You would most likely receive a range of inconsistent responses.

Today’s salespeople are dealing with unprecedented levels of complexity. The competitive environment, the breadth of available solutions and customer needs are all in a constant state of flux. As a result, salespeople face an ongoing struggle to articulate their company’s unique value and differentiation.

If your company is struggling in this area, you are not alone. Studies by leading industry analysts have yielded some disheartening figures.

Salespeople are spending approximately 40 percent of their time preparing customer-facing materials while leveraging less than 50 percent of the materials created for them by marketing, according to the American Marketing Association and the CMO Council.

Still, the research also shows that only 10 percent to 20 percent of salespeople are creating deliverables that are both compelling to their customers and consistent with their corporate messaging.

A study by Booz Allen Hamilton further highlights the importance of these numbers and finds that 85 percent of a company’s brand image is determined by the direct interaction between the sales team and its target buyers.

In short, the front-line salespeople who are determining your company’s image nearly nine times out of 10 are almost never entering meetings with truly compelling or accurate material.

Every business day, countless salespeople are chained to their corporate intranets searching, updating, customizing and in many cases “inventing” sales materials. Meanwhile, scores of marketing professionals are creating and maintaining volumes of collateral that never see the light of day.

Regardless of size or industry, most companies suffer from a marked disconnect between the sales and marketing teams. In describing this disconnect to companies and prospective clients, no one has honestly been able to say his or her company doesn’t have that problem.

The impact that this disconnect has on an organization’s ability to drive revenue is no longer an academic theory. It’s a proven and quantifiable reality. In fact, industry-leading companies have reached a very simple yet profound conclusion: You cannot manage revenue growth. You’ve got to enable it.

Enter sales enablement, which is the emerging solution for this misalignment. This term describes the process of equipping a sales team with the right value proposition for the right audience in the right format at the right time.

A salesperson can spend hours preparing materials for a customer conversation, identifying relevant customer data and then updating and reformatting that information. Instead, sales team members can use a sales-enablement application to generate a more consistent version of these materials automatically and efficiently.

Your salespeople then have more time to develop a strategy while management can be assured of a consistent, high-quality presentation that is specifically tailored to the client.

Sales-enablement applications can save a sales team countless hours that can then be reinvested in higher value-selling activities. By pushing the right sales assets to a salesperson, these applications can help teams stop searching and start selling.

Creating these targeted sales pieces also dramatically improves the salesperson’s ability to communicate value and differentiation in clear, consistent and compelling ways.

After a decade of customer relationship management (CRM) software designed solely to benefit management, this new breed of sales-enablement applications integrate with existing CRM programs to produce benefits for front-line salespeople. In turn, this allows them to create customer-centric assets for their specific selling situation.

CRM software has been an integral part of many sales organizations since the late 1990s. This new field of sales enablement also allows companies to mine additional benefits from this existing technology. For instance, a sales-enabled CRM system can leverage data to proactively recommend the most relevant selling materials for a specific sales situation.

Additionally, sales-enabled CRM systems can correlate sales asset usage to actual sales performance. This heightened visibility allows marketing managers to understand how their messaging and content directly impact sales results.

These sales-enablement solutions are driving a dramatic shift within the CRM industry. Through the years, management has seen that front-line user adoption is the most reliable indicator for predicting return on investment (ROI). Sales applications have finally followed suit.

These new developments are already helping companies solve this long-standing disconnect between sales and marketing. Preliminary figures on ROI from companies that first took the sales-enablement plunge are sparking considerable interest across a range of industries.

ROI analyses performed by Nucleus Research found that M&I Bank saw an ROI of 257 percent after investing in an integrated sales-enablement application tailored to its particular needs. The Milwaukee-based bank saw full payback on that contract within five months.

Pharmaceuticals distributor AmerisourceBergen saw a similarly impressive ROI of 140 percent on its investment in sales-enablement applications. The company’s three-year contract paid for itself in nine months.

Watch for sales-enablement applications to play a leading role in 2007 as companies move toward solving what has become perhaps the largest obstacle for organizations seeking to maximize their revenue growth and the greatest opportunity to harness the power of a front-line sales team.

John Aiello is the co-founder and CEO of The SAVO Group in Chicago, which provides sales-enablement solutions.