What Is Sales Support And Why It Fails

> “75 percent of sales organizations waste resources due to random and informal coaching approaches.”

CSO Insights 2016 Sales Enablement Study

In the last step, you identified the signs in your sales process that prove that it’s sales support that’s failing the team. You may have found many small technical changes that will create incremental improvements in your sales numbers. But, as we’ve discussed, a lack of sales support is an organizational problem and not merely a technical problem.

There are three key steps you can take to effect large-scale change in the way your organization approaches sales and marketing.

1. Bring in a Visionary Leader
Problems in your sales process are indicative of an adoption problem. Most distributed sales organizations rely on an intranet, portal, or CRM to track their sales process, keep their team on the same page, and enable them to order marketing materials. But, many times, sales reps won’t adopt the solution or keep it up to date.

Adoption problems have little to do with the actual solution being used, instead, they’re leadership problems. For a new solution to be chosen, optimized, and adopted quickly, there needs to be a visionary leader at the helm. Bringing in a leader has two main effects:

1. It reduces or eliminates bickering between employees who are fighting for particular features in the solution. Your visionary leader can cut through the discord to focus on the overall business impact and results the solution will achieve.
2. Your leader can champion training programs, employee incentives, and review processes to ensure the new solution is adopted.

By taking this step, you ensure that alignment is created from the top down.

2. Eliminate Busy Work
According to one Content Marketing Institute study, 60-70% of B2B sales content is never used. This means that you’re either wasting 60-70% of marketing’s capacity or you’re missing out on a very large number of pieces that would be beneficial to sales. These inefficiencies can’t be overlooked.

To eliminate wasted effort, you need to create transparency and find out what your reps in the field need. This requires you to learn which materials and tactics work and which ones don’t. To learn this information, follow these four steps:

1. Audit your marketing materials. This first step will help you cut waste and streamline your marketing tools. You can perform this audit by reviewing the total orders for print materials and see which ones are ordered frequently and which are never ordered. To discover these insights, you may need to rely on numbers from your intranet, portal, or CRM. However, at this point, it’s key to remember that Marketing’s KPI is effectiveness and not utilization. A balance that’s difficult to strike when you can’t see the entire marketing supply chain.
2. Identify top-performing sales materials. How often a piece is ordered has little to do with its true effectiveness. To understand what’s getting the best reaction and helping to close deals in the field, you need to talk with sales managers and top performers. Reviewing the feedback that marketing receives can also help you understand which copy, benefits, stories, and images are helping reps to close sales.
3. Eliminate or shelve materials that are ineffective. After trimming ineffective content, take the top-performing pieces and list them as recommended options for your sales team.
4. Regularly survey the sales staff to see how satisfied they are with the marketing department’s work. Use these opportunities to learn which marketing materials they would find valuable. You can also leverage real-time business intelligence from the field to find out what sales is using and how they’re using it. This will help determine the effectiveness of marketing’s work and their ability to create new content that is most likely to be used by sales.

3. Define Your Departments’ True Customers
Having clearly defined roles for each department is essential for alignment. But, there’s one disconnect that happens across many sales organizations – marketing assumes that its one and only customer is the market. That’s not the case.

Marketing’s true customer is the sales department. If marketing can’t convince sales to use a piece of content, then they’ve already lost the battle. By the same token, sales needs to learn to act like a customer and request what they actually need, collaborate in choosing topics for future sales materials, and provide constructive feedback.

Once these roles are defined and accepted by both departments, it becomes significantly easier for marketing to produce pieces that will actually be used. This acceptance of roles can create a shift in how the departments communicate, which will lead to better results.