SalesHacker: Sales Training is Only One-Third of What You Need to Be Doing for Sales Enablement

 

In a recent article by SalesHacker, Mindtickle’s Manager of Enablement, Ashley Philipps, discusses what sales training and sales enablement have in common – and how successful sales enablement can get you ahead of the game.

The key takeaway? While sales training is ideally suited for onboarding new hires and getting them up to speed, sales training alone can’t help to move the revenue dial. In the article, she writes, “At the end of the day, sales training in and of itself is only a portion of the overall solution that an organization needs to be adopting.”

Ashley outlines what sales enablement is, as well as what it isn’t, and cites some important statistics from a recent Forrester tech sales report. This discussion brings to light just what exactly you and your organization should expect from a successful sales enablement initiative.

Among the many functionalities and tools sales enablement should deliver are an overview of reps’ competencies and capabilities, as well as rigorous alignment with business goals. Some questions a successful program will help you answer:

  • What do my reps know?
  • How are they talking about the company and the offering?
  • How are they handling objections or concerns?
  • Are they capable of creating an environment conducive to selling?

After reading this article, you’ll be a step closer to equip your team with the skills, behaviors, and knowledge they need to succeed today.

To learn more about the do’s and don’ts of sales enablement, read on here!

CustomerThink: Why Sales Coaching is So Hard and 6 Ways AI is Making it Easier and Better

Creating and maintaining an impactful sales coaching framework in the modern age isn’t as easy as one might think – but with the right mindset and the right tools, it’s not out of reach. In a recent article published by CustomerThink, Mindtickle’s Senior Director of Product Management, Himanshu Bari, discusses what makes today’s sales coaching such a challenge for businesses.

While coaching has always been an important part of the training process, for sellers navigating today’s digital-first buying journey, coaching is now critical to helping reps learn how to control the sales process and win the customer’s confidence.

Himanshu identifies a lack of time, feedback, visibility, personalization, and specialized skills as the most significant obstacles to overcome when implementing coaching efforts.

For many companies, building out a successful and targeted coaching framework can seem daunting or time-consuming – but that’s exactly where there’s room to grow with coaching automation. In the article, Himanshu analyzes the six major things a next-gen, AI-supported approach to sales coaching can help your company accomplish better.

Among them:

  • Enhanced visibility and incentives to influence culture.
  • Team-level remediation recommendations.
  • Machine-assisted reviews and progress reports.

 

For an in-depth look at improving your sales coaching, read on here!

McKinsey: Smarter Call-Center Coaching for the Digital World

In a recent survey, McKinsey revealed that of 50 senior customer-care executives, 94% expected an increase in skills shown by their contact center agents over the next five years. What exactly does this point to? The fact that digitization is totally transforming expectations of the customer contact center.

In McKinsey’s new blog, read about just what this kind of change means for your organization – and how to address it as your team grows and moves forward. For example, the article establishes the three underlying causes to this shift in coaching effectiveness:

  • there’s often less coaching taking place than companies expect
  • coaches often approach their work with the wrong mindset
  • coaching is often poorly targeted

After addressing these pain points, the article points readers to a comprehensive analysis of how to address them by improving the availability, targeting, and delivery of coaching inputs. McKinsey suggests focusing on analytics, creating more user-friendly digital content, and automating administrative tasks – just as a few suggestions.

To learn more about how to supercharge your coaching efforts with digital tools, read on here!

The Glaring Disconnect in Providing a ‘Superior Client Experience’ in a Top 5 FinServ Institution

After preparing for a career in financial services, fresh out of college, I considered myself fortunate to land a position with one of the top five U.S. financial institutions in the industry.

I’d long been impressed by their depth of wealth management expertise during a summer internship I’d done with the firm a couple of years prior – working with high net worth business and personal clients, as well as portfolio management and alternative investment professionals,  was truly a formative experience. I was excited to join such a sophisticated operation and couldn’t wait to learn more about the multitude of products and services they offered. However, soon after I started I was asking myself: how do I start selling, and what do I need to do to stand out to clients and add value?

Our training consisted mainly of floating around, observing, and basically learning by osmosis. Sometimes a manager would come by and say “Hey, we’ve got a big project and we could use an intern’s help.” Other times, we would go out on our own in search of projects to work on. It was far less structured than I expected –  a “learn what you can where and when you can” environment.

Life at the deep end

When I proudly accepted a full-time position as a registered client associate, I expected my on-the-job training experience to be more formal. What surprised me was that it wasn’t all that different from my internship days: an unstructured, in-at-the-deep-end, sink or swim process — with “shadowing” or  “learning by doing” training. I quickly started having conversations with clients about their portfolios, lines of credit, and business accounts, but quickly realized that I wasn’t equipped to handle questions about competitor offers or details related to our products or market research.

When I finally received some formal training, it was the “old school” off-site kind. What struck me was how costly, time-consuming and relatively ineffective the training was when it came time to actually help the new hires understand how to be successful in our jobs. For example, triple checking detailed financials is painstaking, but crucial because each line carries real financial impacts on the clients. What we needed was the building of systematic knowledge of products, prices, services, and practices in real life situations – not to mention a way to effectively handle objections. The same goes for client-specific research; while Bloomberg and trading platforms were designed to enable us to add value to our customers, the training to educate us on the use of these platforms was boring, time-consuming and left us wanting.

