Introduction

Sales Ops managers (B2C and B2B) have long looked at intra-team competition to boost sales. The conventional wisdom has been that it incentivizes representatives to perform beyond their expected targets to achieve not just material rewards but also prestige. Competition makes sales representatives innovate to achieve their targets, achieve greater efficiency and discourages them from their comfort zone. And lastly, it helps identify future leaders.

However, research is indicating that competition can be hurtful to the organization’s long-term prospects and profits, by privileging efficiency over effectiveness.

Benefits of Collaboration

Sales is a people-intensive process, and there is no single playbook for a successful sales conversation. What works for one representative will not work for another, depending on their personalities. Some rely on their power of conversation, others rely on facts and benefits to close a sale. For the sales enablement team, the ability to learn from every sales interaction is critical. 

The transfer of knowledge is not just a vertical process from trainer to trainee sales representative. It is also a horizontal process involving ‘field tips’ between sales representatives. Those with experience have also built up ‘internal experience’ about product features (say, what sells and what does not), customer expectations and behaviors (say, who is more likely to buy and who is not). Not sharing this knowledge with younger sales representatives is a loss to the organization, because they have to build it up themselves, and have nowhere to go when they need advice. A competition model that involves all representatives competing with each simply erects barriers to horizontal knowledge transfer.

Here are a few ways the sales enablement team can use internal collaboration as a secret superpower.

Increase Tribal Knowledge

In a collaborative model, every sales representatives’ success and failure is everyone else’s learning. It helps identify the best elevator pitches, the best opportunities to ask for references, the best way to pitch a particular product benefit and so on. It helps build a database of customer objections and queries, for which the answers can be compiled.

Increase Interdepartmental Collaboration

A culture of collaboration allows for everyone to be invested in revenue goals. Pain points can be identified and solved between marketing (who make the collateral), IT (who solve technical issues), HR (for hiring and training) and so on. It also helps to bring outside perspectives to help solve intradepartmental problems. This lies at the very core of sales enablement, which aims to align all departments to help sales representatives meet revenue targets.

Invest in Common Goals

A culture of working in silos means that most departments aim to achieve only their goals, with only the C-suite trying to align everything to the main corporate goals. A collaborative culture enables all employees to be invested in the overall success of the organization, aligning their individual and departmental goals with the big picture.

Increase Morale

The simple knowledge that one’s peers will be supportive and helpful in the face of difficulties or failure helps boost morale. As does the knowledge that everyone will share in one’s success, and not feel threatened. Such 

Create a Hybrid Model

Collaboration does not mean “everybody gets a prize”. The competitive spirit still needs to be nurtured

1. To face the competition in the same field and outperform them;
2. To compete against themselves, so they can overcome their limitations; and,
3.  To beat the industry status quo to innovate and experiment.

Collaboration then works as a force multiplier – not by winnowing the field – but by letting every representative have access to the organization’s best practices and elevate their game.

The Role of Sales Enablement

The sales enablement team’s brief is to leverage the internal pool of talent, knowledge, and experience. By encouraging internal communication and making them feel secure, it aims to empower sales representatives to do their best. Collaboration has the power of ‘emergence’ – in that the sum of the knowledge and practice is more than individual abilities.

Sales enablement platforms enable collaboration to make the team more competitive. They deploy technology for real-time and real world data gathering from every customer conversation. This helps determine, among other things,

1. what content and delivery is working and what needs modification;
2. what different kinds of customers expect and what they are not impressed by;
3. what level of customization is required; and
4. what new objections have come up and what can answer them.

This enables the design of the appropriate sales collateral, training videos, role-plays and battlecards. Furthermore, a good sales enablement platform integrates with other sales technology for communication, CRM, lead management and so on. All of this helps the organization become a sales superpower – focussed on driving corporate goals, not internal brownie points.

sharpsell equips sales reps with personalized content to engage with customers and customized presentations to share with customers as per their needs. All the content is accessible through a single source - the sharpsell platform. Companies using sharpsell have seen an increase in sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.

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