When Hiring for Sales Enablement, What’s the Best Fit – Product Marketing or Sales?

hiring-sales-enablement-marketing-salesSales enablement is currently at a nascent stage, which means it can be difficult to find good quality people with enablement experience. Many often fall into sales enablement roles because someone suggests it to them or perhaps they’ve taken on some of the functions of the role as part of their position in sales or marketing. It’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot at Mindtickle as we help sales organizations scale rapidly, so when our co-founder and CRO, Mohit Garg, asked this question on LinkedIn, I found the broad range of responses quite interesting.
According to Lucas Gerler, The Sales Enablement Society polled its members and found that about 40% of current practitioners come from marketing, about 30% from sales, and the remaining 30% from other roles. There are benefits to be gained from hiring from both sales and marketing backgrounds.

Sales is in your DNA

As Renee Capovilla said “If you have “walked” in the shoes of the customers you are serving your deliverables reflect that DNA.” And when it comes to sales enablement your customer is the sales organization, so having experience in sales is a big advantage. It gives you credibility on the field, particularly if the role involves delivering sales training and liaising with the sales organization regularly. Having sales management experience also gives you credibility with the C-Suite according to Chuck Marcouiller, “I believe the key customer of sales enablement is the CRO and senior sales leaders. Having a sales leadership background gives the street credibility and insight into what sales leadership is facing.”
The benefit of having sales experience extends beyond just credibility. It means that you know how to empathize with your customers and the problems that sales reps experience daily. A view affirmed by Nancy Maluso who said: “insights into the seller persona is critical.” This includes an understanding of the buying process and the sales skills that are required to convert a prospect to an opportunity and close the deal faster. Salespeople don’t need to know the thought process behind the product, they need to know their customer and how the product helps them.
But having sales experience isn’t enough as sales enablement must collaborate with so many areas and brings together a diverse range of skills. That’s why salespeople who have held a range of roles in an organization tend to be a good fit. If someone has worked in sales ops, been involved in process improvement, knows how to build partnerships internally or understands how to leverage technology to improve how they do their job, then they bring a lot to the table.
“I’ve found that folks with a pre-sales background perform very well. They understand selling and the sales process and they have deep knowledge of your products and can translate their value in a way sales (and customers) can understand,” explains Daniel West.

Marketing skills enrich customer conversations

While sales understand the customer, product marketing understands the persona and how they relate to the product. This means they can synthesize information about the customer from research and other sources and understand the psychology behind how to communicate with a customer effectively. When coupled with execution skills like lead generation this can be a very powerful skill set that enriches the sales enablement team.
Marketing skills are also favorable at the execution level for some aspects of sales enablement. Content delivery and program management are two areas where marketing can really create knowledge. It may also be beneficial to look beyond product marketing and consider people in regional marketing functions. This is because those roles often incorporate many types of enablement and field sales activities.

Blending sales and marketing may be the right mix

Perhaps the real answer lies in not choosing one over the other, but rather bringing together a blend of skills in your sales enablement team. While people with a sales background know how to approach customers, those in marketing understand how to craft a compelling message to a persona. When both come together they can create the right blend that can enable your sales team and continuously hone and improve their skills.
It’s not easy to find people who have straddled both sales and marketing over the course of their career but you can occasionally find a salesperson who has a knack for product marketing or vice versa. But if you have a sales enablement team then it is perhaps best to create an environment where you can leverage a cross-functional skill base and place people in roles that work to their strengths. This approach can give you the best of both worlds.

Sales enablement is multi-faceted

While the primary discussion is around whether sales or marketing skills are best for sales enablement roles, the reality is that enablement is a multi-faceted role. It’s not enough to understand the customer, craft a message and train the sales team. It also involves making sure they’re more effective at their role and have everything they need to be ready for every sales conversation. This requires analytical skills, an understanding of technology and the ability to improve and re-engineer processes. Sales enablement needs the skills to develop and execute content and training programs, which requires a combination of these skills.
In many respects, sales enablement requires a multidisciplinary approach, which is why some practitioners come from consulting, engineering or even training. The key for any sales enablement leader is to align the desired business outcomes to projects and milestones. They must work with learning specialists to design the right outcome-oriented program.

