The 4 Pillars Of Sales Enablement According To Sheevaun Thatcher
Sales enablement is one of the most transformational go-to-market strategies you can implement within your business in 2021.
When implemented correctly, sales enablement can drive long-lasting revenue growth, and it can improve the success rate of both your salespeople and your customers.
To help you better understand how to do sales enablement for your own business, we interviewed a living legend, Sheevaun Thatcher.
Sheevaun is the head of global sales enablement at Ring Central, a business communications platform that reported 1.2 billion dollars in ARR for 2020.
In this interview, she’s going to teach you the four pillars of sales enablement –– so you can implement a kick-butt sales enablement strategy for your business.
Let’s get started.
Listen to the podcast interview below👇
If you’d prefer to read the interview, below is a shortened version edited for clarity. But beware, the majority of this interview is found in the audio version.
Here Are The 4 Pillars Of Sales Enablement According To Sheevaun Thatcher
1). Alignment
The first one is what I like to call: Did they get the memo?
Which is, does everybody in the company understand the go-to-market strategy?
Why do customers buy from us? What is it that we give them? What is our big, why?
We start with why.
It’s about making sure that everybody is on the same page.
When I started at Ring Central, people would say, “what does RingCentral do?”
And some of our people would say that we do phones in the cloud. Well, that's not what we do.
What we do is help people communicate wherever, from anywhere.
2). Assets
The second pillar is making sure that all the assets, all the content, everything that is in support of that go-to-market message actually aligns with the go-to-market message.
You have a single version of the truth.
You don't have 15 standard corporate decks. There is one that you then can modify in some ways
3). Content
These assets will include training, websites, content.
It’s about having the right content to use at the right time.
So you're not trying to push out something that isn't effective at that moment.
And folks in your company need to have a place where they can go and get that content when they need it.
It's very much activity-based. I don't like to say that sales enablement is based on the sales process because our sales process isn't necessarily the way customers buy from us.
We need to make sure that the folks that support our customers have everything they need to do it to the best of their ability for the highest outcome.
4). Tribal Knowledge
The fourth pillar is all about tribal knowledge.
It’s about: Is our strategy actually working?
Let's not do a review one time at the end of the year, or even just once a quarter.
Every single one of my sales enablement leaders and their people are all embedded deeply into the segments they support.
So not only do they know the mind of that segment leader, but they can also even predict where that segment leader is going to go.
Tribal knowledge is all about being tightly connected with your internal team and your customers –– at all times.