As Manager of Sales Enablement at Procore Technologies, this collaborative approach to enablement has been core to Alex Jaffe’s
success. Procore is one of the world’s most widely used construction management software that recently hit unicorn status.
But it hasn’t been an easy ride Jaffe reflects, “New reps were coming in and we didn’t even have phones set up or Salesforce login. So we really focused on building the foundation. Depending on where you’re at in your company lifecycle you’re going to have different challenges, but it’s all going to revolve around your rapidly growing sales team.”
“Just like racing car drivers, even the rock stars in your sales team need to make sure that their car is perfectly tuned for the track they’re racing on. Sales enablement is just like this. It allows your racing drivers to go fast and go well,” chimes in Marc Wendling, Vice President of Sales at Mindtickle.
In this webinar Alex and Marc explain:
How to create a sales enablement program that meets the needs of each stage of your sales reps’ development;
What role stakeholders, technology and data play in building a sales enablement framework;
Why coaching your sales managers is just as important as training your reps; and
How coaching can be personalized to meet each of your reps’ individual needs.
Listen now
to hear Alex Jaffe of Procore Technologies, along with our VP Sales, Marc Wendling, talk with Larry Reeves of AA-ISP about how to create a sales enablement powerhouse that will help you make your sales reps successful.
The digital era has arrived and research has found it to be the route to the customer, not the balance sheet. That means the biggest asset a business can have is a foolproof process to engage and convert prospects into customers. But the route to the customer has also undergone considerable changes.
Customers now research your business and competitors at the click of a mouse, reading reviews and seeking out advice without ever leaving their desk. In fact, over 60% of a buyer’s journey is over before they even speak to a sales rep, and it’s estimated that by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship with businesses without talking to anyone. The phenomenon is so common now it’s even got a name, “webrooming.”
Businesses that don’t find new ways to engage and convert prospects will be left behind or disappear completely. In fact, according to Pierre Nanterm, CEO of Accenture digital is the main reason over half the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since 2000.
For sales organizations, the challenge is set.
Sales reps who once relied on the hard sell can no longer bamboozle prospective customers with details about their product features, because the customer may know more than they do. And customers don’t want to hear your pitch anymore, they’ve already read it on your website. What they want is proof that your product or service can solve their problems, data that shows what a difference it can make and facts that prove it’s the best option for them.
While sales managers still need to deliver the same things, from recruitment through to training, coaching and performance management, how they do their job also needs to change with the times. Many managers still spend much of their time focused on their team’s lagging and efficiency indicators. A multitude of reports and meetings are dedicated to order reviews and pipeline management, but how often do sales managers review their sales rep’s effectiveness?
Who is beating their quota? What are they doing well that the other reps aren’t? What knowledge and skill gaps do their individual reps have? Are their reps following the correct process?
This type of behavioural analysis is the first step for managers to be able to codify their best sales practices and identify what individual reps need to achieve results. Traditionally one on one sales coaching has been left in the hands of sales managers, with no real tools or structure to help them make the most of their efforts. In the digital age of sales codifying behaviour is key to achieving predictable sales results. And as a sales manager, if you can predict your sales results you will be successful.
So if codifying behaviour through coaching is the key to success then the problem of selling in the digital age is solved, right? Not exactly.
Sales coaching is still very much the domain of the sales manager and not every manager is cut from the same cloth. Each sales manager has their ow distinctive style. Some mentor their charges to success while others get down and personal to help coach individual reps. Some are confident to the point that they inflict their own style on their reps, whilst others focus more on what’s happening around the business rather than on their team.
This creates a unique sales enablement problem. In order to equip sales reps with the information, tools, and skills they need to succeed in the digital age their managers first need to be enabled to coach them effectively. And as sales managers have their own style, they need to be enabled in a way that gives them the flexibility to add their own personal touch. This can be solved for by using a sales coaching framework that provides both structure and flexibility.
Working closely with our customers we’ve found that there are three main areas where coaching is most effective:
The amount of coaching that is required in each category will depend on your business, your product or service and the experience of your reps. For example, if you’re selling FMCG to mom and pop retail stores then execution discipline is likely to be more important than knowledge. Whereas sales skills are likely to be key if you’re selling a complex enterprise software platform.
