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The Sales Enablement Manager to improve the overall performance of your sales team
Sales Enablement is a growing discipline. While the function is fully embodied in the United States and the United Kingdom, it is beginning to catch up and gain momentum in France. To help you better understand this new profession, we propose an article on Sales Enablement, the Sales Enablement Manager profession and the role it plays in improving your sales performance.
WHAT IS SALES ENABLEMENT ?
Sales Enablement aims to provide real-time sales and marketing alignment, to significantly improve the company's sales performance and to create a new sales experience during appointments.
The Sales Enablement application supports the salesperson throughout the sales cycle:
- Before the meeting: the application allows the sales representative to accelerate and improve the preparation of meetings by quickly identifying the most effective marketing content needed to personalize the sales approach.
- During the meeting: whether in person or remotely, the application allows the sales representative to modernize his approach and to be more relevant in his argumentation as well as in the answers he gives to the buyer's questions.
- After the meeting : the application allows the creation of the visit report to be automated directly in the CRM and to provide precise information on the meeting. The time spent by the salesperson on administrative tasks is thus greatly reduced, so he/she can devote more time to sales-related actions.
The Sales Enablement tool goes far beyond the operational support of the salesperson! It also allows the marketing & sales management to collect precise information related to the meeting: Which offers were presented? What is the sales path followed by the sales person? What content did the salesperson share with the buyer? All the data collected allows the management to make the right decisions, to continuously improve the company's sales performance and therefore to generate more revenue.
Presented during the recruitment process, the Sales Enablement application reinforces your attractiveness to salespeople. It modernizes the company's image and makes it easier for salespeople to project themselves into their future activity. It also allows you to better integrate the sales person, to support and accelerate their development. The development of the sales force's knowledge is essential in improving your sales performance. Thanks to daily exposure to training content, "offers/services are better mastered by salespeople, better understood by buyers, and sales increase," says Vianney Leveugle, Marketing & Sales Director at GEODIS Distribution & Express.
All departments benefit from the use of a Sales Enablement application. Whether you are a Marketing Department, a Sales Department or a Human Resources Department, you can support your sales force towards excellence. Moreover, since the stakes of Sales Enablement are high, a new function has naturally emerged: the Sales Enablement Manager! We'll tell you more in the rest of this article.
THE SALES ENABLEMENT MANAGER: AT THE HEART OF THE DIGITALIZATION OF YOUR SALES ORGANIZATION
The Sales Enablement Manager is the link between the Marketing, Sales and Human Resources Departments that facilitates the achievement of objectives. In the company, he/she is naturally positioned at the intersection of the sales and marketing teams and has the main missions of managing the performance of the sales teams, aligning them with the company's objectives and measuring their performance. It is his responsibility to Deploying and leading programs, tools and initiatives that will meet the challenges of the departments while facilitating the work of salespeople in their daily lives. He/she must ensure good alignment between the sales and marketing teams and make sure that the sales force has all the necessary elements (content, tools, technology, training) to improve its performance. Depending on the organization, his or her missions are based on the following areas:
1) Align sales & marketing teams
The Sales Enablement Manager is the link between the sales and marketing teams. He helps both teams work better together and perform with the tools & processes. He also ensures that all team content is optimized, consistent and easily accessible, which streamlines and improves the entire sales process.
2) Improve the sales force technology stack
The Sales Enablement Manager is looking for tools that improve the salesperson's performance on a daily basis. If he wants to facilitate the collection of customer data in the CRM, he must provide his sales team with a Sales Enablement application. This is the case with Salesapps, which automates the creation of visit reports directly in the CRM.
3) Contribute to transforming marketing content made available to sales representatives into sales content
The Sales Enablement Manager ensures that marketing content is designed for sales, organizes it so that sales teams can easily use it and personalize their approach with the buyer in an appointment. He/she is confronted with various issues that hinder the development of the teams' performance: How to increase the use of marketing content by sales teams? How to make content accessible all the time? What content should be created so that the salesperson is more effective in meetings?
4) To contribute to the smooth running of commercial events
Within the framework of the launch of an offer/service, the Sales Enablement manager ensures that attention is paid to certain content. To do this, the Salesapps application has a notification system (highlighting specific content) and a gamification engine to stimulate sales force engagement. It also facilitates feedback from the field and highlights content during company highlights.
5) Analyze the performance of the sales force
The Sales Enablement Manager supports the development of the company's revenues by helping the management to better manage its activity. For example, he/she evaluates and measures the effectiveness of sales-related operations, monitors and analyzes the performance of training content and uses KPIs to identify areas for improvement.
6) Facilitate the integration and training of new sales representatives
The Sales Enablement Manager oversees all training programs. He/she is involved in the onboarding of new sales people and ensures that the ramp-up is quick and efficient. They also support the marketing team in creating training content for the sales force.
A day's work may involve strategic sales workshops, planning a new sales training program, creating content for a product launch, discussing a new campaign with marketing, analyzing the latest KPIs to define development areas, leading a training session with sales people, planning a sales launch or evaluating the use of a new sales enablement tool like Salesapps.
THE SALES ENABLEMENT MANAGER : AN EMERGING FUNCTION IN FRANCE
Sales Enablement is a discipline that remains behind in France due to a lack of knowledge and ownership on the subject. If the Sales Enablement Manager function is highly developed in the United States and the United Kingdom, it is still almost non-existent in France. There are many similar positions but they do not cover the entire discipline: Sales Enablement & Analysis Tools Manager, Methods & Tools Manager, Sales Animation Manager or Sales Performance Manager.
A delay confirmed by LinkedIn Sales Navigator by searching for functions including the term "Sales Enablement". The result (USA = 8242 | UK = 979 | Canada = 646 | France = 194) confirms how far we have to go before catching up with the US.
It must also be said that the term Sales Enablement is not necessarily the easiest to understand. In fact, it is still called Sales Enablement in France, even though we talk about sales assistance, sales performance improvement or sales force digitalization. Originally, Sales Enablement was born essentially with tools and applications intended for mobile sales people equipped with tablets. With the arrival of Windows 10, these solutions could not only be deployed on laptop environments (hybrid or not), but also on fixed PCs. "The level of hardware equipment was a major obstacle to the development of Sales Enablement in the early days," says Stéphane Renger, CEO of Sales Enablement. underlines Stéphane Renger, CEO at Salesapps.
Sales Enablement is growing rapidly, and the role of Sales Enablement Manager will have to develop in France to boost the sales performance of companies. Today, the stakes are clearly identified by the marketing and sales departments. The expectations of the sales population on these digital tools are very high: 77% of sales people believe that sales techniques must be modernized (Uptoo-Opinionway).
