Companies frequently prioritize non-revenue factors, neglecting valuable sales elements. A study by Dooly has found that Sales reps spend 41% of the sales workday on non-revenue tasks, impacting enterprises with a 38% reduction in quarterly revenue. Optimizing sales enablement and operations can significantly enhance productivity for companies. By refining internal methods and fostering collaboration between these functions, sales leaders can empower agents to focus on selling, driving higher deal closure and boosting revenue. Let's dive deeper into the nature of these two important processes.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is more than just a form to generate income for businesses. It´s a strategic sales approach that equips sales representatives with the right resources, ranging from comprehensive training and informative content materials to effective tech tools, all fused to successfully engage the right customers. Sales enablement can boost cooperation between sales and marketing teams. By providing these teams with the resources they need, sales enablement can improve overall organizational alignment and reinforce rapport with customers, ultimately improving sales efficiency. The main aim of Sales enablement is to ensure that each representative has the abilities and knowledge necessary to maximise their readiness for sales. According to HubSpot's research, having a dedicated sales enablement employee or team led to surpassing revenue targets in 2020 for 65% of sales leaders.
What is Sales Operations?
Sales operations are a crucial function in any organization, ensuring the smooth operation of sales for the respective teams. It revolves around assisting sales teams in achieving their objectives. The main goal is to optimize the sales process through the identification of bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and by implementing solutions to enhance productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency. This activity is geared towards boosting sales performance and tries to make sales cycles more fluid and fast so that sales personnel close more deals. Here the data plays a much more important role. Defining KPIs, finetuning CRM, analysing performance data and automating processes can all contribute to the desired impact.
The Difference Between Sales Enablement and Sales Operations.
Quite often these two terms are confused and the distinction is blurred. In reality, they are no synonyms even though both activities share certain common activities. These functions together have a common core focus to better the work of salespeople and drive sales.
The main difference is the scope of applicability. The scope of the sales operations is much wider. They cover the full organization of sales, its structure, processes, HR and tech. On the other hand, sales enablement is preoccupied with the efficiency of sales representatives and customer satisfaction. To some extent, we may consider sales enablement as a part of sales operations. In fact, some companies assign sales enablement teams under the charge of sales operations. Others maintain these activities separately.
In standard case when a company uses both functions we may conclude:
- Sales operations are concerned with the operative tasks of sales: territory planning, account allocation and negotiations, transaction management, commissions, tool and technology management, etc.
- Sales enablement is responsible for aspects that directly impact sales personnel: staff training, processes optimization and forth.
Importance of Bringing Together Sales Enablement and Sales Operations
Consider a scenario where a company acquires a new CRM system. Most likely the sales operations team handles CRM setup and provides the basic introduction, essentially deploying the platform. Subsequently, the sales enablement staff will be responsible for training sales representatives on how to use the CRM system and facilitating its adoption. This example explicitly demonstrates that although both functions stand separately, only combined use may bring the best performance.
In other words, taking that these functions exist to improve productivity and performance of sales, inadvertently the overlap is essential to maintain a strong relationship.
Aligning these two functions allows companies to approach sales holistically and enables sales reps to streamline the sales process and significantly improve sales-readiness. Ultimately, this collaboration drives higher deal closure rates and boosts revenue for the organization.
In Conclusion
To unlock the full potential of your sales team and drive revenue growth, requires both sides of the coin working together. Pairing sales enablement and sales operations opens a path to business success.
Wonder how your business can leverage HubSpot CRM and reverberate the whole sales process? Evaluate your existing processes and identify areas, for alignment and synergy, between these functions. Invest resources to acquire the tool that caters to both sales enablement and sales operations with a powerful CRM platform, process automation and advanced performance analytics. By emphasizing collaboration and streamlining these activities you can empower your sales team to concentrate on their core strengths - selling. Thereby enhancing their ability to thrive in today's market.
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