In order to be effective your business first needs to identify how important each of these areas is and what weighting each should have in your coaching framework. This then forms the basis for a structured coaching framework that incorporates processes and tools that help sales managers identify what their reps need and how to coach them. The framework moves the focus of sales coaching from addressing a single incident in one meeting, to the overall success of your reps and their cumulative sales outcomes.
Following a sales coaching framework also helps identify the needs of individual reps. While a couple of good reps may have been able to lift an entire team in the past, this isn’t the case anymore. Traditionally sales managers have tended to focus in on the “tails” or their very best and very worst reps, while the majority are left to fend for themselves. Research has found that focusing sales
coaching efforts on the middle 60%
can improve performance by a greater amount than addressing the top and bottom 10%. But there are more people sitting in the middle 60%, which means the top sales coaches need to be enabled to coach everyone effectively.
A sales coaching framework also has the additional benefit of providing a structure that can be leveraged by the broader sales and leadership team. As sales enablement and capability teams become more involved in helping reps sell, they are also taking on some of the responsibility for coaching them. That doesn’t mean that sales managers will eventually have no role in coaching. To the contrary, their role will be able to be elevated to focus in on the more challenging and higher impact opportunities that will make their sales reps not just good but great.
Why decision coaching is important to your customers
What are the must-have components of a top-notch sales training program
How to coach your sales reps so that it sticks
The link between mindfulness and sales performance
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“The new problem customers are facing is that they have too many choices. And making decisions are difficult because they’re so distracted, everybody wants their attention instantly. Customers now really need somebody’s help to coach them through the decision process.”
And that’s where the modern salesperson can step in according to Jeffrey Lipsius, Author, and President of Selling To The Point. With over 30 years experience in training salespeople, Lipsius has seen how the sales game has changed in the digital age.
“The salesperson has to be the learner, not the teacher. So the salesperson has to be very customer aware. Because if you are customer aware then you’re going to be able to respond in a way that’s going to help the customer make better decisions. All this talk about salespeople getting customer buying resistance, handling objections and being difficult in prospecting, that all goes away if the customer believes that the salesperson is there to help them make a better decision.”
That’s why Lipsius believes that decision coaching is a very important tool for a salesperson add to their tool chest. “A salesperson really only has to pay attention to 3 factors in the customer’s decision process,” says Lipsius. Listen now
to find out Lipsius’ three C’s to the customer decision process.
Superheroes aren’t born, they’re made. Clarke Kent walked in the light of the yellow sun. Diana Prince was granted her Amazonian strength by the Greek Gods, and Peter Parker was bitten by an irradiated spider. But all of them had to learn how to channel their powers and hone their skills before they could fly or scale walls.
When it comes to sales one of the most potent superpowers a sales manager can have is the ability to coach effectively. But why do we still think sales managers should be able to coach without any training or practice? Just like any skill coaching is something that requires training and development. But before we get into the details on how to achieve that, let’s take a look at why sales coaching is so important to your organization.
Effective sales coaching changes topline revenue
CSO Insights
found that there is a direct relationship between the quality of coaching and the amount of reps who made quota.
That’s because coaching isn’t about auditing what your reps are (or aren’t) doing or a quick fix. It’s about helping them improve how they sell in both the short and long-term, making them better sales reps for life. This could be in terms of specific sales skills, from prospecting to closing, or how effective their negotiating techniques are to get more prospects over the line.
By improving the skills of your reps, coaching can also increase their engagement with their role and your business. This means you’re more likely to retain high performing people who perform even better thanks to coaching. As your reps improve how they sell, coaching can move onto more complex issues, giving your reps (and your managers) new sales challenges.
So how do you learn to leap tall buildings in a single bound?
Just like Superman, sales coaches need to learn how to walk before they jump. There are three indicators that sales managers should be aware of:
Lagging indicators: These show them whether their reps are meeting their numbers and include a lot of the traditional metrics like pipeline activity, wins, and losses. These metrics are commonly measured with most CRMs already doing this effectively.
Efficiency indicators: These provide an understanding of why sales reps are meeting or missing their numbers. This can include win rates, sales cycles, and their pipeline size. These are very critical for the success of your business. For example, in a CPG business, your efficiency indicators will consider how well your reps are getting their product placement. Whereas in Technology getting the discovery process right will be an important area to focus your efficiency indicators.
