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

Have you ever noticed how so much professional jargon seems almost interchangeable? But understanding the nuances of different business terms such as sales readiness vs sales enablement can be exactly what your company needs to see success. 

Working in the marketing or sales department means you need to know the definitions of sales enablement vs sales readiness, as well as their vital distinctions. After all, 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 everything that sales teams need in order to be prepared to make the sale. It covers sales enablement, sales training, sales coaching, and many other sales disciplines. Using content from a sales readiness initiative, employees can quickly pull up the relevant content on the spot whenever necessary to encourage the sale.

In contrast, sales enablement is about providing sales teams with the practical support that they need to facilitate their sales efforts. This could be tools, such as hands-on lab environments, content, such as sales brochures and technical one-pagers that give added information, or metrics and data on elements like sales quotas. 

Sales readiness is a much broader discipline that wraps everything together to ensure that sales engineers are totally ready to step in front of a customer and close the deal. Sales enablement is the tool kit that will help them get there. 

Sales Readiness vs Sales Enablement: The Mindset

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, and even across different teams.

Sales readiness best practices require the whole organization to get on board, understanding that they are all part of the process of attracting and onboarding new prospects into the sales funnel. For example, Marketing teams might work on content that can explain the value proposition to the sales engineers, while Product teams will provide information about new features, and Sales training can be engineered by Customer Education or Enablement teams.  

Look for ways to encourage other teams to support sales readiness across the organization by calling out sales wins as the whole company wins, and speaking directly to members of other departments to get them involved. 

Why Are Sales Enablement and Sales Readiness Both 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 formal sales engineer training. When a customer is hesitant, something else from the sales readiness toolbelt 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 an overall sense of sales readiness through training, coaching, and experience. 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 that you can give to different sales reps, 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 the best results. This step is especially useful during a new product launch or major change in the industry.
• Practice scenarios ahead of time: Ensure that sales reps are well practiced for any event with hands-on training and sales environments that get them up to speed quickly on new features and design. 

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 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.

This post was originally published on January 2021 and updated on February 07, 2023