Sales Enablement: A Constant Engagement for Commercial Success
A discussion on areas of focus when creating and nurturing a successful business development operation.
What makes a successful business development operation in a company? Is it their ability to generate revenue, profits or LTV?
The answer is of course, that, and much more...
Whether a start up, an established business, or an enterprise, business development teams are key contributors to their company’s product success, beyond just revenue generation. Depending on the size and structure of a company, its commercial operation responsibilities can span market research to partner selection, customer segmentation and testing, pricing strategy and agreements with vendors or customers. These activities can be shared among product and business development teams. The product teams need feedback and insight from their partners in the field to continue to optimize their products and stay ahead of the competition. In start up environments, as product cycles become increasingly shorter and competitive pressure mounts, firms must also increase their focus on the business development side of operations.
Unfortunately, many sales professionals are unable to operate at such a high level due to lack of proper product knowledge or supporting processes in their organizations to receive and leverage their market insight. On the other hand, some companies attempt to meet their sales team’s demands for collateral and support to a point of chasing after the wrong market insights and product requirements.
A Winning Commercial Operation Promotes a Culture of Collaboration
Business development is the product team’s market developer, market intelligence monitor, customer service, development partner, and product testing support. All these activities require a highly coordinated approach between sales, marketing and product teams. This means that their contributions or lack thereof can make or break a company. When done right, the commercial team engages in a relay race to defend the company’s market position and arm the development team with key insights into the customer’s unmet needs to build better products.
Fostering a productive relationship between sales and product teams is essential for any business to succeed. It’s important that both teams understand each other’s roles, objectives, and goals in order to ensure that they are working together towards a common goal. There are several ways to foster this relationship including setting up regular meetings, where members can discuss strategies, ideas and feedback; creating joint initiatives such as customer outreach campaigns or product launches; and providing ongoing training on new products or services. Additionally, it’s important to provide reps with helpful tools such as white papers or case studies related to the products so they can better understand how customers have benefitted from using them. By taking these steps, companies will be able to build stronger relationships between their sales and product teams which will ultimately lead to increased success.
A Habit of the Strong
As a successful product development and commercialization requires a robust and comprehensive go-to-market strategy and tactical planning, a strong commercial operation requires a consistent and high quality sales enablement process during and post- commercialization.
Sales enablement (Figure-1) is the practice of equipping sales teams with resources, processes, and technology to help them close more deals faster. It entails providing salespeople with the knowledge they need to understand customer needs, identifying opportunities, delivering compelling messages that resonate with buyers, and using data-driven insights to optimize their activities. Sales enablement also involves helping sales reps build relationships by understanding customers’ challenges and developing solutions that will meet those needs.
This can involve training on new products or services as well as
creating content such as case studies and white papers that demonstrate how customers have benefited from a company’ offering.
By enabling sales teams in this way, companies are better positioned to win more business while achieving higher levels of customer satisfaction.
Sales Enablement: Do it Early and Do it Often
When launching a new product, sales training is essential in order to ensure that the sales team has all of the knowledge and resources they need to be successful. Sales training should cover not only the features and benefits of the new product, but also how it can address customer needs in an effective way. Additionally, it’s important to provide sales reps with tools such as white papers or case studies that demonstrate how customers have benefitted from using your offering.
Whether creating a brand new sales team or growing it over time, consistent and clear training, process development, and analytics are essential to running an optimized commercial team. By involving the sales team at the right time into a commercialization process, companies can improve their offerings and build a strong client base for their products.
Overall, sales enablement is beneficial to the performance and satisfaction of the business development team and enables the product team to leverage market insights faster and more accurately.
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Feel free to comment here or reach out via email.