CRM systems have been around, in one form or another, since business began. In the pre-computerised world there were record cards and good old fashioned one-to-one interactions where personal relationships where built. However in the global operating world things are a whole lot more complex. The management of what may be millions of customers and prospects is tasked with the challenge of making marketing and trade personal, and as an answer to this has been an uprising of literally thousands of CRM options, each with something different to offer the company with a sales team that must perform in order to drive growth.

Recent research into this area found that a staggering 25.5% of companies have implemented a sales enablement department, with a further 6.7% planning to do so in 2016 (CSO Insights 2015). These figures give more than enough reason for businesses to take a look at just what sales enablement is and how it may be valuable to them in this, the year of CRM investment.

Defining sales enablement

Let’s begin by first defining what sales enablement is; first, it isn’t sales operations, and it may best be summarised by Tamara Schenk, of CSO Insights:

“Sales Force Enablement: A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training, and coaching services for salespeople and front-line sales managers along the entire customer journey, powered by technology”.

This definition highlights just how tall a task sales enablement is, and as Jim Dickie reports on Destination CRM, companies almost universally recognise the need for technology in order to achieve sales enablement. Dickie then goes further to highlight the five core areas that will sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to the choice of CRM and how effective they are within the modern world:

– Collaboration: This will demand the streamlining of sales enablement cross department, from sales operations onto training and product management and everything in between.

– Tech-enabled training: Training across the board, from those on the front sales line to those within social media marketing, should be delivered through e-learning solutions.

– Content management: Content management spans every form of internal sales tool, from account plans through to selling scripts, as well as the tools that are customer facing, such as proposals – all managed within a single CRM.

– Virtual coaching: For the large corporation virtual coaching is the cost effective solution to the one-to-one coaching that sales teams need.

– Analytics: The CRM of 2016 should provide for robust analytics that is produced from a variety of systems, from ERP, customer support and onto external sources, this will guide business plans and secure the growth of tomorrow.

All in all these five investment areas each serve as significant costs to a business, even when taken on singularly. However the ROI from such an investment is simply staggering, as the SPO study found that such companies that had already forged ahead with these plans had achieved revenue performance attainment rates of 10.2% higher than those who hadn’t.

Langley James is the answer to sourcing the right people to harness the most innovative of technology; from creating the right digital content and training for the business challenges of today, to harnessing all that CRM analytics can deliver – we have the right people for the most demanding of positions.