On the compliance side, while I received regulatory “training” via an incumbent learning management system (LMS), what became apparent was that it wasn’t all that helpful in teaching me how to actually be compliant in a persuasive, client-centric way.

In the few years I spent with the company, they launched several recruitment and rotational

training programs for new hires – but none of them helped us effectively interact with the clients. In short, what I came to realize is I did not receive the kind of training that would make me able to deliver a “superior client experience.” What I needed was useful and structured onboarding and easily-accessible ongoing training, especially given the high-pressured and fast-moving nature of the financial services industry today.

Sadly, of the dozens of enthusiastic new hires that started at the same time I did, only four or five still work there today. I wonder what this attrition has cost the company? And, do other financial services institutions suffer the same rate of loss?

Beyond “sink or swim”

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with asking new employees to stick close to the more experienced associates and financial advisors and learn by observing them. It’s certainly a great way to get to know your colleagues and the company culture. But looking back on my experience, I’m struck by how much more the company could have accomplished by using a sales enablement approach.

Beyond “shadowing” experienced advisors, digging through emails for basic knowledge or figuring out how to do our jobs through hallway conversations, there was a missed opportunity for the company to connect and support new, enthusiastic reps like me.

What would happen had they employed sales enablement to develop skills and shape productive behaviors? Furthermore, what if we could have easily acquired real-time updates on

cross-selling initiatives, trained on new or improved services or practiced offering portfolio analysis or handling client objections?

Since joining Mindtickle, I’ve observed best-practice sales enablement from some of the world’s top companies, who are leaders in putting the customer first which results in ongoing brand affinity and revenue growth. Here is a list of capabilities FinServ cos could use to deliver a “superior customer experience”:
Effective, useful onboarding. 

Not every company, not even financial services companies, have the resources to run massive, one-time, in-person events. A sales enablement platform can help to cut expensive one-time events in half and also deliver the knowledge and necessary skills that sales reps need to succeed in their jobs.
Engaging, structure ongoing learning. 

A sales enablement platform can help to create a highly engaging environment. For instance, it can offer gamified exercises conveniently available on any mobile device or, by providing a structured virtual practice (role plays). Both could help reps develop the confidence to handle unexpected customer concerns and objections, like finding unexpected fees on their account.

In fact, rather than reps checking compliance boxes as fast as possible, with a sales enablement platform, they could share their progress on a leaderboard to show progress. And it could easily cover a full range of needs, from how to use software systems to structuring engaging customer conversations.
Helpful assessment and feedback. 

Sales enablement can provide rigor and accountability to process-oriented knowledge and training. Let’s say your new reps have been assigned research projects around recent market data. With a sales enablement program, you can run a quick assessment of reps’ knowledge of the details and differences between, say, their knowledge of equity funds or alternative investments.  Assessments can show managers where there are gaps and issues with each rep so they can step in with feedback or if need be, coaching.
Analytics-driven insights. 

Advanced sales enablement systems correlate data between the training and support provided and ultimately, the results reps achieve on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. Managers are able to access assessment results, so they don’t have to guess or go with their gut about a rep’s readiness to sell. Plus insights based on data can help managers easily assess gaps in their sales teams skill-sets and lay the groundwork for personalized coaching.

The FinServ institution I worked at had the best financial research in the business. However, they couldn’t apply the same data-driven approach to training the reps who were talking about that same data.

Conclusions

After my experience working in my dream FinServ institution and now working for a leading enablement provider, I’m convinced a sales enablement platform would improve their onboarding processes, provide ongoing training and updates, boost knowledge retention and ultimately hold onto more than a few of their reps. Top-tier players in the industry who know the competitive advantage they’d gain by providing an exceptional client experience could finally do so.

6 Reasons Your Managers Need Sales Leadership Coaching

coaching_the_sales_coach

We know that sales coaching is an important part of sales management. It helps your reps become better salespeople overall, improves their skills, increases their engagement with your organization and, of course, improves your topline revenue. Studies have found that effective sales coaching programs can improve sales reps’ performance by up to 20%. But many managers actually don’t know how to coach well. Despite their abundance of experience as a rep, the promotion to a management role doesn’t always come hand-in-hand with specialized training.

Effective sales coaching isn’t about occasionally auditing your reps’ activities, or giving some in-person feedback every once in a while, but about building a regular cadence to provide useful, insightful and specific coaching in areas where individual reps need help. After all, coaching sales reps can be tricky for management because each individual has unique areas that they excel and others where they need extra guidance.

Here’s the thing: Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are one of the fastest growing teams inside B2B sales organizations. But when you look at some of the data about these specialized sellers you find out that over 80% of them have less than 2 years of experience and their average tenure at companies is 1.5 years, according to the Bridge Group.

This presents a few challenges for sales managers. First, very inexperienced sales hires require a lot of information about industry, processes, methodologies and overall basic sales knowledge than your tenured salesperson, and their short tenures mean you will be constantly onboarding new sales development reps which may strain your onboarding program but most importantly, you need to ensure extremely short ramp times.

To best enable the SDR team you have to think of your enablement program as more than just onboarding. Having a great sales onboarding program is great and the best way to ensure quick success for the SDR but think of it more holistically including:

  • Ongoing knowledge reinforcement
  • Experiential training and practicing
  • Coaching and career development

For example, if your rep has five areas where they need coaching, how do you know if their sales managers can address every single one? And how do you prepare your managers to find these gaps in the first place? Perhaps they’re great at pipeline management but struggle when it comes to deal coaching.

