Sales Enablement: The Missing Piece to the New Product Launch
Only 17% of sales forces are trending to make the new product revenue quota in 2012. Why are these companies missing the new product revenue quota?
Lack of Sales Enablement.
What is sales enablement? Getting the sales force ready to deliver the new product revenue quota.
Sales Enablement has 3 objectives:
- Deliver the new product revenue quota
- Hit short-term revenue goal while moving to new product.
- Get to reference-ability quickly. (land a couple big accounts to act as references)
There is a growing body of work on sales enablement. The first is the Sales Rep Playbook. One of the key outputs of the Sales Rep Playbook is a Buying Process Map. To build a buying process map, you must start with buyer persona research. The key with buyer persona research is doing it across each individual buyer that touches your product. Buyer personas are fictional representation of your ideal customer profile down to the individual level.
4 key objectives when you build buyer personas:
- Conduct Buyer Interviews—go to the buyers and understand what market problem your product solves. What is important to each individual buyer and what is standing in their way that your product helps remove?
- Gather and Analyze Insights—what trends did we notice between the users and buyers?
- Build Buyer Personas and Scenarios—build fictional representations of each buyer that the sales team can use, real time, while in a sales campaign. Getting inside the head of the various buyers is something your reps have been trying to do forever.
- Map to Buyer Goals and Buying Process-- How can marketing create relevant content that speaks to what the customer is thinking at key points in the buyers journey. You have to be able to market to the buyers when a sales person is not present.
What is the Impact on the VP of Sales? You lose your job because if you can’t help monetize this size of investment, what good are you?
Check out these stats:
- On average, these companies have spent between 11-29% of revenue on R&D
- 18-24 months in getting the new product “ready”
- Hours of grueling questions at the board meeting about why the overinvestment in this product is necessary
- 600-700 hours in “all hands” meetings speeding up the timeline for launch
- 12-14 people in focus groups, task forces and panels during alpha and beta
- Millions of dollars by marketing building use cases and ROI
If you are looking for a quick way to build a buying process map download this buying process tool.
Sales Enablement is a trend that is not going away; it is one of the fastest growing trends inside sales organizations.
Matt Sharrers on Google+
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