Effectiveness indicators: These metrics look at whether your reps actually “get it” and the behaviors that they are demonstrating that drive your lagging indicators. Managers need to proactively identify capability gaps and fix them. A streamlined process for managers to build capabilities in their team and make them more effective salespeople could be the difference between an average and best-in-class team.
Businesses who not only understand their efficiency and effectiveness indicators but are able to maximize their reps achievement of them will achieve success. In the past sales managers focussed all their efforts on lagging and efficiency indicators to enable their team. But businesses have changed, the way we make our products has changed and the speed at which the industry dynamics alter is radically different. To drive revenue in the new world order managers need to look at the effectiveness of each element of their indicators and identify their importance for sales success. By focussing in on effectiveness, managers can coach their reps better, drive revenue and increase sales productivity.
Find new ways to identify capability indicators
Just like sales managers get regular reporting on lagging indicators, they also need access to information on their teams’ efficiency and effectiveness indicators and their gaps.
One way to do this is to spend time identifying the key capabilities that lead to the success of your top 20%. Then enable your sales managers with information about what team members have gaps in these capabilities.
For reps who are losing deals against their competition, managers can benefit from information like:
Are they accessing competitor information before a customer meeting?
Is their messaging tailored for each customer?
What behaviors are they demonstrating that is helping them move down the buying process and close more deals?
A sales enablement platform like Mindtickle can help identify some of these behaviors along with personal observation.
So what are we waiting for?
Before you start telling your sales managers to get out and coach, you have to help them learn to leap that tall building in a single bound. This is an important step that many businesses struggle with. In fact,
the Harvard Business Review
found that only 12% of international business leaders believed they had invested sufficiently in the development of their frontline managers. That means that 88% of sales managers are trying to coach their team blind.
But this isn’t just about teaching sales managers to coach, it’s about empowering them so they can coach. Sales managers in many organizations are weighed down by a plethora of tasks that don’t necessarily help them contribute to revenue or develop their team.
McKinsey found
that frontline managers spend between 30 and 60% of their time doing administrative tasks or sitting in meetings. A further 10 to 50% of their time is spent doing non-managerial tasks like traveling, special projects or actually selling themselves. This means that only 10 to 40% of their time is spent actually managing, and only a portion of this is spent coaching.
One of the quickest ways to give sales managers more time to coach is to take away the administrative tasks that are not adding any value or revenue. Whether it’s automating sales reporting or leveraging technology to reduce travel time, there are many ways to enable sales managers to perform these tasks more efficiently or remove them completely.
It’s essential to ensure that your managers are making the most of the extra time available to them. The first step is to make sure they have
the basics in place
.
Also, HBR found that 40%
of international business leaders believed that their frontline managers didn’t have sufficient leadership development, tools or training. Companies with the best sales training programs look at their existing learning programs and identify what gaps there are in sales leadership training so they can start working on the basics.
Joanne Wells of Halogen Software
suggests looking at what your sales leaders know about your business and its goals. By understanding your broader business objectives leaders are better placed to hone in on what’s most important for their sales reps to learn.
Learning is cultural
Holding knee-jerk training sessions that exist in isolation rarely achieve the desired results. So if learning and coaching are to be integral parts of your organization then they must become part of your culture. This means from the top down learning is valued, supported and encouraged.
The first step
is building the basics for your managers by clarifying responsibilities in job descriptions, performance appraisals, and broader communications, so it’s clear that this is an organization-wide initiative.
Then you can create an environment where there is a regular cadence for learning and coaching. An easy place to start is by looking at your best managers and identifying what they’re doing well. There’s no need to recreate the wheel, replicate what works.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and today there are so many tools available that can be used to help your organization build its culture of learning. Think about this way, if managers are given a structured and effective way to coach their reps regularly they’re more likely to use it, right? But if you have to take everyone out of the field for a week, there’s little incentive for anyone to get involved. That’s why super sales training has to fit into the way your sales team works, rather than the other way around.
The key to making the most of a sales manager’s time is to recognize that the managers don’t have to do it all. If learning and coaching are a part of your organization’s culture, then subject matter experts in Product Marketing or Sales Enablement can take on the role of coaching reps in some areas. After all sales
coaching is a team effort
. Sales Enablement and Product Marketing can take on key roles as subject matter experts, coaching reps on knowledge and messaging, like how to pitch that new product feature for example. This frees sales managers up further to focus on where they can add the most value like improving sales skills in a deal by deal coaching and on the finer aspects of process and execution.
