The three mistakes to avoid when hiring your sales enablement team
The best resources to inform your sales enablement strategy
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“CAKE’s at an interesting time right now. We’ve we’ve really established who we’re going after and circled back to make sure the product is what our customers need. We’ve also seen a dramatic incline in sales and now have to build out and establish the process that will cradle that success,” explains David Harrison, Manager of Sales Enablement at CAKE Corporation.
CAKE Corporation is a restaurant technology company that is on a mission to make it easier to run restaurants. Harrison was their first dedicated sales enablement resource and he’s now focused on building out the team and getting their sales stack right.
“One of our big initiatives as a sales enablement team is trying to understand the climate of sales tools that are currently out there, what can help us, and also what can hurt us. An ongoing process for the sales enablement team is to make sure that our sales process is rock solid, and supported by the proper tools because it can really go sideways pretty quick,” he warns.
Another factor that can make or break the impact of sales enablement initiatives is having the right people in place.
“I’ve become a big believer in team dynamics, which has helped mold my hiring strategy. One of my favorite movies is Disney’s Miracle that’s about a 1980’s hockey team that plays the Soviets. In the movie, the coach, Herb Brooks, says “I’m not looking for the best players. I’m looking for the right ones.” I think that applies when it comes to hiring, especially for small teams. There isn’t a one-stop shop for the right sales team, and there’s never going to be one for sales enablement either. It’s unique to what the team needs.”
This post is based on an interview with Chirag Singh, Sales Capability Development Manager at Dabur. You can listen to the podcast here.
Dabur is the world’s largest Ayurvedic and natural healthcare company. With over 2,000 sales reps Dabur has certainly had its challenges finding the best way to train and coach its salespeople working in different geographical regions. Chirag Singh who leads the sales capability development function at Dabur talk to us about how this FMCG giant enabled their sales team, regardless of their location.
Their sales organization structure has many levels
FMCG sales reps require specific skills
Sales in the FMCG space is very different to B2B sales. Sales reps require very different skill sets to deal with the unique challenges of their business model, where they deal with a range of distributors from large chains to mom and pop stores.
Apart from the typical negotiations, conflict management, and partner management skills, it’s important to drive process adherence. Coaching focuses not only on team handling and negotiations skills but also basic analytical skills. This helps identify whether sales reps are able to interpret data as expected.
Prioritizing sales readiness initiatives was crucial
It was important for Dabur to create a strategy for their initiatives that focused on the skill sets that their reps needed to improve. To achieve this, prioritizing their initiatives was crucial, particularly when you consider the size of their team. To improve the sales effectiveness of their team Dabur implemented several initiatives.
“The most important initiative, and one of the most basic is to standardize the onboarding process for all new hires in the sales team. Dabur is a large and diverse organization so it is even more important to have a standard onboarding system in place. We use Mindtickle to provide us with visibility on the learning curve of every new hire in the sales team,” explains Singh.
Dabur also had a long-term vision for their digital sales readiness initiatives that extended beyond sales onboarding.
“Another thing that is really helping us is the creation of a knowledge bank. This is a repository of all sales processes and sales related collaterals. Since the Mindtickle platform is online and agile, it is much easier for us to add and update modules as and when there is a change in our process. It’s been about 8 months since we started and this has now become a part of our daily work,” continues Singh.
Managers have visibility into every sales rep’s progress
“Using a platform like Mindtickle gives us visibility into what skills each rep needs to improve. That is the greatest benefit we’ve obtained from this initiative. Improvement takes time, for some individuals it can take a few weeks, and for some, it can take a few months. It really depends on the kind of work assigned to them,” explains Singh.
Dabur’s initiatives also help them identify and fix their rep’s knowledge gaps. They have implemented a manager led feedback system that has been essential to their sales transformation program. “Mindtickle allows us to track the coaching tasks given to each sales rep after the fact. We then involve the manager, using a feedback mechanism, to review the improvement in their reps’ performance and actually give them feedback. This process is really helping us drive effectiveness and improve our performance,” explains Singh.
By leveraging technology Dabur has automated and simplified its sales process. At the same time, they have brought their sales team much closer towards their end goal of achieving best-in-class sales effectiveness.
You know that sales enablement can help your sales reps be more effective at their role, but how do you know which sales enablement platform is best for you? There are so many to choose from and some have very different features, which can make comparing them confusing.
