Gartner: 77 Percent of Sellers Struggle to Complete Assigned Tasks

Despite sales organizations investing in sales enablement initiatives, 77 percent of sellers report that they struggle to complete their assigned tasks efficiently, according to Gartner.

"When sales leaders spend on sales technologies, training and development, and sales enablement, they expect enablement to use them to drive seller effectiveness and productivity," said Shayne Jackson, senior director analyst in the Gartner Sales Practice. "However, those responsible for enablement are falling short of expectations in capitalizing on these resources and efforts."

A previous Gartner survey found that 82 percent of sales leaders said that sales enablement content or delivery must significantly change to meet revenue goals in five years. Sales leaders must move away from treating enablement as simply a learning and training provider and instead focus enablement teams on seller behavior change, according to Gartner.

Such efforts, the firm said, leads to improvement in the following areas:

• Alignment: Enablement activities that drive the behaviors necessary to execute the sales strategy.
• Attribution: Focusing on triggering concrete behaviors allows sales organizations to influence specific behavioral changes with enablement initiatives.
• Accountability: The ability to attribute behavior changes (and ultimately commercial performance) to specific enablement initiatives ensures accountability.

To do this, sales leaders must not only bring enablement leaders into their strategic planning process, but also align with them on the behaviors needed to make their sales strategy a success, Gartner said in the report.

In addition, they must require enablement leaders to develop robust measurement approaches that allow them to attribute specific behavioral changes to enablement initiatives and then tie these back to sales goals and key performance indicators, it said further.

"Two key examples of triggers are behavioral nudges and just-in-time learning. Organizations that have used just-in-time learning and behavioral nudges in their enablement approach have seen substantial commercial results compared with those that have not used them," Jackson said.