Given the breadth of the role of sales manager, it’s simply not possible for them to know how to coach sales reps on everything. But, just like their reps, they need sales leadership coaching so they can fill their own gaps.

Look in the “too hard” basket

Another issue that all sales leaders deal with at one point or another is “avoidance”. If something is difficult to do, or someone simply doesn’t know where to start, it’s much easier to put it in the “too hard” basket and forget about it until something bad happens.

Trying to coach sales reps only in adversity, like when they’ve just lost a big deal, is hard for both the manager and the rep. After all, no one wants attention just because they haven’t done their best, and coaching isn’t about yelling at someone for not performing. It’s about encouraging and developing reps to be their best.

That’s why it’s sales leadership coaching is so necessary; it’s important to ensure sales managers are coached to provide their teams with the skills and behaviors they need,  proactively rather than reactively.

So what exactly is sales leadership coaching?

Before we get into the detail of how to help your sales managers learn how to coach their reps, it’s important to differentiate between coaching, training, and managing.

  • Management is about overseeing things and making sure they stay on track.
  • Training focuses on learning new knowledge.
  • Coaching is about developing skills, improving performance and/or changing behaviors.

Sales coaching is the ongoing, one-on-one mentorship of each rep on a sales team. It is a conversation between the rep and a coach, where the rep does most of the talking while the coach listens, observes, and offers feedback.

It’s not about telling someone what to do, but about helping them look at different ways to achieve better results. When done well, sales coaching can drive sales’ productivity and effectiveness.

1. Develop a coaching framework

The first step in helping managers learn how to become an effective sales coach is to develop a sales coaching framework. But beware, there is no one-size-fits-all solution because every business is different. To work out what your coaching framework should include why not ask your sales reps what they need. Speak to your sales managers to find out what they would find useful, and ask your executives about the overall objectives.

This information can then be used to build your aX + bY + cZ formula for effective sales coaching. This framework is tailored to your organization’s needs while ensuring you cover the necessary aspects of sales coaching including knowledge, messaging, sales skills, process, and execution rigor and discipline. While no sales coaching program will be identical, it’s critical that each ensures that managers have:

  • The knowledge required to coach in all the areas
  • The skills to actually coach
  • The tools required to build a cadence for coaching
  • The discipline to execute the coaching framework consistently

2. Put the sales coach into training

Once you’ve identified the key areas that your salespeople need coaching, you’ll need to identify whether your managers have the requisite skills. The best way to ensure managers have the knowledge and skills to coach is to provide them with formal training. There are many ways this can be done, from formal in-class training to peer to peer learning.

Football coaches have to be certified before they get to coach players. In fact, the process for certifying a football coach is thorough, with several levels, depending on the experience of the coach and the level of the players they seek to coach. It should be the same for sales coaches.

One of the most effective ways to coach is to give both the reps and their managers the same information and knowledge and make sure they are certified in key areas. This ensures they have the same baseline knowledge, and the certification ensures they have absorbed the information and are able to apply it.

For example, one of our customers, a high growth tech company was launching a new product and wanted to ensure their sales team delivered a consistent message to prospects. To enable their sales managers to coach sales reps through this they first certified them on how to sell the product themselves. This ensured that they knew exactly what the reps had to do, and when combined with their own experience and skills were prepared to coach their teams effectively.

When this approach is complemented by guidance on how to coach, it can be powerful.

Provide live examples to managers on how to have coaching conversations. Help them understand what they should be looking for and what areas to focus in on for the greatest impact. Provide them with the opportunity to role-play their coaching so they can play it back and learn from it.

3. Leverage reporting and tools

All the training and practicing in the world won’t be of any use to a sales manager if they’re going into their coaching sessions blind. That’s where good reporting on the right things is critical. When determining what they should be coaching sales reps on, most managers just look at lagging indicators like pipeline activity and what deals reps have won or lost. But this doesn’t always provide enough useful data. That’s where efficiency and capability indicators are important.

While effectiveness indicators look at the behaviors that sales reps can demonstrate to drive lagging indicators. Coaching is about behaviors, not quotas, this qualitative information needs to be available to managers so they know what to coach on.

This information can be identified by bringing together information from several places, whether it’s from a CRM, sales enablement software or competitive intel. The key is giving managers the tools that can help them identify which indicators to look at and access to get the right information.

For example, if you’re looking at what the indicators are for salespeople who win deals, your sales enablement software can provide you with information on what content your best reps are accessing before a big meeting. This may provide data about what behaviors are correlative with winning deals, and in turn what behaviors may need to change in order to improve the results of some of your reps.

With useful data-driven reports in hand, managers are able to identify what specific areas individual reps require coaching in, and start working on improving their behaviors and results.

4. Mentor the coach

With the right tools, your sales managers will be much better equipped to coach. But they will still need to learn how to use tools to achieve the best effect. One of the best ways to learn coaching is to learn from peers. Your sales reps buddy up, so why not “buddy up” your sales managers? With role models to help mentor and demonstrate good practice, managers will be able to ask questions and share their knowledge with their peers.

While mentoring and buddying is usually a one-on-one activity, you can encourage collaboration and peer-to-peer learning amongst the management team by bringing them together. Some of our customers have organized manager workshops that give sales managers the opportunity to share what works and what doesn’t in a supportive and collaborative environment.

It’s also a great idea to encourage managers to share their coaching wins with the entire sales team. This has a dual impact for allowing the sales organization to learn from what works, and also demonstrates the value of coaching to any skeptics.

