How to Justify Your Sales Enablement Investment

So you’ve decided sales enablement is right for your company, but you’re not sure how to make it a reality. To justify your sales enablement investment, you must build a business case outlining the benefits to your organization. The business case will include identifying who the key stakeholders are, obtaining executive sponsorship and calculating the ROI your company can expect to see from this investment.

Obtaining buy-in from key stakeholders is one of the most challenging steps when building a business case, and you should expect to encounter obstacles along the way. Educating your stakeholders is a crucial piece to making sales enablement a reality. Let’s discuss three common barriers you may face:

#1 – “We don’t need sales enablement because we have a CRM and/or CMS.”
A common misconception is that sales enablement is just a content management system (CMS) or that it replaces a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. While CMS is one component of sales enablement, a robust sales enablement technology integrates with other key components of your sales and marketing tech stack to enhance sales and marketing processes for a more efficient system. What does this look like?

Sales enablement technology allows content to be tracked and measured every step of the sales cycle, offering the marketing team insight into how their sales content is performing. Automated Meeting Trackers ensure each sales interaction is logged into your CRM and content presented is attached to the event. Not only does this allow content to be tied to revenue, but this also helps sales leaders understand what content to use at different stages of the sales cycle.

Your CMO will finally have real-time data to support strategic decisions and roadmaps for future content creation. Knowing exactly what content is being used and having the ability to measure how it performs is a game-changer for any marketing leader. These insights are also valuable to sales leaders looking for pragmatic ways to onboard new hires and improve the execution of low-performing sellers.

#2 – “We’re not ready for digital transformation; The way we’re doing things is fine.”
“We’ve been doing it this way for years” is a phrase that will keep forward-thinkers up at night. We’re creatures of habit, and change is not always met with a positive attitude. Leadership with the “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” mentality can be very hesitant to adopt innovative solutions that challenge their current way of doing things, so be prepared to face resistance.

Digital sales transformation can and should be taken one step at a time. To start, suggest moving all sales collateral into one content repository so sellers have quick and easy access to everything they need in one unified location. If you’re still using brochures and leave-behinds, (gently) question how marketing is tracking prospect engagement with collateral or how marketers keep printed materials updated every time changes are made to a product or service. Printing new collateral with minor edits is expensive, resulting in most sellers presenting out-dated materials. How does this affect your buyer’s perception of your company?

Sales enablement technology empowers marketers to quickly make changes to digital sales assets so sellers feel confident they’re presenting the most recent and relevant materials to their prospective buyers. For sellers, walking into a meeting backed by a digital library of content prepares them for any conversation the buyer may want to have. Access to content at the touch of a button allows sellers to pivot topics in the moment and enhances the buying experience. A sleek presentation gets you in the room, but the ability to meet buyer needs is what keeps the conversation moving forward.

#3 – “We don’t have a budget set aside for sales enablement.”
The goal of sales enablement technology is to help your sellers efficiently and effectively communicate how your solution will bring value to your buyer. Try “eating your own dog food”, and use this approach internally. Create an interactive presentation with a calculator or revenue model to show how sales enablement will drive revenue for your business, or even better how much ineffective sales processes are costing your organization.

Think back to my first point about better managing sales content. According to SiriusDecisions, sales reps spend 55% of their time searching and customizing content for presentations. Imagine how many additional buyers they could get in front of if they had even half of that time back. Imagine those additional buyers are receiving customized presentations, specific to their business. With access to content on the fly, sellers prepare customer-specific experiences based on content data and flexibility, differentiating themselves from the competition. How many more deals could your company close? Your CFO will immediately start crunching those numbers to see what’s possible.

The sales enablement space continues to gain traction with CSO Insights reporting an 81% increase in companies implementing sales enablement programs, titles and functions from 2016 to 2017. Why? It facilitates sales and marketing alignment, drives revenue, and prepares market-ready sellers to execute every sales interaction consistently and effectively. While sales enablement is a relatively new function, it’s one that is becoming a necessity for companies, regardless of industry or size. Don’t want to get left behind? Contact Mediafly to begin your sales enablement evaluation today.