Buyer Enablement Best Practices with Lawrence Wayne O Connor

Lawrence was born and raised in Chicago, and got into sales enablement after moving to Atlanta in 2006 to learn business and play basketball and now tells stories and works with artists.

Here are six takeaways from Matt Milligan’s interview with Lawrence, centered around sales and buyer enablement best practice. To hear more from Lawrence and other sales enablement experts, download the 2021 Sales Enablement Whitepaper.

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The 4 stages of the buyer journey

It doesn’t start with lead>opportunity> sale. The 4 categories are; identifying the problem, exploring the solutions, building requirements for solution, and picking out the supplier. These are 4 key stories you need to tell and that’s who buyer enablement breaks down. If you haven’t understood these, it won’t work. Enable your sales reps to make your buyer’s lives easier.

Thinking about the sales process non-linearly to influence storytelling

When you’re selling you’re not normally dealing with the boss. It’s important to give the person you’re speaking to the ammo to go to the rest of the team about it. In order to do that you have to be concise, you have to be solid with the story you’re telling. Break the process down, it might not move linearly, position yourself as a trusted person, not just somebody who’s trying to push you down the sales funnel.

Understanding the delicate balance between marketing and sales

When Lawrence started out, he was in marketing creating top-of-funnel blogposts - infotainment that wasn’t moving sales along, but he also hung out with the salespeople. Finding the in-between of creating content that helps move the buyer along, you don’t want to rush your way through a sales call, just have a normal conversation and then you can give the buyer the important information via sales content.

Often the biggest knock on marketing is that they don’t understand sales and how to influence buying decision, the biggest knock on sales is that there’s no empathy for what’s going on. You need to focus on the middle ground - that’s what sales enablement is.

The importance of teaching the client about the problem

Often the “felt” need isn’t actually the problem, so you’ve got to identify what you’re feeling, how it hurts, why it hurts, and the implications of that. But that’s the job of the seller, it’s like Inception, you’ve got to go a few more layers deep - what’s the actual issue that’s influencing everything else. At every step, once you’ve come to that conclusion about what the real issue is, you need to arm the person you’re selling to with the knowledge to tell the other stakeholders what they need.