Generally, sales enablement platforms fall into two categories;
sales readiness and sales asset management
.
Sales readiness platforms help you prepare your sales reps to have meaningful conversations with their customers. Sales asset management platforms enable reps to manage their sales content. In this post, I’m going to focus in on the five steps that will help you find the right sales readiness platform for your business.
Step 1: Step back and define your objectives
While you may be eager to pick a solution and get started, it’s important to take some time to reflect on what you’re trying to achieve first. While you may feel like you’re wasting precious time, in the long run, this step will save you from making the wrong decision, and it will help you gain clarity on what your business really needs.
There isn’t a one size fits all approach to sales readiness, what your sales reps need to be sales ready may be very different from other businesses. Consider the following questions:
What stage is your business in?If you’re scaling rapidly perhaps you’re struggling to ramp up all your new hires effectively with your current onboarding program. If you’re an established business with a large sales team perhaps you find it challenging to keep all your reps on message.
How dynamic is your industry?If your competitors (and you) are releasing new product features every other week, then communicating regularly and keeping your reps on message is crucial to their readiness.
How much visibility do you have on your reps’ capabilities?If you don’t have a process in place to identify skill or capability gaps then a solution that enables you to assess their capabilities would be helpful.
Are you developing a culture of coaching and sales effectiveness?If the majority of your reps aren’t meeting quota regularly or turning over too soon then your coaching process may need more structure to give your reps the cadence they need to close more deals. Your managers may also need more support to create a culture of coaching and feedback, enabling them to focus on broader sales effectiveness, rather than just pipeline and sales skills.
Is your business in need of a sales transformation?If you’ve recently gone through an M&A or you’ve launched a new product you may need an effective way to ensure your customer-facing team is aligned to the new messaging quickly and effectively.
Is your current system really working?Old school LMS and classroom training sessions just don’t cut it anymore. To keep your reps engaged, achieve ROI for your sales enablement efforts and keep up with your competitors, it may be time to update your system to something that addresses the sales issues you face today.
Once you have identified your key objectives, you’re ready to move onto the next stage.
Step 2: Identify your dependencies
Your sales readiness platform is probably not the only tool in your sales stack. While all these tools are designed to make life easier for your sales team, they can actually make it more challenging if they’re not integrated. After all, how many logins can you remember?
That’s why it’s a good idea to identify what tools or platforms you would like your sales readiness platform to talk to. Would reporting be easier if your sales readiness platform could report based on the categories in your CRM? Would your sales reps find it useful if your sales readiness tool could help them identify contextual content for customer conversations from your sales asset management tool?
By including this level of integration on your wishlist you can narrow down the sales readiness platforms that best suit your needs.
Step 3: Prioritize what’s important
This is where the objectives you identified in step 1 become important. They should drive the features and functionalities that you need the most from your sales readiness platform. It’s helpful to identify what your priorities are using a basic framework and then listing out the key elements that your business needs under each category. I suggest using a framework that includes knowledge enablement, skill development, scenario-based training, analytics and other features:
Knowledge Enablement:
This refers to the ability of your reps to use knowledge in the context of their sales situations.
Feature: Learning modules
You need this if you want to
Assign modules to personalize learning tracks for different learners or groups.
Selectively invite individuals and groups to learning modules.
Feature: Mobile app and bite-sized content files
You need this if you want to
Share regular updates on new product features, competitive insights, success stories and marketing collateral in real time.
Feature: Assessments and Certifications
You need this if you want to
Customize benchmarks or pass scores for goal-based assessments.
Generate and award certificates to reps when they complete a level.
Feature: Flexible content formats
You need this if you want to
Import content from other sources (like Dropbox, Google Drive, Slideshare or Youtube).
Directly upload or amend content in any file format.
Create short and long form training content.
Feature: Quick quizzes
You need this if you want to
Measure knowledge retention with pop quizzes and reinforce key information.
Intertwine quizzes with content for effective reinforcement.
Conduct timed quizzes and randomize questions.
Feature: Easy content search and discovery
You need this if you want to
Enable your reps to be able to find content easily when they need it.
Ensure your reps can bookmark content so they can access easily.
Enable content to be saved offline so they can find it anytime.
