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Sales Enablement Manager - Definition and Complete Guide 2024
Sales Enablement is a fast-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, here's an article on Sales Enablement, the Sales Enablement Manager job 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.
Introduced during the recruitment process, the Sales Enablement application enhances your attractiveness to sales reps. It modernizes the company's image and makes it easier for sales reps to see themselves in the context of their future activity. It also makes it easier to integrate sales reps, and to support and accelerate their skills development through training modules.
Developing your sales force's knowledge is essential to improving your sales performance. Thanks to daily exposure to training content, "offers/services are better mastered by sales reps, better understood by buyers, and sales increase", testifies Vianney Leveugle, Marketing & Sales Director at GEODIS Distribution & Express.
Using a Sales Enablement application is a win-win situation for all stakeholders. Whether you're in Marketing, Sales or Human Resources, you'll be supporting your sales force towards excellence. What's more, with so much at stake in Sales Enablement, a new position has naturally emerged: that of Sales Enablement Manager! Find out 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, facilitating the achievement of sales reps objectives. Within the company, the Sales Enablement Manager is naturally positioned at the intersection of the sales and marketing teams, and his or her main missions are to manage the performance of the sales teams, align them with the company's objectives, and measure their performance.
He/she is responsible for deploying and coordinating programs, tools and initiatives that respond to the challenges of management, while facilitating the day-to-day work of sales reps . He/she must ensure that sales & marketing teams are perfectly aligned, and that the sales force has all the necessary elements (sales & marketing content, tools, technology, training courses) to improve performance. Depending on the organization, the Sales & Marketing Manager's missions can be divided into 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) Help transform the marketing content made available to sales reps into sales content
The Sales Enablement Manager ensures that marketing content is designed for sales, organizing it so that sales teams can easily use it and personalize their approach with the buyer in an appointment. The Sales Enablement Manager is confronted with a number of issues that hamper the development of team performance:
- How can we increase the use of marketing content by sales teams?
- How do you make content accessible all the time?
- What kind of content can you create to make salespeople more effective in meetings?
4) To contribute to the smooth running of commercial events
As part of the launch of an offer/service, the Sales Enablement manager ensures that attention is focused on certain sales reps and marketing content. To this end, the Salesapps application features 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 sales force performance
The Sales Enablement Manager supports the company's revenue development by helping management to better manage its business. 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) Facilitating the integration and training of newcomers sales reps
The Sales Enablement Manager supervises all training programs. He or she is involved in the integration of new sales reps employees, and ensures that they are brought up to speed quickly and efficiently. He or she also supports the marketing team in the creation of training content for the sales force.
A day's work may involve strategic sales reps 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 areas for development, running a training session with sales reps, planning the sales launch or evaluating the use of a new sales support tool such as Salesapps.
The Sales Enablement Manager: an emerging function in France
Sales enablement is a discipline that is still lagging behind in France, due to a lack of knowledge and ownership on the subject. While the function of Sales Enablement Manager is highly developed in the United States and the United Kingdom, it is still virtually non-existent in France. There are a number of 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 has to be said that Sales Enablement is not necessarily the easiest term to grasp. In fact, it's still called Sales Enablement in France, even though we talk about sales assistance, sales performance improvement and sales force digitalization. Originally, Sales Enablement was essentially born with tools and apps designed for nomadic sales populations equipped with tablets. With the arrival of Windows 10, these solutions have not only been able to be deployed on laptop environments (hybrid or otherwise), but also on fixed PCs. "The level of hardware equipment greatly hindered the development of Sales Enablement in its early days" points out Stéphane Renger, CEO at Salesapps.
Sales Enablement is growing fast, and the role of Sales Enablement Manager will have to develop in France to boost sales performance. Today, the challenges are clearly identified by marketing and sales departments. In fact, sales people have very high expectations of these digital tools: 77% of sales reps believe that sales techniques need to be modernized (Uptoo-Opinionway). Sales Enablement delivers ROI! On average, our customers have seen the following results: a 90% reduction in the print budget (Zolux), an estimated 45 minutes saved in preparing for an appointment (EDF), a 12.5% increase in sales (Groupe Adéquat), and a 4-fold reduction in the time it takes to integrate a new sales rep (Thibault Bergeron).
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