5. Provide regular feedback from executives

If your organization has a sales coaching culture then your sales leadership will want to know how your sales managers are performing. Rather than observing from afar, they should be encouraged to see how managers are coaching regularly and provide their own feedback and insight to the team or when appropriate, even individuals. By getting involved they can demonstrate just how important the sales coaching program is to the success of their sales team, and in doing so, boost engagement in the process.

6. Incentivize successful coaches

Along with executive buy-in, rewards and incentives are another good way to engage sales managers. While successful sales managers are incentivized when their team meets quota, how often are good sales coaches recognized or incentivized?

Consider adding in a coaching specific incentive to your KPIs for encouragement for those who learn how to coach well. When used as part of a structured coaching program, these six steps will ensure that you give your sales managers the knowledge, skills, and discipline to coach consistently.

Concluding thoughts

Ultimately, more than helping SDRs craft an email or hone their pitch, sales enablement training for a manager can help them coach their reps based on the competency model that was developed (or recruit the managers to help craft it). Part of the problem most companies face is not giving good guidance for managers on what to coach their teams on and ensuring all managers are consistently coaching their teams on an ongoing basis. While this can be tricky to implement initially, some organizations turn to Coaching Reports in the form of an Excel file, Word document or similar which although well-intentioned end up being a burden for the managers and makes it difficult for the enablement team when it comes time to compile information and glean insights from it.

Finally, technology here can help as well. With the ability to create electronic coaching forms that follow a competency profile and different online forms for different coaching situations you can ensure managers are all following the same guidance and the data collected can be analyzed and shared back with the managers to show them how their teams are doing in their expected competencies as well as guide the managers to where more coaching is needed.

The ultimate takeaway here is that it’s extremely important to treat your sales manager training differently from all others –making sure to tailor each program to the needs of your particular reps based on their experience, tenure, and skill level will help your managers’ coaching significantly both in the short and the long run.

5 Reasons to Modernize Sales Enablement

As the pressure of digitization on sales functions has ratcheted up in the past couple of years, companies are taking another look at modernizing sales enablement – for good reason. Among them:

Selling is getting harder.

Fewer reps are hitting their quotas. According to a recent article by Forbes, 57% of sales reps missed their quotas in the last year – concluding overall that what’s truly hindering sales’ success is the lack of cohesion between departments and the way new sellers are being introduced to the product.

Onboarding is taking longer.

With today’s complex product lines and ever-changing business models, it can take as much as nine months to ramp up new reps.

Buyers are bypassing sales for the information they need.

Customers often complete as much as 70 percent of their journey from their own research, according to industry estimates.

Faced with these challenges, companies are increasingly seeing sales enablement as a strategic imperative that’s vital the sales organizations success. The stage is set for a new kind of sales enablement. For hard-pressed sales organizations, it can’t come soon enough.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is a catch-all phrase with many meanings. But more importantly, what is its purpose?

The idea of training new sales reps, or any other customer-facing employees, to align their objectives with the company’s goals and gain insight to be successful is not a new concept. Knowledge of product(s), brand, and the competitive landscape is imperative to their quickly becoming effective. In the search for continued revenue growth, companies have sought to better equip and prepare those on the front lines of revenue generation: sales teams.

The goal has been, and continues to be, to enable them to reach quota as quickly as possible and consistently, thus the creation of sales enablement. However, as the state of sales enablement constantly changes in scope, it’s needless to say that there’s yet to be a single, universally adopted definition.

Here are a few takes:

  • Search Google and you’ll find, “modern sales enablement is the enablement of sales teams with information, tools, and content that help salespeople sell more effectively.” A more visionary definition of sales enablement from SiriusDecisions explains, “Enablement’s purpose is to ensure salespeople have the skills, knowledge, behaviors, and tools needed to engage [buyers, team, other] in rich conversations.”
  • Forrester Research says, “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees  with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return on investment of the selling system.”

When Forrester Research asks, “What is sales enablement?” they characterize it with the idea that companies should put their customers upfront. Putting customers first is an excellent approach to creating your sales enablement initiatives. That said, it’s just as important to determine whether your business needs a dedicated sales enablement manager, a big decision for any company.

No matter its current definitions, sales enablement has come a long way in the last five years towards helping sales teams perform better. Reps today are more comfortable in competitive environments, as well as those which sometimes require more complex strategic sales motions.

At the same time, engaging with today’s highly informed and ever-more scrutinizing customers requires salespeople to retain and effectively use ever-more knowledge, skills, and behaviors.

While sales enablement is designed to help sales turn more opportunities into revenue, most traditional sales enablement solutions cannot show how programs correlate to individual outcomes.

What most don’t realize is that there are huge, previously untouched areas where enablement solutions (tools, platforms, and best practice methodologies) can bring more value and revenue to companies.

What Gartner has to say about sales enablement

Companies, both purposefully and accidentally, are missing some useful and obvious strategies. This short-sightedness also applies to sales consultants and training or learning tools vendors –all of whom have implemented or offered otherwise great technology for sales enablement. Let’s take a look at some numbers behind these pain points. Here are some key statistics Gartner recently shared at their conference about the complex reality of most salespeople today:

  • Customers are more complex: over 6 people are typically involved in B2B purchases with over 3 different functions represented.
  • Product complexity: the product portfolio that sellers represent have increased in size by 2.3 times, and only 37% of sellers find it easy to customize their offerings.
  • Internal complexity: sellers have reported that 16.4% of the sales cycle is spent on internal approvals and only 24% of sellers can easily calculate their variable compensation.