This effectively elevates the role of the sales manager so they can focus on the more complex deals and performance issues, optimizing their time and skills. The more managers coach, the more they learn what works and what doesn’t, developing and strengthening their superpowers.
While every sales manager has their own unique coaching style, the end goal is the same; develop and improve how their sales reps sell and meet quotas. By enabling reps and managers with a structured coaching framework you can have a marked impact on coaching effectiveness and its results. Structured coaching ensures reps have consistent behavior, produce more predictable sales results and follow a sales process.
What is the problem?
Industry dynamics are changing too quickly and competition is fierce, it’s no longer an option to leave coaching up to chance.
Research by the Sales Executive Council
found that coaching the middle 60% can improve performance by up to 19%, and even if you coach those below average to above average you can improve the performance of 50% of your sales force by six to eight percent.
Also, there are so many types of managers and salespeople. Each manager has their own style and sales reps have their own individual needs. Ensuring there is a culture of coaching accountability and sales coaching process ensures managers coach reps on the most important area.
Key to coaching success
The key to effective coaching is to provide specific tools, identify gaps and enable remediation workflow that is readily accessible to both managers and reps every day. By supporting this framework with a process that maps each coaching needs to a subject matter expert will make the stakeholders’ accountable.
It’s no longer enough to coach in one-on-one meetings just a few times a year. Companies are now agile and reps and their managers need to be too. Reps need constant development to help them sell better. They need to be coached on a variety of things. Here are some examples:
Identifying what stage their buyers are in;
Understanding their sales funnel and how to prioritize prospects;
Learning how to tailor value messages to buyers;
Preparing for that big meeting;
Navigating who their champion is;
Trying to find the right angle to close the deal;
Understanding how to maximize the opportunity in their territory; and
Analyzing a lost deal.
This has to be done in real-time, not just when it’s scheduled into the diary.
Coaching from a manager’s perspective
A coaching framework needs to have enough flexibility to accommodate different managerial styles and the individual needs of sales reps. Managers shouldn’t be left to try and figure it out on their own. In fact, managers may not always be the best people to coach on some things at all. Sales Enablement and Product Marketing may be better equipped to coach reps on product demos while managers are best left to coach on the finer points of specific deals.
That’s why best-in-class sales organizations are moving towards an outcome-oriented approach, where different leaders and subject matter experts (SME) collaborate to make coaching successful.
This structure works best when the responsibilities of each stakeholder are clear and their expectations are aligned. We’ve found a framework that encompasses the needs of most sales organizations:
I call this the aX + bY + cZ formula for effective sales coaching.
Depending on the complexity of sale, a, b and c will change the priority of what a rep requires coaching on. For example, FMCG retail sales Sales Process and Execution Discipline (Z) will have the highest priority so c will be high, with b and a being a smaller percentage. For sellers of complex technology software Knowledge and Messaging (X) and Sales Skills (Y) may have a higher priority, so a and b will be a much higher percentage than c. SDR sales may place more weight on Sales Skills, giving b the highest weight.
The trick to the perfect coaching formula is that it’s tailored for your business. Your magic formula will take into account the specific intricacies of your industry, product and prospects, along with the needs of your reps and managers to create your own aX + bY + cZ.
Outreach’s model for tapping into the motivational drive of its individual sales reps
How Outreach has leveraged technology to motivate and develop sales skills
The six areas that were critical to accelerating Outreach’s revenue growth
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“Everybody has different motivational factors. Some people look at pleasure versus pain as being a motivating factor or hope versus fear, acceptance versus rejection, even success versus failure.”
The challenges of motivating individual sales reps were amplified for Outreach as the business grew 20% week on week. As the company’s second employee Jacob Turner has played a pivotal role in developing a framework that has seen the business keep it’s now 40 strong sales team motivated.
“Motivation isn’t just about financial reward. A lot of people, especially millennials, are interested in giving back,” he explains. “Instead of giving people money we’re investing in experiences.” The biggest motivator in Turner’s experience is their weekly sales gym.