Feature: Gamification
You need this if you want to
Drive adoption and ensure your sales reps actually use the platform and even enjoy using it.
Customize rewards based on content importance.
Feature: Integration with other systems
You need this if you want to
Integrate with your sales asset management tool so you can enable your reps to access content that is relevant to their specific situation at the time they need it most.
Integrate with your CRM so you can leverage the segmentation and team profiles you have created there for analytics or to allocate learning tracks.
Integrate with HR systems so you can leverage the team and individual profiles you have created there for analytics or to allocate learning tracks.
Skill development:
These features help your reps handle specific sales scenarios.
Feature: Structured coaching
You need this if you want to:
Enable contextual coaching so managers can objectively observe reps while they are in their sales motion. They can then provide feedback and training and support reps when navigating complex sales scenarios in real time.
Give your manager the ability to conduct on-the-job coaching, even when they’re in a different location to their reps. They can observe and rate how reps perform their sales activities
Scenario-based training:
These features help your reps execute your plan through coaching. This teaches them to follow the sales process and even receive specific feedback on their deals.
Feature: Video / audio role plays
You need this if you want to:
Help your reps practice how they respond to specific and contextual sales situations.
Ensure your reps are articulating your product value proposition consistently, know how to demo your product or can deliver a compelling elevator pitch.
Enable managers to review video, voice over powerpoint, voiceover screen capture and audio responses in real time.
Enable managers to review and grade email responses and offline learning.
Customize evaluation parameters for role plays.
Feature: Automated workflows
You need this if you want to:
Enable your sales managers, sales enablement or other team members to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on the video or audio recordings your reps submit.
Create accountability and a cadence for coaching, so it becomes something that your managers and reps do every day.
Feature: Best practices library
You need this if you want to:
Share best practices and success stories across your team and facilitate peer to peer learning.
Feature:Contextual remediation
You need this if you want to:
Suggest training tracks to reps based on identified knowledge or skill gaps.
Automate training based on gaps identified by their manager.
Analytics:
These features help you drive accountability, identify knowledge and skill gaps, and report back to sales managers and leaders.
Feature: Drill down views and reports
You need this if you want to:
Measure and track the engagement and retention of each rep, sales team or region.
Track cohorts (based on their onboarding batch, sales kickoff attendance etc) to see how each has performed against other cohorts.
Export user data into Salesforce.
Feature: Reporting on content effectiveness
You need this if you want to:
Identify which content has an impact on your reps’ performance and which do not.
Feature: Reporting on business impact
You need this if you want to:
Correlate sales enablement activities with business outcomes. This will help demonstrate the impact on revenue of initiatives or improvements in capability.
Other priorities
Aside from features, there are several other questions that you may want to ask a vendor including:
What is their roadmap in terms of product enhancements and expansions?
What are the minimum software/hardware requirements to use the solution?
What are the solution’s implementation strategy and process?
How long will the implementation process take?
How much of your support is typically required during implementation?
What Is Customer Success support available after implementation?
Step 4: Evaluate platforms against your priorities
It may be tempting to just pick the first platform you demo but it may not have everything you need. It’s important to at least compare two or three sales readiness platforms so you can see just how different they are. By listing out the criteria that are your priorities, and then assessing each platform against that criteria, you can objectively identify which platform will best meet your needs.
Step 5:Get feedback or read reviews
Once you’ve identified the sales readiness platform that best meets your needs, it’s always helpful to hear from people who actually use the product. This is actually easier to do than you may realize. Websites like G2 Crowd allow users to provide unbiased reviews of software platforms they’ve used in real time. You can see how people rated different aspects of each platform and read their comments about what it’s like to use the tool.
While it may sound daunting, by taking a little extra time to evaluate and choose the right sales readiness platform you will save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long run.
, analysts Peter Ostrow and Christina McKeon unveiled a new framework. This addresses the top challenges sales leaders face today:
The inability of sales reps to connect their offerings to the needs and challenges of their buyers
The inability of sales reps to differentiate their product from that of their competitors or the status quo
Their sales reps’ general knowledge gaps, such as product knowledge, understanding their customer or industry
Resolving these issues is not easy, but the new Sales Knowledge Transfer framework lays out how to approach each challenge. In particular, it focuses on ensuring the sales team can articulate value, connect with buyers, and properly use their knowledge about products, industries, and competitors during each phase of the sales cycle.
