If you listened to our first episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast, you heard Scott Santucci discuss one of the biggest challenges of working in sales enablement: random acts of sales support. At most companies, sales enablement is not thought of as a strategic, ongoing process, but more as the “fix it” job. With no formalized processes in place to help sales enablement individuals or teams plan, execute and measure their success, they end up doing everything from creating one-off sales materials to hiring, training and firing. Without a strategy in place to manage, prioritize and delegate these random acts of sales support, sales enablement leaders are stuck feeling like the VPs of Broken Things. Scott claimed that this is because there is no universal, agreed-upon definition for sales enablement and its deliverables, so every fix-it checklist ends up on sales enablement’s desk. Scott then highlighted the four major areas of “brokenness” in sales enablement from his own experience: training and talent management, demand management, administrative capabilities, and content management and distribution.
In our newest episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast, we continue the conversation of sales enablement “brokenness” with Nicole O’Brien, Senior Consultant at Tiferet Group. Nicole’s vast experience in marketing and communications has shaped her unique view of sales enablement, especially surrounding content management and distribution. We dive into this area of brokenness specifically, and why it’s integral for Marketing and Sales to connect the dots through content to provide a better customer experience.
“Marketing is off creating quality, beautiful content, but the problem is that this content doesn’t live in the real world; it lives in Marketing dream world. In reality, content typically doesn’t hit the mark, resonate with the customer, or do any of the things it intends to do [like create a personalized buyer experience, shorten sales cycles, or drive revenue]. It’s never the right content at the right time. We as marketers are spending millions of dollars creating assets that aren’t usable or findable by Sales,” Nicole shares.
In this episode, we also delve into organizations’ reluctance to change: it’s not easy to shift your entire sales and marketing mindset to one that acts as a single, cohesive entity if you’ve been working in silos for generations. But, as Nicole shares, “these behemoth organizations are still operating the same way they did decades ago, in a world that’s moving faster and has more information than ever…those things aren’t going to change,” so it’s up to organizations to change themselves.
But how? With such antiquated practices and processes, it’s next to impossible to determine where to begin. Learn more about sales enablement brokenness in Nicole’s newest blog post, Sales Enablement Angst: Top Four Problem Areas. You can also listen to this episode of the Sales Enablement Shift podcast featuring Nicole to better understand the gravity of the disconnect between sales and marketing. Recognizing brokenness isn’t enjoyable, but addressing it and formulating a plan to tackle misalignment is the only way to properly enable sales.
