This article finishes with the following paragraph
"Plan for your new digital-first approach in 2021 and beyond, because remote selling is here to stay
If your business isn't built for the new age of digital engagement, connecting with prospects and building a strong sales pipeline will be next to impossible. Adjust your budgets appropriately for the proper sales enablement spend to stay nimble for whatever the future brings.
As we all learned in 2020, predicting the future can be futile. But what's inarguable is that the pandemic has unveiled new modes of doing business.
Working from home, executives and technologists alike have been challenged with developing methods to make that transition easier. That has revealed the value of sales enablement technology.
It's possible that after the pandemic is over, executives will still relish the opportunity to do business in person. But as long as geographical limitations exist sales enablement software will, at a minimum, help advance initiatives between those in-person meetings—all of which will shorten the sales cycle. That's music to a sales associates' ears."
But What About Sales Enablement?
In a recent blog Adam Gray talked about Salestech, for those about to invest in sales tech, for those being taken in by the sales tech hype, or for those that are looking to make savings during the pandemic and look what to cut ..... here's the real view on sales tech.
"Earlier today I was chatting to Andy Hough CEO of the APS and we were talking about how in the modern world too often people are looking for a quick fix, a silver bullet if you like. There’s always the dream that a new piece of sales tech will provide a mechanism that delivers a stream of red-hot-leads to save time and effort.
Formula-1 is the pinnacle of motorsport and every team is looking for this "edge" to give them that elusive win. They, like the sales world, are all hungry, to be first, to be the best.
The problem is that a competitive advantage is rarely a competitive advantage for long. A new rubber compound that gives 1% more grip and shaves a second off your lap time is great. But everyone gets the same compound, so everyone is a second quicker. So nobody has an advantage.
It’s the same with sales tech. It’s great that you have some new tool that will help you generate more leads but so does everyone else and, at the end of the day, the number of customers in the marketplace hasn’t increased so companies like yours spend more and more on tech in the hope that it will provide more, but in reality it probably provides less. Costs go up, so margins go down and fewer salespeople achieve their quota as more and more pressure is applied to them to bridge this shortfall.
LinkedIn has in some ways done the same thing to prospecting and sales. It’s now really quick and easy to find the buyer within any company (a task that might have taken hours previously) and it’s really easy to reach out to them and tell them what you do (whereas before they wouldn’t take your call even if you were able to find them)…but everyone has the same opportunity.
So where has the competitive advantage gone because an advantage is only an advantage if you have it but nobody else does?
The competitive advantage is you.
Like with Formula-1, the championship is invariably won by the best driver - Fangio, Stewart, Lauda, Prost, Senna, Schumacher and now Hamilton. The winning formula has seldom been the cars, the tyres or the nose-cone…it’s been the driver.
In the world of sales, particularly online/digital/social selling, the USP is you. Who you are is the differentiator, you are the competitive advantage.
You need to develop your skills in this space to be a better prospector and a better salesperson as that is, in 2021, the only competitive advantage that you can rely on."
Let's not forget it was Grady Booch who famously said "A fool with a tool is still a fool."
Where Do We Go From Here?
Looking for your competitive advantage, looking to turn your sales team into Prost, Senna, Schumacher and Hamilton, it's not a car you need, it's training of your drivers.
Just give me, or one of the DLA Ignite team and hour of your time and we can walk you through what we are doing for other companies. No hard sell, just take you through what other companies are doing to transform.
Please contact me here or one of the DLA Ignite team here, so please pick one of our industry experts or one of our experts in your geographical locality. Our website is here.
The size of the global sales enablement market is projected to soar to $3.1 billion by 2026, from $989 million in 2020—a 17.4% compound annual growth rate. The B2B landscape has changed. Where once we met face-to-face with vendors and suppliers, sales and marketing teams have been forced to completely rethink their strategies and tactics for a post-pandemic world. Sales enablement is now critically dependent on technology and on enabling sellers to operate efficiently in a digital environment. Furthermore, videoconference connections are now indicated by four out of five buyers as more desirable over audio or phone interactions in B2B settings, according to a McKinsey & Company report. The pandemic was the push that B2B markets needed to accelerate digital strategies around sales enablement. A whopping 97% of executives claim the pandemic has sped up their company's digital transformation, and a full 95% are now actively seeking new ways to interact with customers and prospects on digital platforms, McKinsey reports.
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