First, what is sales enablement?
To put it simply, sales enablement is the process of aligning your sales and marketing teams and giving them the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include onboarding and continuous training, content for selling and brand-building and deep product or service knowledge to adequately sell your product or service to customers.
Sales enablement helps organise and streamline processes. It’s about people and technology and strategically aligning them both behind a common goal: sales success. It’s multi-layered and, as mentioned above, requires ongoing collaboration across the go-to-market engine to ensure a seamless partnership between marketing and sales. They’re such a power couple, those two. In effect, sales enablement achieves greater results by improving both marketing and sales activities.
What are sales operations?
There are so many things that go into a well-oiled sales operations machine. Sales ops has a hand in shaping everything from sales training and sales techniques to CRM tracking and staff incentives — and the list goes on! So, rather than managing sales reps and their interactions with prospects, a sales operations manager ensures that everyday operational tasks run smoothly and efficiently. It’s the behind-the-scenes job that makes sure the team is ready for optimal efficiency and effectiveness. No pressure, right?
What is the difference between sales enablement and sales operations?
Now that we've outlined what sales enablement and operations are, let's highlight some of the pillars that make each of these functions unique.
Sales operations:
- Responsible for hiring and onboarding new sales reps
- A tactical position that helps the sales organisation run smoothly and efficiently
- Helps manage the sales tech stack and report performance and key business outcomes
Sales enablement:
- Plans content for the employee onboarding programme as well as training and coaching sessions
- Creates sales collateral based on insights
- Is an overarching strategy that aims to align and improve marketing and sales
- Helps with content creation, discovery, analytics, sales readiness and more
How can sales enablement and sales operations work together?
It’s important to note that, despite their differences, sales operations and sales enablement teams function best when they work together. They both exist to improve sales productivity and performance — inevitably creating overlap — making it super important that they maintain a strong relationship. If a company implements a new sales platform, the sales ops team is the crew that sets up the sales force with the new tool by creating accounts and building dashboards. On the other side of the room, sales enablement would then train reps on how to use the new tool effectively. Enablement might also collaborate with sales operations to create a new dashboard within the platform and communicate how those changes affect the sales process.
Without a tag-team effort between sales enablement and sales operations, you can imagine how quickly that situation can become complicated — especially for a large sales organisation. An effective partnership between the two allows sellers to execute the sales process more efficiently and show up to every buyer interaction more prepared and ready to sell. And that, my friends, is the end result of a power couple working their magic!
Boost your sales success with Seismic
In our experience, after taking a closer look at sales operations vs sales enablement, companies are eager to jump in and use tools and resources to help their organisation create a winning sales enablement strategy. Hungry for more knowledge about sales enablement and how it can help your organisation get enablement right? Request a demo and we’ll show you how!
