Sales Enablement: Strategies to Drive Strong Results

Many sales organizations have developed buyer personas for key individuals or roles. Just as individual personas can vary within the same role, so do organizations vary within the same industry. This requires a tailored approach.

Ninety-four percent of B2B purchases are made amid organizational changes. A buyer’s ability to navigate those changes can make or break their ability to buy and implement a new solution. Recognizing this broader organizational context — and how an organization handles change — allows sellers to tailor their customer engagement and better position their offerings. 

Sales enablement leaders can equip sellers to understand and recognize different enterprise customer profiles and target their engagement approach accordingly. We identified four distinct profiles — broadly distributed across company sizes, geographies, purchase categories and industries — that are highly likely to shape multiple buying decisions at the same company. These profiles include the following: 

• Traditionalist organizations have fixed structures and systems that avoid risk and change. They typically care about realizing the benefits of a single change, rather than managing complex interdependencies.
  

  Traditionalists have the longest sales cycles of the four profiles, and they are most likely to report purchase stalls, or multiple points when they stopped making progress. A simple buying checklist can help Traditionalists acknowledge completed tasks and feel ready to move forward. Likewise, messaging that emphasizes low-risk, readily available support can help them feel secure in the face of change.

• Fence-Sitter organizations fail to commit to a strong culture or direction. They may be looking for proven products and services that support continuous improvement or business modernization, instead of radical innovation.

  Fence-Sitters spend more time on independent online research instead of meeting with suppliers or other members of the buying group. They stick to traditional channels, such as supplier websites, and they report lower social media use. Targeted outreach and guided selling tools should encourage these buyers to consider other stakeholders’ perspectives and needs. Equip sellers with useful commercial insights to shock Fence-Sitters out of complacency and motivate more decisive action.

Sales enablement teams have been using AI for years, but the path to true value and overcoming skepticism about machine learning algorithms has been long. 

Today, AI is used in prescriptive recommendations, such as next-best actions or recommended content for a seller to share. It’s used in training and coaching to determine sentiment or skill level. A majority of respondents (84%) in Gartner’s 2023 Technology’s Impact on Seller Productivity Survey said their systems provide advice on next-best actions to take with customers/prospects.

The use of those insights and prescriptive recommendations can now be extended to create personalized and relevant content — for example, by using generative AI’s ability to summarize a previous meeting. The intelligence in technology today is the foundation that generative AI will build on to assist in helping sellers create messages and content for buyers.

To many, this new opportunity to shape seller behavior feels new and exciting. But as generative AI emerges, it also has the potential to cause risks that must be mitigated. 

How should sales enablement leaders drive adoption and value with GenAI while protecting corporate intellectual property and their organization’s brand and reputation?

Start by safely and effectively creating and sending messages and content using the concepts of generative value messaging (GVM). Influence seller behavior around generative AI by ensuring sellers understand how to use it. Develop generative AI literacy, and enable sellers to internalize the difference between GVM and low-quality, value-destroying content.

Seller energy and persistence are critical to commercial success. Yet many chief sales officers struggle to engage and motivate sellers. Our research reveals two opposing forces at play that influence seller motivation.

• Drive. We define drive as seller motivation toward work. Sellers experiencing high drive report feeling mentally engaged at work, taking initiative, being persistent and feeling ready to act at any time. 

  • Increasing drive can help raise quotas and lower burnout, making it seem like a promising strategy. Seventy-six percent of sellers experience a high level of drive or motivation toward work. But there’s a catch: Drive is only part of seller motivation. 

• Drag. We define drag as the feeling of demotivation away from work. To motivate sellers in today’s environment, it’s critical to understand drag.

  • Sellers experiencing drag report feeling bored, procrastinating or avoiding work altogether, struggling to focus, or feeling like they are going through the motions. We found that 83% of sellers experience high or medium drag.

The dynamics of seller drive and drag are complex. For many sellers, these opposing forces present themselves simultaneously in various aspects of their day-to-day work and are not simply two extremes on a single spectrum.

With seller drive already high, the greatest opportunity for commercial returns is to reduce drag

CSOs tend to invest in drive. Yet our research reveals that high levels of seller drag are detrimental to quota attainment and seller retention. Specifically, we discovered that:

• The average quota attainment for low-drag sellers is 1.7 times higher than for high-drag sellers

• The majority of high-drag sellers (70%) reported actively looking for a new job, compared to only 7% of low-drag sellers

Four factors contributing to drag have the largest impact on quota attainment and active job hunting:

• Lack of development opportunities. A lack of internal growth opportunities leaves sellers unable to envision a long-term future within the organization. 

• Feeling like a cog in a machine. Emphasizing standardized, repeatable sales plays, while generally valuable to the team as a whole, can leave sellers feeling they have little control over their work or value to the organization. 

The 2022 Gartner B2B Buyer Survey shows that 75% of customers often prefer to learn and engage using digital channels. In the virtual environment, sales enablement leaders must ensure their sellers have appropriate virtual selling competencies.

The increasing technology use required by virtual selling creates significant opportunities for data-literate sellers to extract value from the available data, whether to develop competitive selling strategies or share relevant insights with customers. For instance, tools that capture customers’ digital body language and turn the findings into insights can help create a more tailored and high-value sales experience.

To elevate sales performance in the virtual environment, add these three key seller competencies to your seller competency profiles:

• Digital dexterity. A seller’s digital dexterity can take various forms. It includes basic behaviors, such as using digital tools to effectively collaborate with remote colleagues. It also includes higher-order activities, such as leveraging an organization’s artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling capabilities to decide the next selling motion.

• Data literacy. Data literacy captures sellers’ ability to understand relevant data and create insights to inform next steps in a sales interaction. Closing this data literacy gap is important since sellers must be data literate to draw relevant, actionable insights from data for improved sales decision making, such as next steps in a sales interaction.

• Sense Making. In the past few years, buyers have reported a dramatic shift to virtual buying, while also struggling with the difficulty of making a purchase decision in an information-saturated environment. Sense Making, helping customers make sense of the information they’ve encountered to make confident purchase decisions, is a skill to help sellers address this challenge.