“Sales gym is about giving reps access to different concepts of sales and psychological practices. Like what’s the difference between feedback and feed-forward, what types of leaders are out there, how to be a better leader, and things like that.” he continues. What makes the Outreach sales gym unique is that it’s a virtual classroom that relies on Slack and a webcam.
“They’re not really Outreach specifically. It’s more about how to be a better salesperson.” And isn’t that what every salesperson wants? Listen now
to hear how Turner took his sales reps to the gym to stretch their skills.
No athlete is perfect. Each has their own unique skills and areas that they can improve upon, that’s why even elite athletes need a team behind them. Usain Bolt is the fastest person alive but in the lead, up to the Rio Olympics (where he won his ninth Olympic gold medal), he credited his team led by coach Glen Mills as the strength behind his success.
Mills has never been an elite athlete. He’s a
career coach
, one who has learnt the ropes from the ground up and trained in aspects of anatomy, agility, coordination and even talent identification to become the best in the business. Running may be an individual sport, but Bolt’s success is thanks to a team of experts from doctors to nutritionists to Mills, who all put his needs front and center.
Focus in on the target
Sales is no different. While achieving quota is up to the individual rep their success is a team effort. For each team, the focal point of their efforts starts and ends with the needs of the sales rep.
In order to stay on top of their game reps require sales coaching on three areas:
The mix of each of these disciplines that a rep requires will depend on a range of factors such as their industry, product and skill level. Each business will need to determine what is the appropriate blend of weighting that each need for their business. This then forms the basis for your sales coaching program. By structuring your coaching program you can take the risk out of your revenue forecasts. Research from The
Corporate Executive Board Company
showed that reps who received as little as three hours of coaching a month exceeding goals by 7%, boosted revenue by 25% and increased their average close rate by 70%. Without a structured program in place, your sales organization is leaving your revenue in the hands of fate.
Success is a team effort
While the manager plays an integral role in coaching a sales rep to success, they are not the only person involved in the process. Sales enablement and capability, sales coaches, leadership and product teams are becoming increasingly involved in the coaching process. Some actually take on the role of coach in some areas, while others help enable the sales manager so they can coach more effectively. Each and every role in the coaching process is important.
For example for some organizations their sales coaching framework looks like this:
With the roles of each stakeholder defined within the coaching framework, your subject matter experts have clear expectations of what they need to do. This also surrounds sales reps with a team who are all there to help them achieve success.
Having everyone on board is an important step towards creating a culture of coaching. To ensure the culture is entrenched it’s also necessary for coaches to be accountable.
Scott Erdinger
suggests some useful ways to reinforce the culture of coaching like establishing uniform expectations across every member of the team from the VP Sales down. This ensures both giving and receiving coaching is role-modeled by all. Highlighting those you are achieving is also effective, but the key here is not to just mention who they are but to also share what they did. This again helps role-model behavior and imparts knowledge to other reps. Finally, he suggests a carrot and sticks approach to accountability, where those who engage in the coaching process are rewarded and those who opt-out face consequences.
The mix of activities that are appropriate will depend on the nature of your team, its members and how entrenched sales coaching is in your organization. Like anything worth doing, coaching requires hard work, but the potential benefits to your team and topline are endless.
Research published by The Harvard Business Review found that salespeople can be segmented into eight different types, but only three of them are consistently effective at selling. That means for every rep you hire only 37% of them will be consistent performers. Worse still, the research found that the remaining 63% demonstrated behaviors that actually drove their performance down further. So if you keep hiring the same type of reps you may never actually get them to ramp up effectively unless you know what areas to focus on.
The researchers observed how 800 reps applied 23 different sales skills that had been identified for success. These skills fell into seven different categories:
Meeting preparation
Customer interaction
Company presentation
Presentation rapport
The sales pitch
Storytelling
Rising to the challenge
Sales coaching can make all the difference
The good news is that each of these behaviors can be learned and improved upon with the right training, coaching, and reinforcement activities. This is where managers have a large role to play. As
Tamara Schenk, Research Director at CSO Insights explains, “Lasting behavior change requires ongoing reinforcement. This is where coaching comes into play.”
But sales coaching for the sake of coaching isn’t enough. For managers to coach effectively they need a structured process to identify gaps and fill them. Without a structured coaching program, you’re just leaving your sales success and revenue to chance. Even the best reps can use some tips to help them improve their behaviors and win rates. There are eight types of reps, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. We also share some effective sales coaching techniques for each kind of seller.
