On our  recent webinar with Mike Bosworth, I told him about the many Kadient customers who have created formal Sales Enablement / Sales Effectiveness roles and appointed senior executives with titles of VP or Director of Sales Effectiveness, Sales Enablement, or Sales Readiness. 

He replied that this is a temporary situation as companies are going through “a transition from old style VP of Sales to new style VP of Sales”.  The old style VP is anti-process, manages by intuition, and has always struggled to institutionalize sales knowledge, so he or she creates this Sales Effectiveness role to fill the gap and cover their weaknesses.  He went on to say that in 5 years, every VP of Sales will be process-oriented, customer-centric, and personally committed to leveraging sales knowledge.  So where does this leave the Sales Effectiveness group?

Though I totally agree with everything Mike Bosworth says about the need for sales-ready messaging and just-in-time, opportunity-specific sales knowledge, I disagree with his assessment that the Sales Effectiveness function is a temporary stop-gap and that the current breed of sales leader will not survive the next 5 years.  Most VPs of Sales know that you can't raise the bar of sales team performance without repeatability and consistency in how people sell, and this requires process. 

It's this need for process that has caused these leaders to invest in CRM, sales force automation tools, and sales methodologies, but the results are disappointing.  CRM and SFA tools require sales people to put lots of data in but do little to help them sell better.  Methodologies offer structure but are overly complex and difficult to operationalize in a way that directs sales behavior.

These factors have highlighted the huge need for sales enablement and knowledge applications like Kadient, and for the dedicated Sales Effectiveness folks to manage these systems and the processes that arm the sales teams with the content and messages they need to win.

I'd love to hear from the Sales Effectiveness executives in our community, as well as from the folks in sales and marketing who wish they had some dedicated resources to this critical initiative.

Jeff Ernst, VP of Marketing, Kadient

Read this Q&A with Kelli Stephenson, a Kadient community member and one of our favorite VPs of Sales Effectiveness:

http://demandgenreport.com/articles.php?codearti=1097

When you look at the impact that her work is having on her company, its very hard to imagine her role going away.