What the figures above tell is a story of increased difficulty and complexity for the salesperson in your average B2B company. Now add the picture above with the new reality of how salespeople develop their skills, according to Gartner:

  • 58% of sellers develop their skills through their colleagues
  • 35% of skills sellers use today were acquired in the last year
  • 66% of sellers expect most learning and development to occur outside the classroom
  • 60% of sellers expect to learn and develop just-in-time

Traditional training programs and methods are falling short of the expectations and needs of sellers today and leaving much to be desired. The facts presented by Gartner point in a few different directions as well:

  • Managers are more than ever required to be involved and help drive sales learning and coaching
  • Onboarding programs have to adapt to the new realities of today’s sellers and better enable them to help buyers during their journeys
  • Manager enablement is a critical need to help managers have better conversations, give feedback, identify seller skills gaps, and have career conversations with their reps

Most sales enablement teams would agree that the biggest problem or obstacle they face when rolling out programs is getting managers to spend time with their sellers and with the programs.

The key takeaway? Working with managers to show the impact that their actions can have in sales performance is one of the most important action items in your next sales enablement playbook.

If you have a platform that allows you to measure your sales team’s “readiness” and you can show managers the skill gaps identified through the different initiatives rolled out, you’ll have a much easier conversation when it comes to implementation of a new sales enablement strategy. Regardless of technology, the first step is changing the frontline managers’ mindsets and presenting them with a strong case for enablement.

What modernizing sales enablement programs can do for you

The goal of modern sales enablement is straightforward: to help you and your team win more and bigger deals.

“Sales enablement optimizes the selling motion in order to increase pipeline, move opportunities forward and win bigger deals more efficiently to drive profitable growth.” – Sales Enablement Society

It helps achieve that goal through three its three core capabilities. In short, sales enablement:

  • Helps sellers build out skill sets to deliver phenomenal customer experience. It personalizes, gamifies, coaches, and provides micro-learning modules to deliver resonant and memorable experiences that help sellers master and operationalize new skills.
  • Combines a modern enablement platform with best-practice methodologies. Sellers need a digital solution that they can access anytime, on any device. Modern platforms’ design is informed with industry-leading insights on how acquired skills translate into revenue production and customer engagement.
  • Shows the connection between actions and outcomes. Modern sales enablement platforms harness artificial intelligence and data-driven analytics so you can see how your programs are improving sellers’ capabilities. You can identify knowledge gaps where you might want to do some coaching. The platform provides a clear picture of how sales capabilities impact sales performance and business outcomes.

So without further ado, here are the top five reasons you should consider modernizing your sales readiness programs.

1. Business is in a high growth phase

Many businesses experiencing high-growth tend to deal with business challenges that are right in front of them. Usually when business is booming it’s easy to forget about the longer term future. This short-sightedness can cause major headaches down the road, particularly when there are no streamlined processes in place to track personal or business performance.

Referring to an HBR blog Science of Building a Scalable Sales Team, Mark Roberge from Hubspot points out the importance of taking a disciplined approach when training salespeople so that everyone has good foundational selling skills. According to Mark the result at Hubspot stated that “our salespeople are able to connect on a far deeper level with our prospects and leads”, a process that has consistently resulted in high growth.

2. New sales reps take a long time to meet quotas

Hiring new sales reps is a significant investment for any company, and the longer they take to onboard and ramp up, the more money burned.

“According to Aberdeen Research, companies that adopt best practices across their sales teams had double the quota attainment of their peers. Each sales enablement program that gives a rep more time for core selling nets more revenue. Each best practice program that makes reps more effective translates into topline improvement”.

Modernizing sales readiness programs will help each member of the sales team achieve peak performance. Therefore, sales enablement programs should always include finding ways to improve sales reps’ efficiency and effectiveness with prospects so they can meet their quotas and keep on performing into the future.

3. Sales reps spend too much time on non-selling tasks

The primary job of any sales rep is to continually work on their sales process, generating and qualifying leads, conducting sales demos and closing deals. If Anytime they’re not on these selling tasks it’s usually unproductive, and a poor use of a valuable resource.

“To increase sales productivity, you have to reduce or eliminate tasks that aren’t productive.”- Nancy Nardin

Modernizing the sales readiness programs with a data driven sales enablement platform will help your organization have vision into the sales process and identify how it can help reduce non-selling tasks and increase efficiency across the entire process.

4. Need to increase individual sales quotas next year

According to CSO Insights, 94.5% of firms they surveyed said they were raising quotas. If you too are planning to increase quotas, then you’re going to need a new strategy and a new set of sales enablement tools to get more out of your sales team. A dedicated sales enablement manager should help to ensure that your sales reps be well trained regarding your customers’ needs, be up to date with industry and product news, have the necessary tools and information available with them when they need it. As CSO Insights discovered.

As CSO Insights discovered that the key to achieving higher quotas with the same sales team is to keep your sales team well trained and ready with a new set of skill.

5. Marketing efforts aren’t helping sales sell

If you are increasing your marketing budgets but that’s not translating into helping sales sell more, then having a sales enablement manager could be the reason. A significant part of marketing’s role is to create sales collateral for each persona for every stage of the buyer’s journey, so, it’s crucial that both sales and marketing are aligned and work closely together.

