Sales enablement

What’s the Difference Between Sales Readiness vs. Enablement?

liran

Feb 07, 2023 - 3 min read
Sales Readiness vs. Enablement?

Picking up on a tremendous amount of business jargon can be an intimidating aspect of becoming a professional. What makes it even worse is how so many terms seem so interchangeable and similar. Don’t ignore any terms you hear at a business meeting or conference; they might be exactly what your company needs to boost itself to higher places.

Two of those terms you’ve probably heard of are sales readiness vs sales enablement. Working in the marketing or sales department means you need to know these two definitions as well as their vital distinctions. You don’t want departments to clash rather than work together.

To avoid inefficient issues during workflows, think about the type of training you will provide to your sales teams. Is enablement or readiness your focus?

Enablement and Readiness: The Basics

Sales readiness, in short, represents the knowledge, skills, and tools sales staff use when interacting directly with customers. Using content from a sales readiness initiative, these employees can quickly pull up the relevant content on the spot whenever necessary to encourage the sale.

Sales enablement, aims to achieve a similar goal but in a different way. It’s more broad, covering general knowledge and mindsets required to appeal to clients. It’s also formalized in most organizations, as multiple departments collaborate to generate sales enablement training content necessary for sales teams. This information helps individual staff members use the tools from sales-readiness effectively.

A common analogy to help you visualize the difference is personal values vs the law. Your own values tell you that stealing is wrong. Likewise, the law outlines specific punishments for stealing that discourage the act. That’s sales readiness and enablement respectively.

It’s worth noting that, while sales readiness is not as formalized as enablement, it still requires commitment from all around the business. As mentioned, it’s a mindset that must be shared by everyone from department heads to managers.

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Why Are They Important?

Sales teams have a complicated job on their hands. When dealing with customers directly, you might have to answer unique questions you haven’t prepared for or provide support that you might have to figure out at first.

Adapting to individual customer cases is a necessary part of achieving sales, some of which may not be covered in a formal sales engineer training. When a customer is hesitant, sales readiness may be just enough to make the final push.

Combined with efforts from the marketing department, sales can craft the perfect customer experience to encourage sales and revenue from the company. The key to success here is formal virtual sales enablement training combined with a sense of sales readiness. Only then can you put yourself at a significant competitive advantage by closing more deals and creating more dedicated clients.

Sales Readiness Best Practices

How exactly do you prepare your company for sales readiness when it’s not exactly a formal process? You can still provide training, but be sure to follow some basic practices.

  • Focus on the specifics. Your business likely sells a wide variety of products and services. Attempting to get every employee up to speed with everything can be wasteful and not conducive to knowledge retention. Rather, aim for specific skills to make your sales team agile.
  • Make it a continual effort. Don’t think sales readiness is a “set it and forget it” consideration. Continually provide small, bite-sized modules to your sales team for best results. This step is especially useful during a new product launch or major change in the industry.
  • Promote fast response times. Now that news travels as quickly as the Internet allows, being able to respond quickly to changes in the industry is vital for sales and marketing. Ensure your sales readiness is prepared.

Sales enablement and readiness both benefit from in-house training. Think about investing in a training platform.

The Importance of Sales Training

Training for sales teams is becoming more and more widespread as more companies are realizing the benefits. A study from CSO Insights tells us that the number of organizations using sales enablement has nearly tripled in the span of 6 years.

Both readiness and enablement are equally important, but did you know that you can optimize the way you deliver technology sales training? Through online platforms like CloudShare, you can generate effective sales demo environments, providing your teams with the ultimate tool to boost revenue.

CloudShare: A Powerful Tool in Any Sales Process

There’s nothing more impactful and persuasive than a live demonstration of your product or service directly with a client.

CloudShare makes it easy for you to demonstrate high-level functionality, use case-specific features, and more.

Are you interested in seeing what CloudShare can do for your sales processes? Book a demo with our team today to get started.