Sales Enablement Consulting

Sales enablement consulting is the work of settling what a company is actually selling, and then building the content, qualification approach, onboarding and measurement that let a sales organization sell it repeatably. Vivaldi has done go-to-market and sales enablement work since 1999, including the go-to-market system and sales enablement toolkit behind Cox Automotive’s dealer software portfolio and the value selling framework that became the standard approach for British Telecom’s enterprise sales organization.

• Since 1999go-to-market and sales enablement strategy
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Brand Leadershipco-authored by our founder

When companies bring us in

Sales enablement consulting is usually bought by a CRO, VP of sales or head of sales enablement in a business selling more than one thing to the same buyer. The trigger is rarely a training gap. It is one of a small number of patterns that keep repeating.

• The cross-sell that never happens. Two or more product lines serve the same customer, the commercial logic has been obvious for years, and sellers still bring one product into the room.
• After an acquisition or a portfolio build-out. Two sales forces sell adjacent things to overlapping accounts and neither can describe the combination. Cox Automotive faced a version of this across a portfolio spanning Dealertrack, Dealer.com, VinSolutions, vAuto, Xtime, Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book and Manheim, all sold to the same dealers.
• Strong individuals, no repeatability. A handful of sellers hit the number consistently, nobody can articulate how, and the method does not survive their promotion.
• An integrated offer that did not land. The company launched a platform or a bundled proposition, the deck changed, and the pipeline looks the same as it did before.
• Performance that does not match the portfolio. The products win evaluations and the sales function loses deals, which points at how value is articulated and how deals are structured rather than at the products. That was the diagnosis at British Telecom.

Why most sales enablement programs underdeliver

The standard diagnosis is a content gap or a skills gap. Sellers cannot find the right deck, or they have not been trained on the new proposition, so the response is a content library and a training day.

That treats a positioning problem as a logistics problem. If the company sells several product lines and the buyer has one situation, the seller is being asked to translate in the room, alone, in real time. Some do it well. Most do not, and the ones who do cannot explain how, which is why the method never spreads beyond them.

The useful question is not whether sellers have the right materials. It is whether the company has decided which customer situations it is the obvious answer to, and whether the sales organization is built around those situations rather than around the internal product taxonomy. That decision is a strategy decision, not an enablement deliverable, and it is the one most programs skip.

When the decision has been made, enablement becomes straightforward execution. When it has not, no amount of enablement infrastructure compensates, and the infrastructure makes the gap harder to see: content usage and training completion both rise while conversion does not move.

What our sales enablement consulting services include

Five bodies of work. Most engagements need the first and at least two others. We will say plainly if you only need one of them.

1. Deciding what is being sold

Before an asset gets built, the proposition has to be settled: which customer situations the company is positioned to win, stated in the customer’s language rather than the product catalog’s; what is actually being sold when several products go to the same buyer, which is usually the connection between them rather than the sum of them; and where the offer is genuinely differentiated as against where the seller is competing on price, because the sales motion has to be different in each case.

2. Sales content built around buyer situations

Once the proposition is settled, the supporting apparatus has a defined job. Content is organized by the situation a buyer is in rather than by product line, so the seller is not assembling the argument in the room. The test is simple: a seller should be able to name the buyer’s situation and find the right material for it without a judgment call about which of nine decks applies.

3. Qualification and objection handling from the field

A qualification approach that identifies which situation a buyer is actually in, early enough to change what the conversation is about, and objection handling built from the objections that arrive in real meetings rather than the ones imagined in a workshop. This is also where deal structure and value articulation get rebuilt when the diagnosis points there.

4. Onboarding and the path to standard

Onboarding that brings a new seller to the same standard without the person who designed the program being in the room. If the program depends on its author, it is not a capability yet, and it will degrade the quarter after the engagement closes.

5. Measurement, feedback and governance

Measurement on pipeline conversion and cycle time within the buyer situations the program targeted, rather than on content usage statistics that confirm a deck was opened. Alongside it, a return path from the field into the proposition, so what sellers learn in the market changes what the company says.

How a sales enablement engagement works

1. Diagnose. Interviews with sales leadership and frontline sellers, win and loss review, customer and non-customer research, and a look at the pipeline data stage by stage. The output is a view of whether the constraint is the proposition, the sales motion, or the enablement layer, which is a question most programs answer by assumption.
2. Decide. The buyer situations the company will organize around, and the ones it will stop chasing. Tested with customers, stress-tested with sales leadership. The output is a decision with exclusions written down, not a menu of segments.
3. Build. The messaging architecture by buyer situation, the sales content and enablement toolkit that follows from it, the qualification approach, objection handling, and onboarding materials.
4. Embed. Training, governance, the feedback route from field to strategy, and a measurement model on pipeline rather than activity, so the program keeps working after we leave.

