PROS has been promoting a recent Gartner report titled Five Best Practices to Improve Your B2B Road Map for Sales Enablement. This report validates what Ignite Sales has been saying for the past several years.
In this report Gartner describes a methodology that enables you to create a sales enablement roadmap that can be used to socialize and justify investments in sales enablement tools. We recommend that you read this report in detail however here are some key points that we see as important takeaways.
Understand the difference between sales efficiency and sales effectiveness
It may seem like we are slicing shades of grey however this distinction is very important to understand. We are continually educating retail banks on this topic. Gartner takes a deep dive on this subject and defines sales efficiency as the capability to deliver repeatable processes with consistency and improved time savings. Sales effectiveness drives processes that indirectly or directly improve revenue growth or cost savings.
Efficiency is about streamlining your sales operations. Effectiveness is much more strategic. It is about determining which products are strategic to sell and which are the most profitable to add to the bottom line.
Aligning Sales Processes and Capabilities to Corporate Objectives
The report continues to take you through a detailed methodology that will help you map sales KPIs to Corporate Business objectives and Business Drivers. This exercises helps ensure that sales is focused and the investments being made in sales are aligned with the rest of the business.
This is really the foundation of any sales plan or investment in the overall sales organization. If you can’t measure it, then why do it?
Completing the Roadmap
Once you understand how the sales efforts are going to be measured, it is now time to determine what capabilities the sales team and sales infrastructure needs to meet the KPIs that have been established. For each KPI, you would map the capabilities that you currently have and what you need moving forward.
This roadmap serves as a very important tool for investment but also to educate the rest of the executive team on what your team’s capabilities are today and where the company needs to evolve in the future.
Ignite Sales’ award-winning OmniChannel Sales Analytics solution provides many of the capabilities needed in today’s retail banks – just ask Comerica, Rockland Trust, Sovereign Santander, and Central Bancompany among others,
For more information on Ignite’s OmniChannel Sales Analytics Solutions, click here.