A sales enablement manager can help bridge the gap between marketing deliverables and what the sales team needs. Working with both sales and marketing can make a difference in sales ability to provide valuable content and collateral to customers. For example, the HubSpot sales enablement team sits with the sales reps but reports through to the marketing.

Why change?

To sum up, moving in a direction of a revamped, modernized sales enablement program has the potential to completely turn things around when it comes to your team and their sales readiness. A comprehensive and collaborative approach to sales enablement just might be that secret ingredient when it comes to revamping the way your organization tackles – and wins – sales deals.

Ultimately, here’s what a modern sales enablement platform do for your organization:

  • Accelerate and enhance onboarding to telescope time-to-productivity
  • Coach sellers in the exact areas where they need help
  • Energize your meetings and kickoffs to propel profitability
  • Build sellers’ confidence and effectiveness through guided role-play
  • Track and accelerate business outcomes through reporting and analytics
  • Build reps’ skills through tailored, highly engaging learning and development activities
  • Help sales leaders to make their skills go viral, company-wide.

I Never Knew About Movember, but Now I’m All In

I’m sadly not alone in having stories of prematurely losing male loved-ones to untimely, often unnecessary and tragic deaths. I never realized I was in the midst of a male health crisis of my own having lost a dear friend at 39 years old to pneumonia, a father who was only 69 to a stroke, and a grandfather to suicide.

My colleague Oscar Collingsworth-Smith, our new star FinServ Industry Exec, has similar stories of losing dear male family members to tragic, not-caught-early-enough diseases. Sadly, early male deaths are all-too-common; most everyone knows men die earlier and more often than women. What they may not know is many of those deaths are preventable. And more still, like me, may not be aware that

Movember

is a leading charity working to change the face of men’s health.

In fact, Movember addresses some of the biggest health issues facing men today: prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health and suicide prevention. In 15 years, the Movember Foundation has funded more than 1,200 men’s health projects around the world. By 2030, the foundation will reduce the number of men dying prematurely by 25%.

I’m super proud to join Movember as a Mo Sista with Mindtickle, who for the month of November, will be supporting men’s health by raising funds and awareness for all the dads, brothers, sons and friends in our lives.

Across the globe, Mindticklers will be growing mustaches, getting active, and inspiring donations & conversations to bring about change in the men’s health crisis.

With Mindtickle, we’ll be tracking, evaluating and discussing our team’s Mos, using the

Mustache Capability Index

to judge style, craftsmanship, density, difficulty, healthiness, size and personal fit. The Mindtickle Mo Sistas will be moving, participating in events, and showing their support and love for the ‘Mo.

And you can help our cause here – right on Mindtickle’s very own Mo’Space!

Thanks to Oscar and a supportive executive team, Mindtickle is coming together to change the face of men’s health. And, I’m all in!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igHbLmYJT9Q&feature=youtu.be

Does Your Onboarding and Training Open Newly Hired Sales’ Minds or Crush Their Souls?

Sales Enablement expert Steven Wright provides a metaphor for onboarding by describing two completely different experiences of doing the same thing – boarding a plane.

Calling all cattle

At the airport, ticketing is crowded as usual. There’s no option to pull up a boarding pass on your phone – since this is an international long-haul, the agent needs to see your passport. The queue is about 50 people deep. Thirty minutes later, you finally get to see an agent. He looks askance at your carry-on and “suggests” you check it – for another $40. Boarding pass in hand and frown on face, it’s off to security now. The line there is at least 200 people. Another 45 minutes, and after all the TSA rigmarole, you’re through. At the gate is a teeming mass of people, and an hour until boarding. Maybe a coffee? The line at Starbucks is better than security, but not much. You give up the coffee idea and find a seat. Boarding is finally announced. Can boarding group numbers go that high? You realize they can – another 30 minutes in line in the jetway. You enter, turn right. And finally, you settle into your seat, crowded on either side by…well. It’s going to be a very long 14 hours.

Right this way, sir

The ticketing area is crazy, but the business class line is empty. The agent takes your passport and smiles. A few clicks and your boarding pass gets neatly and quickly tucked into your passport. With carry-on and backpack, time for TSA Pre-Check. Crazy on the other side, by the way. A TSA agent beckons you. Two minutes later, you’re heading for the lounge. Glass of wine, munchies, a look at the New York Times and boarding is called. At the gate, there’s another empty line, next to all the queued coach passengers. You board, turn left, stow your carry-on, and take your seat. The flight attendant greets you by name and offers you a glass of champagne. You try out the seat controls, look at the menu (nice wines on this flight) and settle back – almost looking forward to the next 14 hours.
So what does this have to do with sales onboarding and training? Hang on, we’re getting there next.

