The value sales enablement brings to sales professionals

- Remember the good old days of sales, when the competition was the guy down the street, and ordering online meant the Sears catalog and waiting for, like, three months for your product to arrive? In those days, we as sales professionals, we ran the show. Our customers needed us way more than we needed them. They were limited in not only where they bought a product, but who they bought it from. Well, those days are long gone, and the options and choices our customers have are tenfold. How they buy, how our customers make decisions, how they get information, it has all changed. And those changes have severely impacted the sales cycle. The traditional selling skills of prospecting, making sales calls and presenting proposals, are just not enough anymore, not enough to capture your customers' attention, differentiate yourself from the competition, and meet your sales goals. To succeed in sales today, we need sales enablement to provide the support and do the heavy lifting to ensure we have the tools we need to focus on what we are best at, selling products and services. Sales enablement is an enhancement to our skills and one that is badly needed in a fact-paced, overcrowded, and constantly shifting marketplace. Here are just a few ways that sales enablement makes our lives as sales professionals easier. Number one, sales enablement makes you more effective and efficient as a sales professional. Sales enablement focuses on deeply understanding the buyer's journey. They don't focus on the sales process. Learning the right customers to target, understanding what information and products your customers really want, and when and how they want it. By knowing that information and then giving it to you as the sales professional, you enter the sales process better informed, prepared, and with a deeper understanding of how to sell in a way that your customer wants to buy. Second, sales enablement is so much more than a set of tools, research, and content. It's a process, a well-aligned process. This is not support in name only, but support that is well aligned and designed to work together. Sales enablement ensures that marketing is working with sales, that research is focused on the right customers, and the data and information you receive is aligned with the customers you want to attract. And lastly, sales enablement helps sales professionals stay committed to learning and growth. The sales cycle has changed so much, and sales enablement is a critical piece of ensuring that we as sales professionals have the resources we need to not only meet our goals but to exceed them. For a complete list of ways that sales enablement could benefit your sales team, go to the exercise file that goes with this movie. There you will find innovative and creative ways that companies are using sales enablement.