Aligning marketing, sales and training to prioritize enablement ...

Barb Vlacich, vice president of presales?operations and sales effectiveness, talked about how Kronos transformed from a company that focused its sales and marketing teams from a geographical focus to an industry focus. The realignment of the sales and marketing teams helped the company prioritize its sales enablement ?process and improve its performance.

The first step in the process was to engage Corporate Visions to help with the transition of the teams?to the industry focus, which?created a foundation for what is now a very strong relationship between sales and industry marketing.?After the alignment by industry, Kronos worked on enhancing its sales enablement strategy?by creating the sales leadership council, a forum for sales managers to discuss their issues and challenges with the sales?enablement team. This helped Kronos identify issues that were preventing the sales team from meeting its goals and then address those challenges. In addition, the sales leadership council helped create a stronger relationship between the sales team and Barb?s presales organization.

This relationship helped shape the goals of sales enablement for Kronos, including:

• Showcase?the expertise of Kronos and its team
• Demonstrate that Kronos is uniquely positioned to solve a prospect?s problem
• Create a position value for the Kronos?solution, including the impact of the business
• Give the customer specific reasons to act now
• Move the sale forward!

Kronos moved forward to meet these Sales Enablement priorities and learned several valuable lessons along the way.

1)??Create culture?that is ?all about me.?

Make sure the culture is focused on your sales teams, and your sales team needs to know that they are the priority. Sales enablement teams need to stop thinking of the sales team as a partner, and instead, think of the sales team as the customer.??Collaborate with sales in the same you would collaborate with a customer.

2) Never?set the priorities for sales enablement.

Salespeople should set the priorities for sales enablement. Kronos leveraged its sales leadership council, which?includes sales managers, ?to?develop the priorities for?sales enablement investments. The council discusses trends in sales, potential operational improvements, leadership training and pilots.

3) Treat everyone differently.

This may seem counterintuitive, but salespeople are unique individuals and cookie-cutter programs don?t provide?value. Kronos?assesses?the skills of the sales team and strives to continually provide programs that help the sales team achieve its goals. In practice, everyone doesn?t need to learn everything, help people find what they need and a program that is right for them. The focus on assessing skills and performance has paid off for Kronos, which now has the ability to?forecast the performance for a given sales rep for the year

4) Do everything in sales enablement to move the deal forward.

Continue to support the sales team in its effort to close sales, this goes back to thinking of the sales team as a customer, rather than a partner.

Source: http://conference.corporatevisions.com/aligning-marketing-sales-and-training-to-prioritize-enablement-investments/

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