Companies that have complex solutions, operate in a competitive environment, or have an evolving product line, are especially vulnerable to these three challenges. Sales enablement leaders need to prioritize and architect how they will educate, assess, certify and keep their sales team up-to-date on a routine basis.
The five phases of knowledge transfer
SiriusDecisions outlined five phases for a successful knowledge transfer program:
Audience
Knowledge
Planning
Programs
Adoption
This is an interesting approach that helps focus your enablement efforts in a sequence that builds upon itself to deliver a comprehensive program. The first step involves creating
“Sales Personas”
. The knowledge required is then mapped to each persona before creating an enablement plan and rolling out the program. The final step requires a dashboard that enables you to track adoption and course-correct elements of the program.
Is this involved process too much?
I don’t think so.
In my experience, each of the steps outlined in the key requirements for rolling out a program that will have an impact. In particular, I like the idea of creating “sales personas.” This involves identifying the different types of sellers your organization has, how they best learn and their challenges. This is similar to creating “buyer personas” – but for an internal audience. After all, we all know that one-size-fits-all enablement programs don’t work, but we rarely take the time to truly break down our own sales teams’ needs into different documented personas. This approach will benefit not only the Sales Enablement team but also Product Marketing and Corporate Marketing as well.
Sales Training 2.0?
On the surface, this approach looks like you’re just organizing your sales training better, but there is one major point of difference. Most companies approach sales training as a one-time effort to get their sales reps up-to-speed on a certain topic. This means training is often short-lived and often done in isolation or in response to a particular event (like a new product or a change in selling methodology).
SiriusDecision’s concept of knowledge transfer takes a different approach. Rather than look at what training reps need, it considers what type of sales knowledge they require at each stage of the buying cycle and how it should match different sales events.
Taking a sales enablement perspective, the approach requires you to define all the different ‘knowledge elements’ your sales team needs and determine the best way to achieve this. In addition, it requires consideration of how to ensure the team is actually absorbing the information, certifying them so they can actually use their knowledge in specific sales scenarios, and determining how to identify what else needs to be transferred to the team.
Effectively implementing a ‘knowledge transfer’ program means taking control of what your reps need to know and rolling out a repeatable process. The process shouldn’t disrupt the team, but rather ensure they are always on top of the latest product, customer, industry, and competitive information they require to be successful.
Sales readiness and knowledge transfer
For Mindtickle customers the framework may look similar to our sales readiness approach. Being sales ready involves putting together a process to routinely update your sales team without disrupting their work. At the same time, the process should give them quick access to the knowledge they need to do their jobs effectively.
To address their key challenges, sales enablement leaders should take a closer look at how they are managing the sales knowledge transfer process at their company. By putting in place initiatives that better coordinate enablement efforts for their teams, they can overcome some of the issues that are currently impacting their sales performance.
In this 16-minute podcast, Crepeau and Wolber outline:
Why there is a pressing need for sales enablement
What industry trends are shaping B2B sales
Common mistakes sales enablement leaders commit
The key sales enablement initiatives at G5
“Today, sales enablement spans every function within the organization. Let me take a step back, and say why sales enablement is so hot now in my opinion. Having sold enterprise technology for more than 25 years, the reality is it’s harder to sell than it ever has been. Only 60% of reps are hitting quota, leaving 40% of reps unsuccessful in reaching their targets,” explains Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results.
Following on from the previous podcast, where Steve Crepeau and Mike Wolber discussed how G5 built a successful sales enablement team, they share their thoughts on why enablement is a must-have in every company.
In this episode, they also discuss what mistakes organizations commonly make when setting up their sales enablement team. “The biggest mistake is not having executive buy-in. Regardless of how large or small the sales team is, without the support of leadership, it is difficult to execute a sales enablement program,” explains Crepeau.
“The second mistake is not assigning a superstar performer to head sales enablement. I think sometimes you pick someone who seems convenient because you’re afraid of taking such a productive resource out of the field. And then you have the wrong person heading up sales enablement within your organization,” he adds.
This post is based on a webinar where Stephen Hallowell, VP of Sales Enablement at MuleSoft discusses why companies should invest in sales coaching.
MuleSoft is a leading high-growth technology company that focuses on application integration under one platform. With over 800 employees and over 1000 enterprise customers across 60 countries, MuleSoft has had astounding growth.