Each sales organization is different and must find its right blend

When it comes down to it, there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer to this question – it really depends. It depends on the stage your business is, the verticals you’re targeting, your product and your growth trajectory.
The needs of a sales organization also change over time and so do the skills they require in their enablement team. That’s why identifying what your organization requires now and then building a strategy and a team that can deliver those specific needs is so important.
By its very nature, sales enablement needs to be forward-looking and able to pre-empt what sales require before it becomes a real problem. This strategic outlook should translate into your hiring strategy. A sales enablement team needs to enable the acceleration of sales, and you need a team that can support your strategy to achieve this. 

Sales Disrupted: Preparing your Sales Organization to IPO

sales preparing to ipoPreparing to IPO is a massive task. It’s not enough to have the legal paperwork and financial reporting ready, your business also has to be able to demonstrate that it’s up to the task. As Joe Sexton, who helped prepare our customer AppDynamics for its IPO journey, has said: “you have to act like a public company before you actually become one.”
When it comes to your sales organization that means ensuring you have all the necessary rigors in place from your sales process to culture. This process should start about 24 months before you’re planning to IPO. There are six areas that we suggest focusing on when considering how to enable and prepare your sales organization to be ready to IPO.
sales preparing to ipo 2

Ensure your messaging is consistent

While consistent messaging is crucial for any sales organization, when your business is preparing to IPO its importance becomes elevated. It also becomes more important to look at consistent messaging from a data-driven perspective. From CEO to SDR, everyone needs to sing from the same songbook so your customers and the public see a cohesive sales machine. The entire company should be aligned on your message and articulate it because this will become a core part of your overall IPO strategy
Core to messaging is your company’s story.
MuleSoft, who recently made its public debut, refined its messaging with a core team of leaders. It then created a certification program to ensure each member of its frontline team was on message before they had customer conversations.
“We had the core team record themselves in the Mindtickle platform to provide examples and best practices. Then we formed a group of best performing reps and managers who we call black belts. This group of black belts then certified the full team. We had over 500 people go through this program,” explains Stephen Hallowell, VP of Sales Enablement at MuleSoft.
Leadership support was key to the success of their messaging as well as setting benchmarks and ensuring each rep received personalized coaching. AppDynamics also underwent an extensive company-wide process to certify their reps on consistent messaging. Each rep had three chances to achieve certification of their message or they were out.

Build capacity for growth

Investors will want to see a company that is growing and poised for further growth. This is not the time to take your foot of the pedal, a business that is preparing to IPO should be continuing to scale sustainably. In fact, public tech investors like revenue growth rates above 30% in the two forecasted years after the IPO. Others suggest that a business should already be achieving $100 million in revenue by the time they IPO, and still be growing.
Building the capacity for growth isn’t just about adding more reps though. In fact, the key to building sales capacity is ensuring you’re not over-investing.  In order to grow a business needs more reps who are selling more effectively and meeting quota. You need to do more, smarter, better with the resources you have as well.
This goes beyond just looking at quotas and considering how to ensure more of your reps are able to achieve or even smash their quota. If you’re hiring new reps, how long does it take them to ramp up and what can you do get them fully ramped up quicker. How effective are your current reps? Can you identify what is causing them to lose deals?
This can be achieved in several ways, enablement initiatives like onboarding and effective sales coaching can make a significant step change in the way your reps perform. For example, Mulesoft executed a structured coaching program to drive behavioral change. They identified execution gaps and built competency maps to help them pinpoint where to target their coaching efforts to make a real difference in the performance of their sales reps.
AppDynamics looked at the yield of each rep, being what the rep should be able to produce. This yield helped them define their sales capacity and identify what capacity they needed to hit their targets.

