way to make an impact. There is a 25% difference in win rate (from 43.9% up to 54.7%) just by making sure that sales coaching is formally defined and monitored (as opposed to allowing managers do what they want randomly). But more importantly, consider how sales coaching will make every sales enablement effort that much more effective. Everything from rolling out new tools and messaging to on-boarding new sellers can be improved by ensuring that your sales managers are coaching their people.

    There really is much more to say about how to “do” sales enablement correctly, but I’ll let you read the report before going any further.

    Let me leave you with this: Selling is a constantly evolving – and increasingly complex – business. As a result, it requires a new approach to making it both effective and efficient. Please don’t leave it to happen organically. Make it a strategic priority to embed sales enablement in your overall strategic planning – because how you execute is as critical as what you execute.

    I mua. Onward and upward.

    Article originally published on Jan 30th, 2019 on
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    Tim Ohai
    Published June 2, 2019
    By Tim Ohai

    Global Lead, Sales Process & Methodology at Workday

    With well over a decade’s worth of experience in developing sales team performance, Tim has helped Fortune 500 companies design and adopt selling solutions internationally, build sales systems that increase revenue and customer loyalty and create genuine coaching cultures.

    Find out more about Tim Ohai on LinkedIn