Despite sales organisations investing in sales enablement initiatives, 77% of sellers report that they struggle to complete their assigned tasks efficiently, according to a new survey by Gartner, aiming to understand sellers’ sentiment and emotional reactions toward technology – and its impact across key levers of seller productivity.
“When sales leaders spend on sales technologies, training and development, and sales enablement they expect them to drive seller effectiveness and productivity,” says Shayne Jackson, senior director analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. “However, those responsible for enablement are falling short of expectations in capitalising on these resources and efforts.”
In a survey of 213 chief sales offices and senior sales executives, conducted in November and December of 2022, 82% of sales leaders said that sales enablement content or delivery must significantly change to meet revenue goals in five years. CSOs must move away from treating enablement as simply a learning and training provider and instead focus enablement teams on seller behaviour change. This results in better:
• Alignment: Enablement activities that drive the behaviours necessary to execute the sales strategy.
• Attribution: Focusing on triggering concrete behaviors allows sales organisations to influence specific behavioural changes with enablement initiatives.
• Accountability: The ability to attribute behaviour changes (and ultimately commercial performance) to specific enablement initiatives ensures accountability.
To do this, CSOs must not only bring enablement leaders into their strategic planning process, but also align with them on the behaviours needed to make their sales strategy a success. In addition, they must require enablement leaders to develop robust measurement approaches that allow them to attribute specific behavioural changes to enablement initiatives and then tie these back to sales goals and KPIs.
“Two key examples of triggers are behavioural nudges and just-in-time learning,” says Jackson. “Organisations that have used just-in-time learning and behavioural nudges in their enablement approach have seen substantial commercial results compared with those that have not used them.”