Button down your processes

Before IPO, all your sales processes need to be rock-solid. That means having in place everything from demand generation tools to pipeline management. Processes should be streamlined, understood and scalable. Investors will expect execution excellence. This means more than just having a consistent sales process and methodology that is used by all reps. Coaching processes should also be in place to ensure any gaps are identified and able to be rectified quickly.
It’s also important to look across your entire customer facing team. While much effort is focused on field sales reps, inside reps and even customer success teams play an important role. By qualifying leads and ensuring they are nurtured or moved onto field sales when the time is right inside sales helps improve efficiency and reduce your sales cycle. While customer success can play an important role in customer retention and renewals.
AppDynamics developed a culture of excellence in pipeline generation. Every Monday field sales reps focused on prospecting, according to our VP of Sales, Cameron Essalat, this was called PG (pipeline generation) Mondays. , in addition to marketing, partners and inbound sales. These efforts supercharged their sales pipeline and helped the business continue to scale rapidly.

Continue to invest in capability

Creating a strong pipeline is important, but the investment will be sunk if your reps are not able to convert those leads. This is where focusing in on sales effectiveness to build capability is key.
Your reps’ skills need to continue to be developed so they can constantly improve and stay on top what they need to. Building capability can include enablement initiatives that ensure regular communication, develop structured coaching and provide reps with tools that keep them constantly up to date and primed to sell at their best.
The more you invest in your sales team the more important retention becomes. This is why it’s also important to consider the type of sales culture you want for your business and put in place processes and initiatives to help you achieve this.

Measurement is imperative

You’re no longer a small startup that’s testing a new product. By the time you’re 24 months out from IPO, your business will be still scaling but revenue should be becoming more predictable. But just because your revenue is predictable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t maintain a tight rein over your performance.
To control and identify issues before they become major problems it’s important to identify what areas have the power to transform or derail your sales. Then you can determine which leading indicators to monitor so you can stay ahead of the game and make any necessary adjustments to keep you on track. If you’ve only got an eye on lagging indicators like topline revenue, you aren’t giving yourself an opportunity to foresee issues and address them before it’s too late.

Build a sales stack that supports growth

Your sales stack should support your growth and help your reps sell, not give them yet another thing to learn. Precious time and resource can be saved by building a sales stack that is intuitive and leverages integrations wherever possible.
Many efficient businesses anchor their sales stack to their CRM so reporting and activity can be streamlined in one place. It makes sense, but of course, your sales stack must also support your other core initiatives to create consistent messaging, build capacity and capability and execute your processes. With these six measures in place, you can not only prepare your business to IPO when the time is right but also help it continue to scale and achieve its growth potential.

[Podcast] How Qubole Leverages Sales Readiness Technology to Deliver True Value to its Customers (Episode 21)


In this 20 minute podcast, Brazier outlines:

  • How Qubole uses sales enablement drive productivity per sales rep
  • Why technology is crucial to accelerate sales readiness and bring true value to your business
  • How to leverage sales kickoffs to ensure your reps’ positioning cutting edge
  • His best advice to anyone creating sales enablement initiatives

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes or find it here.
Jordy Brazier is Vice President of Sales Operations for Qubole and has been in Sales Operations for over 10 years. Qubole is the largest cloud and diagnostic big data service, providing businesses with a self-service data platform to help them make data driven decisions.
Selling to IT decision makers, they operate in a tough market, releasing new product updates regularly to stay ahead of the curve. This means their sales reps also need to make sure they have a cutting edge positioning.
“Every week we release a new course or an updated version of a course about what products we have? And, how to compete with specific products,” explains Brazier.  “To drive adoption and see who is going through those trainings is, Mindtickle lets us see who are the learners and who needs improvement. It’s great to have this ability. We want to make sure that we have the best prepared reps when we go into the field. So they can be true trusted advisors to our customers and are able to deliver true value. That’s super important and that’s why we take enablement very seriously and really invest in those programs, into technologies that make them the best and put fire power behind them.”
Qubole has also raised the effectiveness of their reps through its comprehensive onboarding program and certifications.
“It’s had a great impact for us as well. We use best practices to take control of the consumer process, bring true value and accelerating productivity,” Brazier continues.

