Sales Success with Enablement Assessment

Introduction

Your Sales Team needs to be confident in the abilities of the Marketing Team and others in the organization for them to be effective in their sales efforts.

1. Do you know the marketing and internal issues that the Sales Team is facing?
2. Does the Sales Team feel that they are being listened to?
3. Is there a plan to make improvements so that the Sales Team can increase sales?

If the answer is no to any of these questions then the best way to find out is to ask the Sales Team what they think.  Determine what the Sales Team needs from a marketing and non-marketing perspective via an easy to answer assessment survey.  This sales enablement assessment provides a baseline that can be used to determine what needs to be worked on.

My friend, Judi Uttal, wrote an excellent blog post on the subject titled “Measuring Success – The Sales Enablement Survey“, where she discusses the affect of the assessment survey on the Marketing Team, Sales Team and her company.  Her post prompted me to write this post.

Benefits

The benefits of a sales enablement assessment are multiple including:

• Helps direct limited marketing resources
• Assists in determining marketing department budgeting
• Unites an organization (Sales, Marketing, Operations) around a common mission
• Provides a quantitative measurement of success

Assessment Specifics

So what questions should be on this assessment. Well, it depends on the specifics of the organization.  The contents is determined via meetings with managers of the teams affected including Sales.  The assessment should ask about the importance and satisfaction to identified items. For example here are some specifics that could be included:

• B2C company would be more concerned with effectiveness and importance of their ads (TV, radio, print, etc.)
• Most companies would be interested in their competitive information
• Company with OEM channel would mention OEM awareness in the assessment
• Product selling company would be interested in the availability of a product road map
• Reseller channel company would be concerned with their partner program
• Organizations that have a CRM system would care about its effectiveness and the data it contains
• List of the marketing activities being done currently (events, webinars, social media, etc.) with importance to Sales Team and the team’s satisfaction of these activities

Assessment Process

Here is my suggested process for sales enablement assessment:

1. Discussions with management on what questions to ask
2. Creation of assessment
3. Determination of who should receive assessment (create a list of Account Executive email addresses)
4. Send out assessment
5. Analyze and present results
6. Determine actions to be taken and execute on them (put them in the task management system)
7. Repeat survey in 6 months and review results (hopefully better)

Conclusion

You need to have someone perform the assessment and analyze the results who is not emotionally tied to the organization.  And not bogged down by day to day activities.  The organization must be dedicated to making the changes necessary from the assessment results.

Remember the Peter Drucker quotes: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” and “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

The sales enablement assessment provides measurement and informs management of the right things to work on for the increase of sales.  You’ll be glad you did the assessment.  Provide me your thoughts on assessment for the Sales Team and the affect it had on your organization.  And if you need help with assessment execution please let me know.