“We have been evolving quite a bit as a company over the years. We have gone from what was a fairly tactical engagement to selling business value associated with what otherwise can be a pretty technical concept. We are enabling change on a broad scale inside some very large companies,” explains Hallowell.
Why sales coaching matters
A significant part of MuleSoft’s success can be credited to their investment in sales coaching. “To improve the outcome and win more deals, the sales rep has to start doing things in a fundamentally different way than they were previously. Natural behavior is to put one foot in front of the other and keep marching straight. We need our sales reps to stop and take a left turn at some point. The only way that we’ve been able to drive that behavior change is through coaching, ” says Hallowell
Two main aspects of the coaching program
Sales leadership at MuleSoft decided that their sales coaching initiative should answer two questions:
Are
their reps doing what is important?
How can their managers help their reps sell the right way?
Most sales teams get their approach to the second question right by coaching their sales reps. But the first question is often under-recognized yet it’s vital to ‘accountability’.
“If the manager doesn’t actually know and doesn’t have the ability to know, whether somebody’s doing the right thing, and the individual contributor also doesn’t know, you can never get that self-diagnosis. The more you can make it very apparent to people what they’re doing well and what they’re not doing well, you create the need for change,” explains Hallowell.
“If somebody comes in and coaches me and says, “Ah, well, hey, here’s a better way of doing things,” and I haven’t seen that reason yet for doing things differently, I’m not going to get the results out of it,” he continues.
Building a competency map
The first step was to identify what knowledge gaps their managers had. This was done through effective benchmarking.
“To kick this off, we did some benchmarking with our managers by assessing them against some third party statistics. That helped us realize some are exceptional and some are not. That helped create that need for change across all levels of the organization,” explains Hallowell.
Once the gaps were identified, the next step in the process was to train them effectively on their skill gaps. “The next thing we did was build the competency maps. We did that probably 9 to 12 months into the process. In my experience, for a competency map to be effective it’s got to be somewhat detailed, just because you’ve got to be precise about what you want people to do. That level of detail delivered too early can be a bit overwhelming. Trying to find that right balance of really defining for the managers, these are the specific behaviors and skills you need to coach, to giving them enough detail to be actionable, but not so much detail that you overwhelm them,” explains Hallowell.
Designing the certification program
“One important thing we drove was a significant relaunch of our messaging. A pool of leaders and individual contributors locked themselves in a room for a couple of days and came out with something that everybody felt really good about. Once it reached the field, there was no question of “Is this the right message?” Our leaders bought into it,” says Hallowell. The primary element in the coaching program at MuleSoft was message calibration, which was done by the leadership team.
“We had the core team record themselves in the Mindtickle platform to provide examples and best practices. Then we formed a group of best performing reps and managers who we call black belts. This group of black belts then certified the full team. We had over 500 people go through this program,” explained Hallowell.
Coaching is not a checkbox exercise
The importance of this program is well understood given that over 500 employees went through the coaching program. The program was well received across the organization. What exactly worked for MuleSoft?
There were multiple factors including support from their leadership, setting high benchmarks for their sales reps and providing personalized feedback for each rep.
“One of the things that were really important for us is that this wasn’t just a check the box exercise. If it had been simply a box-checking exercise, there wouldn’t have been a lot of opportunity for coaching. I can’t overstate the importance of really broad management support and solving a pain point that everybody recognizes. The next thing is holding that performance bar very high. We did not pass people who were not completely 100%. Yeah, it might take a little longer than we want, but we’re going to make sure we get everybody’s attention on,” says Hallowell.
Finally, make it awesome
The success of a coaching program is measured on how well it is adopted. “
The last thing I’ll leave you with is we have a set of core values at MuleSoft. One of them is to make it awesome. It’s one that I love. I use it with my team all the time, and I think it’s so important in our role. You’re going to ask a lot of people going through this program. If they detect anything that’s not awesome, they’re not going to invest, ”
says Hallowell.
Did Hallowell and his team make it awesome? Given their success, it sure looks like they did. The coaching program helped MuleSoft scale their sales team without compromising on the performance of any individual. Their average selling price went up from $ 77K to $169K. And feedback about the coaching program was really positive across all levels of the organization.
