Three comprehensive steps for effective Sales Enablement: Learn, Apply and Share

In my recent blogs, I mainly focused on strategic elements of successful Sales Enablement: how to measure business impact, how to build an aligned Sales Enablement strategy, and last but not least how to drive effectiveness through Communities of Practice (CoP).

Once you have defined your Sales Enablement strategy, one major question occurs with regards to how define success of your enablement activities. From previous interviews with sales executives, managers and employees, three major steps should be applied in order to call your activities a “success” based on metrics you have defined with your sales stakeholders at the very beginning of your Sales Enablement strategy definition.

It is about Learn (what should be learned), Apply (how to leverage learning) and Share (why it’s been a success). In the following, I am going to explain the comprehensive three step approach as well as what the key success factors are.

• Learn: Based on your defined Sales Enablement strategy, you should already know about sales strategy and priorities. Once you aligned with your sales stakeholders, you start creating respective learning materials (such as e-books, webinars, sales kits, etc.) in order to enablement your field. Your learning content should be based on a precise learning analysis, where you on the one hand side define the learning needs and gaps as well as the preferred business impact with your learning. Learning should be always based on business priorities and objectives. Otherwise, you won’t attract sales to sign-up for your trainings.
• Apply: In your learning activity, implement an “Apply Component”. During this phase, sales colleagues need to apply learning content during sales cycles. During this phase, sales colleagues will use your materials, in order to convince customers of a certain product or services offering. You might also think about, let sales colleagues pitching in front of senior management/sales management internally, in order to assess them.
• Share: During the share cycle, it is all about feedback and leveraging the learning and experience within sales colleagues’ peer group. This is especially important, as you get first hand insights on whether your sales enablement content has been valuable or not; whether you need to adapt it at the end.