Five questions to ask when refocusing training investments for the future:

For Mindtickle’s November 13 Webinar we’ll be asking five key questions to help you get to the answers you need when it comes to finding the right way to optimize and balance your training investments:

  • What are the barriers to training? For all employees – whether freshly onboard or established veterans – increasing business complexity, new technologies, and new distractions have built a wall that companies need to break through in order to engage workers. Yet, some of those distractions – when’s the last time you checked your phone? – can help break down those walls.
  • Where are the challenges? When it comes to the effect of training, several factors are in play ranging from a lack of learner engagement, often because of a less than ideal experience along with weak content. Complicating things is the inability to effectively measure the impact. To make things even worse, many companies are still stuck in the technological past when it comes to training.
  • Which is it – and, or, versus? Legacy approaches highlight the need to understand where the value of Learning Management Systems (LMSs) is versus newer approaches especially or sales and training enablement. But it’s not an “and/or” situation. Nor is it one versus the other. By understanding what types of learning are needed, and which technologies can best address them, companies can start to find approaches that will help training take-off.
  • What works? While employee engagement and training is one thing, it’s important to consider sellers and their experience. Sellers, more than perhaps any other customer-facing employee, have demands and challenges of their own. For one thing, everyone wants to “help.” And many parts of the organization have a stake. But companies need to build a lens through which to view the seller experience and build training that, like the example I started with, optimize how and what sellers do.
  • Is technology enough? Even with a clear strategy for how to both leverage existing training investments and take advantage of new technologies, companies need to take a step back and recognize that technology, by itself, won’t fix things. Companies need to understand the strengths and limitations of the organization and technology and build a flight plan that takes both into account.

Which would you rather?

Take a moment and think about the experience your organization offers new sellers? Is it akin to the cattle call or “Right this way, sir” boarding experiences?
Those first experiences with your company set the tone, and define on a deep unconscious level, how sellers will regard your company, your brand, your solutions and how they will engage with buyers. For sellers, is your approach “round-em-up and brand ‘em” or is it “welcome aboard, we care about you as the key interface to our all-important customers”?
Even after they board the plane, what happens next? What’s their ongoing experience? Crowded, boring, too much time in class or staring at a screen? Or interactive, helpful, and even entertaining? Do your sellers arrive at their destination relaxed, refreshed and ready to sell? Or exhausted, tense and ready to quit? (And why do so many companies persist in calling it “Boot Camp”? What possible positive association can that have?)
When looking at the onboarding and training experience, consider how your organization, culture, and training and enablement technology can open the mind rather than crush the soul. Your company is probably investing a lot in improving the customer experience – and who often becomes the first human contact for your customers? The seller. What is their experience like? Does it enable them to provide your future customers with the experience they need to buy or develop brand affinity?
Oh, by the way, for my upcoming trip? Thanks to miles and lifetime status – strictly business class, thank-you.
Please join me at Mindtickle’s upcoming webinar on November 13, titled “Enabling Sales People for the Future by Refocusing Training Investments”, where we will discuss how you can refocus training!
About Steven Wright:
Steven looks for the intersection of technology and practice to better enable sellers to improve customer understanding and sales progression. With over 20 years of experience in sales enablement as a practitioner at companies such as IBM and as an analyst at Forrester, Steven focuses on improving sellers’ skills at all levels and has worked with hundreds of companies.
Working with Vendor Neutral, Steven is currently managing Vendor Neutral Certified Profiles, a program from VendorNeutral.com that offers buyers detailed profiles of sales technology solutions to simplify finding the right tech for their needs.

A Playbook for Data-Driven Sales Enablement

Enablement success…or not?

According to research from CSO Insights, “organizations with successful sales enablement programs see 67% quota attainment, compared to only 42% for companies that admit their enablement programs fall short of expectations”. This is great news if you’re running sales enablement for a company or trying to get buy-in across the organization for your own enablement initiatives. The problem is, though, that even though the value of sales enablement is starting to become obvious, recent research on sales performance is putting a dark veil across what would otherwise be a positive initiative.

Over the past few years, not only has quota attainment by sales reps dropped precipitously – with the latest number hovering around 53%

– but the majority of sales leaders also maintain that their sales enablement programs are not fully meeting their expectations

.

If you’re wondering why this happens, you’re not the only one. While more and more organizations are starting to see the value of sales enablement, it seems that most programs still struggle to deliver the expected value. This predicament becomes a bit more clear when we address at a simple question that Mindtickle posed to hundreds of sales leaders at a conference earlier this year:

“If you were to listen to your sales reps on the phone, how many would you say are on-point and delivering your value proposition accurately?”

The results were startling. Over 60% of respondents indicated that they believe less than 50% of their sales teams deliver their value propositions accurately during a sales situation. This points us to two potential takeaways:

  1. There’s a problem with how sales training is done today
  2. Enablement teams are clearly not having the expected impact on sales behavior

Tackling these two issues in a way that lasts requires a new, revamped playbook – and this blog post will provide some insight as to how a new sales enablement playbook could potentially look like.

A new playbook for enablement

The first question we typically ask companies looking to improve their sales enablement is what are they measuring and how. If you are still tracking and reporting on course completion rates or certification numbers, the odds that you’ll be getting the proverbial “seat at the table” are pretty slim.

The most successful enablement teams we work with have been able to break out of the traditional learning and development mold and create a new measuring system aligned with what sales most needs: an improvement in seller competency and performance.

But technology is only part of the formula. If you want to create a winning playbook for enablement there are four elements we suggest you think about:

  1. Approach enablement as a continuous journey through the seller lifecycle
  2. Prepare reps to handle different scenarios – not follow a script
  3. Guide and empower front-line managers to better coach their teams
  4. Institute a data-driven conversation about enablement

Enablement as a continuous journey

Multiple events happen throughout a seller’s time with a company that requires enablement. New products are introduced and new partnerships are formed, the marketing team launches new messaging, competitors change tactics or launch new offerings, changes in the go-to-market strategy open up new territories or industries – for all of these and more, a seller should be continuously informed.

While we are all familiar with the above scenarios, if your enablement team wants to upgrade their playbook, a good start is to look at these enablement events not as isolated moments, but rather in the context of the buyer/seller journey.

