Overcoming Sales Enablement Challenges with Scott Barker

Scott Barker is an experienced sales manager, and has been bringing his love of sales coaching to B2B startups and businesses since his departure from 8x8 7 years ago. Having most recently rejoined 8x8 as global sales enablement director, Scott’s passion for sales enablement and sales rep development is in full effect.

However, a common thread we found across our latest whitepaper, centered around the future of sales enablement has been that because sales enablement is an emerging discipline. This can come with it’s own set of challenges, here are three that Scott has faced, for the full interview, download the full whitepaper here.

Working without a Sales Enablement charter

For Scott, previous to the establishment of a sales charter the biggest challenge was leadership buy-in across the board. Every sales leader we chatted to for this whitepaper had this to say. Sales enablement can be an abstract thing to argue, whilst the coaching and development that sales enablement can bring can have an astronomical impact, convincing sales leaders of this can be a real challenge.

Getting the bigger picture right

Sales teams can very easily silo - with everyone getting what they need and doing what they need to do, it can sometimes be tough to get teams to think about the bigger picture. Getting time with sellers that isn't just about "how do we close this deal?" It's about everything else within the business to help them clear their head and get on with it.

ROI Metrics

As we already know, sales enablement needs to be sold to sales leaders, and justifying the sales enablement program to senior sales staff. Now that you’re meeting with reps, one-on-one, where's the ROI, where's the return on investment? If you go and meet with a customer and you say our product is cheaper, that's a hard benefit that they can clearly see. But then if you say it's going to make the team more efficient, you can't measure that so easily.