1. Experts
As natural salespeople, experts know what they’re doing and customers love them.
Coaching opportunities: Step up to mentor their peers and share their best practices is a growth opportunity for experts.
2. Closers
They can close a deal, but these smooth talkers can turn off customers
Coaching opportunities: Focus on coaching on softer skills can help closers improve their selling style and keep them engaged and motivated.
3. Consultants
These problem-solvers listen to their customers well but overlook case studies that can help them extract more sales value.
Coaching opportunities: Focus on how they interact with customers, engage in storytelling that can help them build deeper relationships.
4. Storytellers
With the gift of the gab, storytellers could sell ice to the Eskimos but they often lack efficiency and structure in their selling process.
Coaching opportunities: By helping a storyteller focus their meeting agenda, set targets, and improve self-awareness they can close more deals quicker.
5. Aggressors
They may win the deal, but their aggressive approach toward price can put some customers offside.
Coaching opportunities: Aggressors can improve their sales results by rounding out their skills so they focus on value more than price. Coaching on softer skills may also help them build a stronger rapport with their customers.
6. Focusers
No one knows their product better than a Focuser, but their lack of confidence can make it challenging for them to identify what their buyer really needs.
Coaching opportunities: Focusers can benefit from coaching that helps them identify an opportunity, understand their customer’s pain points and articulate your value proposition.
7. Socializers
Everyone loves a socializer, but the pleasant chit-chat can get in the way of making a sale.
Coaching opportunities: Moving from a good rapport to talking business is a behavior that can be improved by setting short-term targets and close guidance. Socializers may also need help understanding their sales funnels, so they make the most of the opportunities they have.
8. Narrators
A good sales script can be a useful guide or a hindrance. For narrators, it’s a case of the latter, where they feel lost without their script.
Coaching opportunities: Customer conversations are rarely scripted, so Narrators require coaching that helps them understand their customers, tailor a pitch to meet their needs, and handle objections confidently.
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days” ~ Zig Ziglar
Sales enablement is more complex for a distributed field sales team. After all, employees don’t have the luxury of wandering across the hall to ask a question. To get you started, here are six points to consider as you’re developing your field enablement strategy.
1. What is the role of sales enablement and management in your organization?
Understanding who has responsibility for what in your business can influence how you structure the development of your sales enablement initiatives. In some businesses, sales enablement takes on the broad role of enabling the entire sales organization, while in other organizations they just focus on providing sales collateral and product content. This leaves local and field enablement in the hands of sales managers, who may also be distributed, making it even harder to develop effective enablement initiatives.
Another factor to consider is the proximity of each team. If your field teams are all located in the same state, there may be more opportunity for them to meet periodically to discuss issues and updates and share success stories. Whereas if you have a globally distributed team more enablement effort may be required to foster collaboration and communication between teams and individual reps.
2. What are your business objectives?
Your business objectives are the guiding light that drives all aspects of your enablement strategy. While increased revenue is a given objective for every business, your underlying business needs may differ considerably depending on the agility and stage of your sales organization. If you’re a high growth startup that’s scaling rapidly by hiring, ramping up reps in remote locations is likely to be high on your agenda. Whereas if you have a large and distributed sales team, then feeding them ongoing competitive updates and ensuring your reps are executing your business strategy effectively is your number one priority.
Regardless of your industry, accountability is key for field sales enablement. Particularly as your managers can’t be physically present to see the activity or application of knowledge by each rep every day. This means leveraging technology, to track their knowledge and how they apply it, is essential.
3. What type of sales do your reps need to do?
Field sales reps tend to focus on either complex or consultative selling (like selling security software to a Fortune 500 company) or simple commodity selling (for example selling FMCG beverages and electronics to mom and pop stores). Being agile at scale is a priority for both scenarios. This is where enabling mobile communication with bite-sized push notifications is important.
Pro tip: We’ve seen gamification work really well to drive engagement in these circumstances.
By the nature of their role field sales reps also tend to work remotely. This means they miss out on water cooler conversations with their peers about how they closed that big deal. Peer success stories that can be delivered through a mobile app are a good way to open up communication across geographies and learn from each other.
