I talk to a lot of small- to medium-sized professional services firms who are growing. Their revenue is going up in the right direction; they have a lot of activity and are busy. But when they take a step back to dive into their revenue numbers, there's one thing that is very scary.

Most managers and sellers have experienced this:

• A seller is moving a new business prospect through the sales process.
• All signs are positive.
• The prospect goes silent, and will not respond to email, phone calls, letters, or stop-ins.
• The seller goes to his/her manager and asks for advice.
• The manager spends time listening to the seller, conducting diagnostic work, and providing advice to the seller (what to do to restart the stalled sale).

On the surface, this sounds like a good system, but in reality, it is not. Here’s why:

• Managers work with multiple sellers—doing this for many sellers takes up a great deal of time and is often redundant (same problem… same solution).
• Sellers might not have easy or timely access to their managers—this delays the sales process and allows the sale to get further off track.

Sales enablement is quite the buzzword these days, but for good reason. When done effectively, it can have lasting impacts on a sales organization. It can shorten the sales cycle and strengthen the entire sales process. Sales enablement has the ability to increase conversion rates and drive new revenue while simultaneously saving your salespeople precious time. 

In today's business environment, your sales team is not only competing against the sales teams of your competitors, but also the busyness and expectations of your prospects. Sales enablement gives sellers a competitive advantage and empowers them to do more with their time and make smarter decisions along the way. Whether your company is just starting to dabble in the sales enablement game, or have already gone all-in, this article will cover the four key components to finding success with sales enablement. 

A good theatrical performance can transport you to different places and times, and it can help you experience situations that you’ve never encountered before. It can change the way think and feel and provide a whole new way of looking at a situation. Brian Stokes Mitchell, Tony Award Winning Actor, says, “That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds, and the way they think.”

As inbound marketers, we work really hard to generate leads for our salespeople. We labor away at content revisions, review analytics and trends, optimize for SEO, schedule tweets and posts, and do everything in our power to get qualified visitors to the site to ultimately convert into leads. Whew! It’s exhausting to even think about it sometimes… the amount of work that an average marketer puts into their inbound marketing program.