Can Sales Give As Good As It Gets?
When Joe Galvin of Sirius Decisions wrote "sales enablement is about knowledge transfer" last month, he spoke about how Salespeople need to access and acquire constantly changing information from a variety of internal sources to maintain their state of knowledge readiness and be able transfer that knowledge to their customers.
Joe is right of course, but he only has half of the picture. He should have also included the two way exchange of knowledge that must exist if a sales and marketing organization is to flourish?
Not only must knowledge in the form of content, insight and data flow to the sales person, but insight, understanding and even raw data must flow back to other sales ecosystem stakeholders supporting the sales as well.
For instance, lead gen groups need up-to-the-minute and accurate knowledge of lead status and campaign effectiveness passed to them to make adjustments in the current campaigns or plan their next initiative or event.
Product marketing teams need to know how their product is fairing and what sales material is driving sales conversations forward.
Finance and legal teams need knowledge of the terms and conditions agreed to and the customers performance against those targets the prior year as they consider pricing on new projects and opportunities with the same client.
The sales operations group needs a damn near perfect knowledge of where each opportunity sits in the pipeline, how likely, for how much and when the deal is to close to generate a forecast executives can take to the street.
Professional services leaders need to see what service level agreements are being extended to ensure the appropriate resources are trained and available when the value promised must be delivered.
C-level executives need knowledge about the strength of the pipeline and current status of strategic opportunities and clients to determine where their time is best applied to drive forecasted results.
Enabling sales people is a first step, but in a world where everyone sells, sales enablement must take on more of a two way, enterprise wide exchange of information and knowledge.
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