Where this has been done

Cox Automotive’s portfolio of products and tools, spanning Dealertrack, Dealer.com, VinSolutions, vAuto, Xtime, Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book and Manheim, was powerful but confusing for dealers and difficult for sales teams to communicate. Vivaldi worked with the AVP of marketing for software solutions and her team to redesign the go-to-market system and build a full sales enablement toolkit, so frontline teams could sell an integrated solution rather than fragmented product pitches. Discovery ran across the 5-Cs of company, customers, category, competitors and consumers, which produced a go-to-market messaging architecture, and then the enablement materials that let Cox Automotive sales leaders tell that story face to face with dealer customers. The new approach simplified seller workflows, increased cross-sell opportunities, boosted portfolio engagement and articulated “why Cox” as a connected growth engine for dealers. Paid media for the launch campaign achieved a 73% increase in click-through rate versus the prior campaign. Read the Cox Automotive go-to-market and enablement story.

British Telecom’s enterprise sales function was underperforming relative to its market position and the quality of its product portfolio. Vivaldi’s diagnostic found the root cause was not product gaps but structural problems in the sales approach, including how deals were structured, how value was articulated and how pipelines were managed. We redesigned the go-to-market approach and developed a value selling framework that gave enterprise sales teams the tools for more strategic conversations with CXO buyers, and restructured pipeline management to improve conversion at each stage. The framework became the standard approach for BT’s enterprise sales organization. Read the British Telecom sales transformation story.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for sales enablement

We are a strategy firm that also builds the enablement layer, which is an unusual combination. Most firms sit on one side of it: a strategy house hands over a messaging architecture and leaves the sales organization to interpret it, or an enablement practice builds the toolkit on top of whatever proposition it is handed.

• We will change what is sold, not only how it is sold. If the proposition is the constraint, that is the engagement. Building a toolkit on an unsettled proposition is work we will decline.
• We refuse to use your product taxonomy as the organizing logic. Sales content organized by internal product structure reproduces the buyer’s confusion in better-looking materials.
• We work with the field, not only with sales leadership. Objection handling and qualification are built from what sellers actually hear, which means time in real meetings.
• We build for handover. The measure of the work is whether a new seller reaches standard without us, and without the person who designed the program.
• We are accountable on pipeline. Conversion and cycle time by buyer situation, set as the success measure at the start of the engagement rather than reported as activity at the end.

How to evaluate a sales enablement consultant

Worth asking of every firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Will you change what is sold, or only how it is sold? Most enablement practices do only the second. That is legitimate work, and it is the wrong purchase when the proposition is the constraint.
• What will you do with our product taxonomy? A firm that accepts your internal structure as the organizing logic for sales content will reproduce the problem in a better-looking library.
• How does the field feed back into strategy? Enablement without a return path from sellers degrades within two quarters, because the market moves and the content does not.
• What do you measure? Content usage and training completion are activity measures. Pipeline conversion by buyer situation is an outcome measure, and it is harder to produce.
• Who owns the program afterwards? If the answer is the consultancy, you have bought a service rather than a capability.

Sales enablement consultancy, sales training provider or enablement platform?

Related work

Sales enablement rarely sits on its own. Four adjacent bodies of work, depending on where the constraint actually is.

• Organizational enablement when the pattern is broader than sales and the question is capability across the business.
• Customer-first training when the constraint is that teams think in product lines rather than customer situations.
• Go-to-market strategy when the launch itself is the question, not the ongoing sales motion.
• Leadership development when sales leadership rather than the sales force is the bottleneck.

This work sits inside our People, Culture and Capabilities practice at Vivaldi.

Sales enablement consulting in the US and worldwide

Our sales enablement work runs out of ten offices on four continents, which matters more for this service than it may sound. A buyer situation is not the same in every market: the same product portfolio meets a different competitive set, a different buying committee and a different set of legacy perceptions depending on where the account sits. A messaging architecture written for one market and translated for the rest tends to fail quietly in the ones it was not designed for.

We work with US sales organizations selling domestically, with global firms rolling a single sales motion across regions, and with companies entering the US where the existing proposition has to be rebuilt for an American buying committee.