In CSO Insight’s 4th Annual Report: Sales Enablement Grows Up, sales enablement is defined as “a strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add value in every customer interaction.” Nuances aside, why should consulting firms care about sales enablement? Here’s why: sales enablement leads to more revenue on the table and deeper client relationships.
According to a recent study by Hinge Marketing “79% of consultants list attracting and developing clients as their biggest challenge.” Pursuit time is increasingly cannibalized by administrative duties, a buyer’s time is hard to come by, and expectations for differentiating and conveying unique value in these conversations are sky high. Enter: sales enablement.
In our recent webinar with Tamara Schenk of CSO Insights, “The Secret to Highly Effective Sales and Marketing”, we touched on three C’s to sales enablement success: 1) putting your client as the primary focus, 2) collaborating with clear accountability, and 3) content management. Here are the takeaways:
Putting Your Client as the Primary Focus
With client services being a #1 priority for all successful consulting firms, this “C” is a slam dunk. The pursuit and engagement process for firms is tedious and time consuming, which makes aligning your firm’s services to the client’s path imperative. Doing so improves client interactions, deepens visibility, and allows you to better understand the buyer’s journey. With this, you’ll have more comprehensive client personas and a better understanding of the relevant messaging and content that will resonate at the right time. The result: quicker pursuit cycles and more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
Collaborating with Clear Accountability
Pursuit and engagement cycles today are flooded with duplicate content efforts from client to client. When creating deliverables, consultants can spend hours asking coworkers for materials to repurpose and collaborating on slides, creating multiple, scattered versions. Prioritizing cross-functional collaboration allows marketing to support basic needs such as content organization, and business development to spend more time working on deal strategy and sharing tribal knowledge. The result: increased credibility and differentiated services.
Content Management
Finally: content management. The content challenges aforementioned bog down the entire professional services industry. Finding and building content are the primary tasks keeping folks at top consulting firms from doing their jobs. Seismic helps solve this problem by 1) automating content creation at scale to quickly provide project deliverables, and 2) creating a centralized location to efficiently surface updates, messaging, and client-facing materials. The result: reduced time wasted creating deliverables and increased opportunities for billable hours leading to increased revenue.
For a deeper dive into CSO Insight’s research on sales enablement, watch the on-demand webinar here. If you’re interested in learning more about how Seismic can partner with your firm on sales enablement, visit our Consulting solution page.
