Sales Enablement Revisited with Paul Butterfield

Sales Enablement as you know it, is a dead end.

Is there a direct impact between your B2B Tech organization’s sales enablement strategy and revenue? If not, you are doing it wrong and your efforts are a waste of time.

In a recent podcast episode, Paul Butterfield of Flywheel Revenue shared some valuable insights on sales enablement and its impact on the tech industry.

What should sales enablement look like?

Paul defines sales enablement at its highest level as a strategic process of providing customer-facing teams with the methodology, skills, and business acumen to enable them to have the right customer conversations. These resources should enable teams to differentiate themselves through exceptional customer experiences rather than relying on product features or discount pricing to make a sale.

Sales enablement with impact

Is your sales enablement program helping the sales team to sell more? One of the major challenges many companies face with their sales enablement initiatives is the lack of correlation between their sales enablement strategy and the company revenue growth objectives. If your enablement strategy does not enable the sales team to sell better or convert more, or if it does not help the CMS to retain more, there is a fundamental error in the process.

An efficient sales enablement plan is about creating value for the customer. It encompasses all customer-facing teams, including marketing, product, and professional services to accomplish a unified customer experience. From a customer’s standpoint, all touchpoints across the chain of contacts are interconnected. It is of no consequence to the customer that the respective teams belong to different departments; to the customer, it is one experience. To this end, the various customer-facing teams must be in alignment.

Best practices to establish an efficient enablement program:

Paul shared the following sales enablement best practices to follow if you want to ensure results:

- Find the right mix of leading and lagging indicators, always with revenue in mind

- Implement a sales methodology focused on business outcome rather than product features

- Enablement should not be done in a vacuum - it should be a collaborative effort across teams

- Invest in tech and AI to boost sales teams’ performance

- When introducing a new tech platform, always bring the sales leadership through it first in a leadership-only training session

- When rolling out any kind of change, put it to the test first by creating a pilot group for feedback and driving adoption across the organization

- Put less focus on the booking of demos on a first call and enable SDRs to have value-added conversations

- Ensure enablement teams understand the importance of measuring revenue outcomes

One of the most interesting and important takeaways from the episode with Paul Butterfield is the conclusion that successful enablement is the move towards enabling an effective customer journey rather than merely enabling your sales team.

Paul’s journey into sales enablement started unexpectedly in 2012 when he was tasked - as Sales Director of a SaaS company - with developing the sales team to help the company reach its revenue goals.