Minding the Sales Enablement Gap

Sales Enablement Gap

What sales enablement gap?

Getting onto the subway, trivia games that span generational gaps, and the rollercoaster ride that is software sales, minding the sales enablement gap takes on different meanings depending on your role.

However, Conversational Intelligence Software did not exist 10 years ago, and subsequently, neither did sales enablement as a standalone role.

Take a look at any company operating at a run rate surpassing 5 million or more. Likely, they have someone employed who owns the technology stack within the organization. They are responsible for trying to piece together how everything works together in harmony.

The proliferation of technology being deployed for the sole purpose of driving recurring revenue is actually astounding. Most importantly, the fascinating part is that the creation of more tools, creates more tools, and more specialty roles to support those tools.

The effects are compounding.

What are B2B software organizations using today?

Take a look into the technology stack at your organization. How many of these (or more) does your company have? Can you decipher what every single one of these tools has in common?

  • Learning Management Systems (LMS)
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
  • Sales Engagement Platforms
  • Revenue Intelligence Systems
  • Conversational Intelligence Software
  • Sales Coaching Software
  • Database and Contact Intelligence
  • E-signing Tools
  • Video Creation and Recording Tools
  • Zoom (because who uses anything else?)
  • Website Chat
  • Sales Enablement Platforms

Did you know that the amount of money spent per sales representative within an organization is anywhere between several hundred to several thousand dollars per month?

Costs of Sales Enablement

Every sales enablement or conversational intelligence software on the market today focuses its outcomes in two areas. One area is the training and moment up until the call. The second is insights and analytics after the call is over. Aside from real-time sales coaching software, the thousands of dollars spent building up a technology stack prove worthless when stress kicks in. As a sales leader, you need to find a way to help your team deliver in the moment.

Here is how things normally go…

Sales development rep spends two to three weeks onboarding after they get hired. Then they get tested via their company’s Learning Management Solution to validate they understand what they need to.

From there, they are shown how to leverage the Sales Enablement platform filled with content, playbooks, and battlecards. Their manager will also mention how to quickly find things when questions come up.

Then, something amazing happens we can all relate to.

The moment a prospect is actually on the other end of the call, everything is forgotten.

How Do We Solve It

As we stumble over our words, stutter through ways to overcome an objection, we have forgotten everything we learned. Frantically, we click through browser tabs to try and find the best way to keep the call moving forward. But we’re still stuck.

It is human nature to react like that. Aside from real-time call coaching software, nothing in your company’s tech stack is doing much to help overcome it.

This is the current sales enablement gap. This is the gap that had been ignored, written off as “it is always going to be this way”. That is until Abstrakt has come along. Meanwhile, the old way of doing things was to buy more tools, hire more trainers, or lower the ratio of reps to managers. That is all with the goal of trying to help close the gap that exists when a rep is on the phone.

Current Gap In Sales Enablement Software

The current gaps that revenue leaders need to mind are two parts.

First, their understanding of how to best stay up to date with technology trends. Business applications typically follow a few year delay behind consumer’s use of technology. Did you know that Natural Language Processing and Speech-to-Text has been deployed for years now? Chances are that you actually use some form of it today just in your daily life.

Second, and arguably the most important, is how to leverage new technologies to benefit your team. The rate of change is simply too great for an organization to rely on a single person to understand how all the moving pieces fit together.

However, the question remains – what are you going to do to improve your team in 2022? What does your technology stack look like? How are you going to improve it with better tools?

In conclusion, if you want to see how Abstrakt is redefining conversational intelligence software, you can view a quick demo.

If you want even more information about Abstrakt, then book a demo with us and we’ll show you the difference with our sales coaching software.