“A number of people that came up to me and just said, “Thanks for making me go through that.” I think this quote is verbatim from half a dozen people, said, “You know, I was pretty skeptical about this thing when we first started, but I’m so glad you made me do it. I’m so much more confident with my customers,” says Hallowell proudly.
How to lay the foundation for a new sales enablement team
Key goals a new sales enablement team should focus on
KPI’s and success metrics that matter
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“As a digital marketing company, we’re really focusing on best-in-class lead generation strategies. We want to help our partners and customers increase the value of their assets and net operating income by investing in the right advertising channels,” explains Mike Wolber, Sales Enablement Leader, of G5. G5 specializes in digital marketing for real estate companies.
Wolber was one of the first members of the sales enablement team at G5. In collaboration with Steve Crepeau, from True Sales Results, they have laid the foundation for their sales enablement function
.
“
I think that you can give five different sales reps the exact same toolkit; computer, documentation, training log and even the same manager But those reps are all going to approach conversations differently. They’ve got different DNA,” adds Wolber.
Just like each sales rep is different, so is each sales team and the team that supports them. That’s why it’s crucial to have everyone involved in the enablement of the sales organization.
“The sales enablement function needs to be cross-functional by design. You really need to work with professional services; your client success team, the sales enablers, the sales reps, the inside sales reps, marketing, product marketing,” explains Crepeau.
There are two main reasons why 63% of sales reps fail to achieve their quota according to SiriusDecisions – improper training and an inability to find and use the relevant content. This week, Mindtickle and Seismic – the leading enterprise-grade sales readiness solution and sales enablement solution respectively – have created a technology partnership that solves these issues. Together they enable enterprise sales reps to train for and execute their sales interactions more effectively than ever before.
In this day and age, buyers have changed the way they purchase and interact with salespeople, and sales organizations need to be agiler to keep up. Customers now come to the table well informed and much further down their purchasing journey, and they expect reps to be ready to respond to their questions, needs, and objections. That’s why it’s now crucial to ensure your reps are prepared, up-to-date and able to engage prospects with the most relevant and personalized content.
The sales organizations that have adapted to this new world order have achieved this by ensuring their reps and everyone in the enablement process, from content creators in marketing to sales ops and training, have access to technologies that:
Provide on-demand access to all materials necessary to increase performance:It’s no longer sufficient to just email updates or conduct training sessions a couple of times a year. Best-in-class organizations ensure their reps receive feedback on both presentation dry-runs and the content used within them. Their reps are able to tweak content on Seismic and receive coaching on their pitch on Mindtickle whenever and wherever they need.
Enable just-in-time readiness on new content:By leveraging Mindtickle’s training and video coaching capabilities, sales reps can access new content and become smarter quicker. This has the added benefit of decreasing the time spent on separate training sessions or on requesting guidance from content creators.
Give access to valuable information:Information on reps’ performance and content engagement collected in Seismic and Mindtickle is fed back to individual reps. This enables them to continuously and intelligently improve how they perform their job, focusing in on the aspects that are directly tied to closing deals more effectively.
Provide holistic sales engagement data:In this data-driven world, teams involved in the creation of sales content and training collateral require a comprehensive view of their reps’ engagement with all sales-oriented materials. Best practice sales organizations leverage this data to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of their salespeople and further inform their enablement initiatives.
Enable new content certification:It’s no longer sufficient to certify your reps once when they are onboarded and then forget about it. Reps in best-in-class sales organizations are constantly learning and improving their knowledge. Mindtickle’s certification process responds to this by applying to new collateral, including product brochures and case studies. This ensures that their reps only use the content in the field once they have demonstrated proficiency and expertise in presenting it.
By integrating Mindtickle’s training, coaching, role play and communication capabilities with Seismic’s personalized content creation and analytical capabilities, this technology partnership brings together each of these aspects. The result is a technology solution that enables best-in-class sales teams to focus on driving revenue. All teams involved in the sales enablement process, from Sales Ops to Content and Product marketing are enabled to accelerate deals, improve win rates and increase the revenue earned per sales rep.
“At Nutanix, we pride ourselves in providing sales reps with the right technologies they need to exceed quotas and drive revenue,” said Amir Chaudry, Head of Global Sales Enablement, Educational Services & Field Readiness at Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing. “The combination of Seismic and Mindtickle does just that, helping reps prepare and master messaging before meetings, and win the deal with the most relevant information and collateral during them.”