4. What kind of sales culture do you want?
There is often a danger that field sales reps can miss out on being part of a team culture or even develop their own individual work culture. Because many field reps don’t see their colleagues regularly that doesn’t mean they can’t be part of a broader team culture, it’s just harder for you to create.
The first place to start is by clearly defining what type of sales culture you want your team to have. How should your reps position themselves when in front of a customer? What values should they share? Once you have defined your vision you can then determine how to execute it. Whether it’s through a weekly podcast where you share business updates and wins or structured coaching programs.
With field teams, it’s also important to pulse check their engagement more regularly to ensure they’re still satisfied or have any feedback to improve the culture. This can be achieved by pushing a quick survey to their mobile device each month or quarter. This one small exercise could potentially save you thousands of dollars in staff turnover in the long-run.
5. What does your industry/product/customer require?
As field reps tend to spend more time out of the office, their mobile device can become like a pseudo office if they’re enabled well. This is where the value of mobile sales enablement really comes to the fore for a field rep. So if they’re selling FMCG products they’re likely to need access to large catalogs, promotional and pricing updates, while a niche software rep may need access to complex product information.
Enabling your field reps with content that they can access on their mobile device, even when they’re offline, that is easy to search and bookmark can be a life-saver. They won’t be left fumbling through huge documents when they’re sitting in front of a customer and can quickly search and read up on something before a big meeting.
6. When do they need information?
Field reps are time poor and always on the go. While it may be convenient for you to push out information as it becomes available, it may make more sense for them to have periodic updates. By feeding your field sales reps information and content when they actually need it, they are more likely to consume it. So consider whether a spreadsheet of next month’s pricing updates should be sent out now or at the end of the month.
These six points each help provide the basis for putting in place a comprehensive framework for field enablement. Once you have a framework in place and your initiatives outlined, you’ll be on your way to achieving your business objectives.
In this 15 minute interview Duchen and Reisert outline:
What makes a great SDR onboarding program;
How you can reduce the ramp up time for your new SDRs;
What role a manager plays in the onboarding process; and
What sales enablement professionals can do to improve the success of their SDRs.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes or find it here “Onboarding SDRs can actually be really tricky especially for an organization that is doing this for the first time,” explains Ryan Reisert who’s seen his fair share of inside sales onboarding programs.
Along with Mike Duchen, Reisert is co-founder of Inside Sales Bootcamp, a sales acceleration engine for high growth. They help companies onboard and ramp up their SDRs.
“I see a lot of companies struggle when they start to create their outbound program. Because they’ve had success with inbound, they’ve got a lot of leads coming in, but they start their outbound function without actually going through the data or at least trying to understand what expected outcomes can look like. Without setting that up front, you’re set yourself up for long term failure,” he continues.
“This is not an easy role when you look at what the day to day of an SDR actually looks like,” adds Duchen. “A rep will be doing 100 activities per day, every day. It’s a lot of work. And on top of that, they’re probably getting rejected eight or nine out of ten times.”
Inside sales is a tough job, which is why every enablement initiative you implement that helps your SDRs do their job will lead them (and you) on the road to success.
Superheroes aren’t born, they’re made. Clarke Kent walked in the light of the yellow sun. Diana Prince was granted her Amazonian strength by the Greek Gods, and Peter Parker was bitten by an irradiated spider. But all of them had to learn how to channel their powers and hone their skills before they could fly or scale walls.
While every sales manager has their own unique coaching style, the end goal is the same; develop and improve how their sales reps sell and meet quotas. By enabling reps and managers with a structured coaching framework you can have a marked impact on coaching effectiveness and its results. Structured coaching ensures reps have consistent behavior, produce more predictable sales results and follow a sales process.
“Everybody has different motivational factors. Some people look at pleasure versus pain as being a motivating factor or hope versus fear, acceptance versus rejection, even success versus failure.”
No athlete is perfect. Each has their own unique skills and areas that they can improve upon, that’s why even elite athletes need a team behind them. Usain Bolt is the fastest person alive but in the lead, up to the Rio Olympics (where he won his ninth Olympic gold medal), he credited his team led by coach Glen Mills as the strength behind his success.
Sales enablement is more complex for a distributed field sales team. After all, employees don’t have the luxury of wandering across the hall to ask a question. To get you started, here are six points to consider as you’re developing your field enablement strategy.
