You can’t “sales enable” your way out of a buyer enablement problem.
People don’t know how to buy software. That’s surprising to most salespeople, but an honest step back begs a real question: why should anyone have to know how to buy software? After all, buying software is not a success. Signing on a dotted line is hardly worthy of a bottle of champagne.
Instead, success is when the difficult or impossible thing has become easy and automated because someone leaned on outside solutions to solve the problem. It’s actually incredibly bold to go out and buy a solution to remove a blocker for your high-performing team instead of leaning on your high-performing team to remove the blocker.
Buyers stick their neck out: they leave their day-to-day domain of expertise and decide they’re going to bring an outside entity in to take a leap and make things better… and many salespeople never stop punishing their faith.
Buyers and sellers are fundamentally aligned. They are like two cyclists in the same Tour de France team: they’re technically competitors, but they’re actually teammates: they draft off each other, pace one another, and even share nutrition and wheels. Yes, they might have different strengths and styles, but the only purpose of working together is to get the team (and especially the captain) across the finish line. In fact, the entire team serves to support the captain (think Lance Armstrong) who has the hardest job of all… winning!
That finish line (successful deployment and managed change) is just plain difficult to cross… alone… together…first…last… or any other way. Change is as tough as it gets.
Let’s say you were a team member who can’t keep up with Lance well enough to actually support his race. That would be a huge problem, and it’s the exact problem sellers were facing as SaaS diversified and buyers started needing more help. That’s why sales enablement started. The whole idea was to coach sellers on how to get to the finish line better, so they can help buyers come in first. We augment sellers with content, processes, and tools, so they can ride farther and faster. There’s a problem, though: we’re empowering everyone except the captain that needs to cross the finish line first, and we’re really just adding to competition and noise Lance needs to ride through.
Sales enablement has so heavily tilted the scales of a project toward sellers that we’ve become an obstacle to buyers. The results aren’t good: 87% of projects with motivated buyers and sellers fail to successfully deploy, and 73% of buyers say their last purchase was extremely difficult. Unfortunately, failed projects for buyers mean missed quotas for sellers, and sellers continue to tilt the scales away from buyers in an attempt to reclaim success.
The next step in winning together is buying enablement. We need to create a foundation for software buyers to succeed and cross the finish line faster every single time. You can’t throw sales enablement at a buyer enablement problem. We need to empower and support our captains and cheer them across the finish line.
62% of competitive deals are won by whoever is easiest to buy from. In other words, buyers reward their best teammates, and you can start being one today.
Sangria is project management that empowers buyers and sellers to reach the finish line together.