The seller journey is related to the seller’s own experience at your company (new rep vs veteran), performance (low, mid, high), and all the other facets that might impact how this person learns, applies their learning and wants to learn.

The buyer’s journey, on the other hand, is related to what buyers are looking for throughout the sales process and how you are enabling the salesperson to engage with the buyer throughout those stages and help them make a decision. Understanding the “persona” of your sales rep, their needs throughout the buyer journey, and their needs for all of the scenarios which require enablement will help you start thinking differently about the plays you want to add to your playbook which will help guide the sales enablement team.

Skills, not a script

The next chapter in your playbook for better enablement is looking at the sales team’s skills and competencies, and working towards developing the ability for sales reps to adjust and adapt their approach to buyers based on the buyer’s needs instead of a standardized, predetermined pitch.

While the pitch certification is important to establish a baseline and ground rules, reps should be “situational-aware,” and tailor their conversations accordingly. A high level of “situational awareness”

requires better readiness for your sales team and the adequate tools to get them to where they need to excel.

Great enablement programs incorporate different ways in which reps can practice sales scenarios and get constructive feedback and coaching. Virtual role-play technology is key in this area so that you can train Account Executives on how to counter objections, help Business Development Reps hone their outbound email writing skills, and Sales Engineers to try different ways to demo a solution or answer a technical question.

Coaching in the frontlines

While the impact of sales coaching is known to drive over 27% improvement in sales wins rates

, many companies still lack this chapter in their playbooks. Best-in-class organizations, however, have decided to give frontline managers the tools they need to become better coaches. And while training sessions help, there are a few key elements that are essential when rolling out a coaching program:

  1. Coaching framework
  2. Coaching cadence
  3. Accountability
  4. Results

Having a coaching framework gives managers tangible guidance on what to coach reps on and hot to coach them. Typically, this is connected with a competency model so that managers can tie observable behaviors back to the key competencies reps need to develop.

A cadence helps make sure that coaching becomes a habit where managers drive and hold regular coaching sessions. The accountability bullet points to requiring a senior leadership sponsorship to ensure that the front line managers not only have the tools they need to implement coaching but are also measured and tracked on their coaching initiatives. Frontline managers who are held accountable for coaching their teams and have the resources to do it end up performing better than the average with the results to show.

Finally, being able to track results is the missing link in most coaching programs. Companies using field coaching forms but not compiling the information or those who coach regularly but don’t track the impact on deal velocity or size end up missing the biggest incentive reps have to spend time in coaching sessions.

When creating your own coaching playbook, make sure you have the tools to ensure both reps and their frontline managers are properly enabled to put the program into practice.

Data-driven enablement plays

Measuring and reporting on enablement success can only be done if you know what to measure and how to measure it. Any playbook will fall short and won’t be adopted if you can’t start tying those initiatives with lagging and leading indicators.

At the top of the list is what we call your “Readiness Index”. How can you tell whether an individual rep is sales-ready? And what does readiness means for your organization? The best enablement leaders are not waiting for the VP of Sales to schedule a meeting and tell them her readiness goals. If this is not clear in your organization, take the reins and put together a draft document with a definition that you believe is the correct one for the team you work with and seek the sales leaders to either agree and approve or discuss and improve.

Elements of readiness typically include:

  • Knowledge score:an indicator of whether the reps are able to recall key information required to do their jobs.
  • Skills or capability score:the metric showing how well each rep is doing related to the core competencies required for them to do their jobs and apply their knowledge in specific situations.
  • Execution or behavior score:a key value related to true field observation (either via ride-alongs, shadowing calls or reviewing recordings) that tells how reps are actually executing or using their knowledge and skills in real conversations with buyers.

Ideally, you want to be able to have all this information in a system with visual analytics that you can share with managers and they can pull the information themselves about their teams. Once you start collecting hard data on the three key elements above, the conversations about enablement programs and priorities become grounded on true data and help show the value that sales enablement brings.

Concluding thoughts

Creating a sales enablement playbook can be hard if you try to do many things at once, but focusing on the core elements described in this post I hope we have guided you in a clear direction where you can start slowly building the different plays that tie into a continuous enablement journey, preparing reps for different scenarios, incorporating coaching and having a data-driven vision for how your programs can be measured and proven effective.

McKinsey Quarterly Report: Why Data Culture Matters

 

Bringing together data talent, tools and decision making is often easier said than done: many a company faces this challenge.

How do you incorporate data into your daily business model and strategy? What about your company culture?

With these questions in mind, the McKinsey report gathers and analyzes some key research that touches on seven fundamental principles that underpin a healthy data culture. In this article, McKinsey provides readers with 7 takeaways from industry leaders that help understand how to tackle the ever-evolving use of data analytics.

Some of the topics  include:

  • C-suite commitment through ongoing informed conversations
  • Drawing a  correlation between data analysis and decision making
  • Striking the appropriate balance between hiring new employees and transforming existing ones

“You develop a data culture by moving beyond specialists and skunkworks, with the goal of achieving deep business engagement, creating employee pull, and cultivating a sense of purpose, so that data can support your operations instead of the other way around.”

In addition to McKinsey’s comprehensive research, Mitsubishi managing executive officer Takehiko Nagumo, Boeing CIO Ted Colbert, and JPMorgan CDO Rob Casper, along with others, also provide thought leadership throughout the article.

Read here!