Thoughts on Sales Enablement

CRM solutions fail most of the time. I always wonder what is meant by fail. I have had my hand in many CRM deployments and only a 2-3 did not meet the clients expectations from initial roll-out. Those that I would consider a “fail” never aligned the technology to the business process from day one. Pretty soon they were on a road to nowhere. Having worked in Sales and having a CRM background, I know why user adoption is not higher. Sales people do not like to be tracked, measured or accounted for against anything other than quota. Think about it. What other organization is measured against a quota, that if not met, will likely result in job loss? Sales is already measured.

The sales enablement concept is very interesting because it gives sales a real reason to use a CRM system. If it does provide value, user adoption goes up, ROI goes up, and hopefully, sales go up. Then everyone will be happy. The average tenure of a Sales VP is currently 19 months. Can your organization survive with 19 months or less of sales data?