We’re excited about this partnership and believe it will add value to our customer’s businesses by helping their sales organizations to sell more effectively.
For more information on the Mindtickle-Seismic technology partnership, read the full press release here.
How to tackle sales readiness for new product launches
How to get the buy-in from your leadership
Tips to get your own sales enablement budget
Which metrics and KPI’s sales enablement managers should track
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“I’ve been actually practicing the sales enablement role for many years. In fact, so many years that I believe I was here before the term sales enablement emerged,” mentions Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Leader, and Practitioner. She has worked in Sales Enablement for more than a decade, working with companies such as Symantec, Rapid7. She is also currently the President of Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.
Working with multiple technology firms she has established sales enablement teams from scratch. With this experience under her belt, Guardia has a lot of experience to share with new sales enablement leaders and management on where to start with sales enablement. More importantly, she also has some great advice on how to get the budget approved for your enablement initiatives.
“To be successful as a sales enabler, you need to think about how can you run this mini-business inside your company successfully,” says Guardia.
“We measure a lot of different things, but are we measuring the right things? More than often you’ll find that sales enablement people are measuring indicators with a bias to training. They are measuring a number of people who are trained, the number of hours consumed in training, and the smile sheets. Is that really telling you the success of the sales enabler, enablement team? Probably not,” says Guardia offering some great advice to new sales enablement leaders.
Furthermore, Guardia enumerates important KPI’s and metrics that sales enablement managers should start tracking. Continuing on from the last podcast, where Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, in this podcast, she takes this her advice a step further advising sales enablers on the nitty-gritty of their role.
Listen now, as Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, regardless of their size.
In this 16-minute interview Guardia outlines:
How to coach your frontline managers effectively
Ways to enable your sales leadership
Tips to deal with managers who are reluctant to coach
Best practices for sales enablement and coaching
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,
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.
“If you just take your reps and you say,
’Hey congratulations! Tomorrow you are a manager, and we don’t provide any support or guidance about how best to do that, or stick with them throughout their journey to becoming the best manager they can be.’
t
hen that’s just wishful thinking, and it is not going to help the selling organization,” states Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Practitioner and Leader, who is also P
resident of the Boston Chapter
of the Sales Enablement Society.
According to Guardia, “Sales enablement is really about ensuring that the selling organization and the partner community is prepared to do their job. That preparation comes in the form of skills, knowledge, systems, tools, and processes that focus on sales efficiencies and overall improvement of their sales effectiveness. In some cases, people call it an improvement to sales productivity.”
To ensure everyone contributing to sales effectiveness in an organization are on the same page, it’s crucial to enable the enablers.
Many managers don’t know how to coach well. They may have been great sales reps, but just because they’ve been promoted into a management role doesn’t mean they’re equipped to perform it.
“CAKE’s at an interesting time right now. We’ve we’ve really established who we’re going after and circled back to make sure the product is what our customers need. We’ve also seen a dramatic incline in sales and now have to build out and establish the process that will cradle that success,” explains David Harrison, Manager of Sales Enablement at CAKE Corporation.
You know that sales enablement can help your sales reps be more effective at their role, but how do you know which sales enablement platform is best for you? There are so many to choose from and some have very different features, which can make comparing them confusing.
“Today, sales enablement spans every function within the organization. Let me take a step back, and say why sales enablement is so hot now in my opinion. Having sold enterprise technology for more than 25 years, the reality is it’s harder to sell than it ever has been. Only 60% of reps are hitting quota, leaving 40% of reps unsuccessful in reaching their targets,” explains Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results.
“As a digital marketing company, we’re really focusing on best-in-class lead generation strategies. We want to help our partners and customers increase the value of their assets and net operating income by investing in the right advertising channels,” explains Mike Wolber, Sales Enablement Leader, of G5. G5 specializes in digital marketing for real estate companies.
There are two main reasons why 63% of sales reps fail to achieve their quota according to SiriusDecisions – improper training and an inability to find and use the relevant content. This week, Mindtickle and Seismic – the leading enterprise-grade sales readiness solution and sales enablement solution respectively – have created a technology partnership that solves these issues. Together they enable enterprise sales reps to train for and execute their sales interactions more effectively than ever before.
