What’s Good for the Customer Is Good For the Seller: Activating Sensemaking To Guide Sellers to Information

Sales organizations have made great strides in creating digital repositories for enablement content and tools. Most surveyed heads of sales and senior sales leaders (66%) report their organization has a centralized location for sellers to find sales content and/or tools, yet 38% of respondents also report that sellers have moderate to extreme difficulty accessing these tools and content [i]. If two-thirds of heads of sales and senior sales leaders admit that it is hard for sellers to find the information they need, imagine what sellers might say!

A cluttered or inaccessible repository means that, at best, sellers simply avoid it and stick to the content and tools they know. At worst, they waste time trying to find the resources they need and even then might still settle on suboptimal content for the task at hand. This challenge isn't unique to sellers, however; in fact, Gartner has seen this challenge with customers as well. And the approach that the best sellers take to helping customers overcome their information challenges is one that sales organizations can apply internally, to help sellers find the right content and tools.

In our research on buyers, we found that customers today are awash in information. The overwhelming amount of high quality information available can actually make it more difficult for buyers to make decisions. In this environment, sellers tend to take the following approaches:

• Giving: generously sharing data, product specifications and supplier collateral, believing that more information will move a deal forward.
• Telling: relying on personal experience, expertise, knowledge and authority to address customers' needs.
• Sensemaking: helping customers prioritize various sources of information, quantify trade-offs and reconcile conflicting information [ii].

Unfortunately, many sales enablement functions, like the sellers they support, operate on the "giving" model - more content, more tools, more e-learning - when they should be operating on the "sensemaking" model.

Sensemaking sellers win with customers, and an enablement function that carefully curates information and content for sellers, guiding them to the right resource for their task, is more likely to elevate sales performance.

How Can Sales Enablement Leaders Use Sense Making To Help Sellers?

Sensemaking enablement organizations focus on guiding sellers to carefully curated resources and tools for each stage of their workflow. For example, VMWare, an information technology company, uses heat maps to assess individual seller skill then delivers enablement content through their CRM platform at the appropriate sales process stage. The content sellers receive is tailored to their specific skill gaps and aligned to their workflow.

Sales enablement functions that use a sense making approach will help their sellers to feel confident that they're accessing and using the most appropriate sales content. Sellers also benefit by saving time, strengthening their skillsets and ultimately becoming more effective.

Evidence

[i] 2022 Gartner Revenue Success Survey
[ii] A Comprehensive Guide to the Sense Making Approach (28 July 2022)

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