Activity-based enablement has been a hot topic of discussion in 2015. This comes in the wake of the CRM craze over the past few years; according to Gatepoint Research, over 74% of sales organizations are using CRM today. But CRM can be a blessing and a curse for sales reps. There is no denying the benefits it brings in terms of reporting, analytics, customer engagement, and more. But all of the manual updates and reporting can take up a lot of time that reps would otherwise spend selling.
CRM is not the only potential time-waster for sales reps. When you add up the time reps spend on administrative and manual tasks, prospect and company research, and content search, creation and updating, there’s not much time left for core selling activities. And it may actually be worse than you think: according to SiriusDecisions, sales reps are only spending 18% of their time in front of prospects. This is alarming to sales organizations everywhere, and is the reason many are turning to activity-based enablement.
What is activity-based enablement?
According to Jim Ninivaggi, Service Director of Sales Enablement at SiriusDecisions, activity-based enablement is “understanding the activities salespeople perform every day by looking for ways to enhance the productivity of every activity, not only by looking at ways to improve efficiency, but also by finding ways to maximize effectiveness and/or optimizing the ability to engage a buyer.” Activity-based enablement involves streamlining, minimizing or delegating the non-core selling tasks that are eating up a sales rep’s time—while still making sure sales reps are engaging prospects with the right content at the right time.
Why does activity-based enablement matter?
As it stands, sales reps spend 30 hours each month searching for and creating sales materials for prospect conversations and meetings. Seismic’s annual Salesforce Spotlight Report found that 80% of respondents spend more than two hours in work-related email, and 38% spend the entirety of their days in email. Further, 70% of respondents spend more than two hours each day working in Salesforce, and of that 70%, two-thirds are in Salesforce for the entire day.
What does this all mean? It means that sales reps are spending too much time in too many disconnected programs, and performing too many tasks that aren’t related to selling. Sales leaders need to identify the biggest time-wasters for their reps, and how these activities can be minimized, streamlined or eliminated altogether. If you’ve read Seismic’s 5 E’s of Activity-Based Enablement guide, you fully understand the benefits that activity-based enablement could bring to your sales organization: increased efficiency, engagement, effectiveness, empowerment, and the elimination of manual updates.
But it can be hard to decide where to start when it comes to implementing an effective activity-based enablement strategy. That’s why Seismic has created a six-step guide to help you successfully execute activity-based enablement in your sales organization. Download this free guide below!