In Conversation with Nancy Maluso

This post is based on a webinar with Nancy Maluso, Research Director for SiriusDecisions. You can listen to the entire webinar here.
SiriusDecisions empowers marketing, sales, and product professionals to make better decisions, execute with precision and accelerate growth. Nancy Maluso has built and managed successful teams in the technology industry and now brings her passion for improving sales productivity to her research at SiriusDecision.
“Coaching is something that I love. It’s something that actually moves the needle and helps people perform better,” exclaims Maluso. “According to Wikipedia, the know it all of all things Internet, coaching is a form of development in which a person called the coach supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training, advice, and guidance.”
Coaching has been proven to work and sales reps find it valuable. “When we asked high performers where they see value in coaching they said, for example, that on deal collaboration and navigating internal resources coaching was extremely important to their job performance,” says Maluso. “Yet, overall, 22% of reps don’t receive any coaching and only 36% of sales reps actually made quota. The average turnover of B2B sales professionals is about 32% annually, meaning 3 out of 10 territories are left uncovered. And when we surveyed top sales leaders we found that 7 out of the 10 inhibitors to growth have to do with sales skills.”
There is clearly a disconnect. If sales coaching is so valuable to reps’ performance, why aren’t more reps being coached? According to Maluso, for a coaching program to be successful, it must include four critical factors. “First, coaching is an individual game. It’s based on the needs of the individual. We have to have some way of knowing what someone needs in terms of coaching.
The second is a competency map. What skills, knowledge, process, expertise, and tools does an individual sales rep have to have to be good at their job? Thirdly, we need insight, both data, and observations, that allow us to know what the individual needs to be coached on. Effective coaching programs are prescriptive, proactive and persistent. We found that if we don’t provide sales managers and sales leaders with a process and a program combined with some tools to help augment the coaching effort, it typically doesn’t happen.
Finally, there need to be actions that the individual is going to take to make a difference.” When all of these factors are in place sales coaching will be most effective. But successful coaching requires more than just a process.
“From a cultural perspective, we want the program to be constructive, not punitive. Part of that is asking reps to identify and self-correct wherever possible. To have the coach support their sales effort persistently through every stage. It’s not just at the end of a win/loss review for example. It’s before they go to have a conversation with the client; it’s not punitive, it’s supportive,” explains Maluso.
Coaching is also a continuous process, it has no defined endpoint. “If a rep has mastered what they need to do with their job, coaching should continue to help develop them for the thing they want to achieve next. Whether it’s leadership roles or specialization, coaching should continue to support that rep,” suggests Maluso.
Persistence is another important quality in an effective sales coaching program according to Maluso.
“We’ve had clients say to us, “Well I do coaching every quarter. I do it at the quarterly business review.” That’s not coaching. it’s persistent and it’s proactive, and it’s always on,” she explains. To create a program that is persistent and proactive you have to have insights. That’s where the competency map comes in.
“It defines what reps need to be able to do. Then it’s looking at metrics that say, “Are they doing that?” Hopefully, your tools track activities that reps undertake so you can see if they are they making the right number of calls. Are they having the right number of customer engagements? Doing the right number of demos?” she suggests.
Useful information can be gleaned from lagging indicators like your sales funnel or win/loss ratios.
“For example, if the funnel is fat in the middle, but narrow at the top and narrow at the bottom, it might indicate a few things,” she says. “Metrics don’t tell you precisely what’s wrong, they give you indicators. Just like if you hit a golf shot and it goes to the right, a good golf coach will have a sense of why that might be. But until they inspect your actual swing, they’re not going to know specifically what’s wrong with your particular mechanics. The same is true with the sales rep. The dashboard gives indicators, things to probe on. If the funnel’s fat, we might look at, well, are they having trouble with solution design? Maybe they’re not engaging their sales engineer properly. Perhaps they don’t know how to use the CPQ tool. Only by observing them in their work will you know or sure.”
To really understand what’s going on insights have to meet with reality. Data provides one view, but it’s not until you observe what a rep is doing on a regular basis that you can identify how to effectively make a difference. “Managers aren’t observing reps to be Big Brother. It’s about understanding what the rep needs,” she explains.
Observing reps so that you can coach them and make a real difference to their performance requires cadence. That’s where the right tools are so crucial. “Processes and tools can help us make coaching a regular part of weekly one-on-one calls, a regular part of prep before customer calls. Coaching can also be done in groups, talking about individual needs so others can learn. It can be done in a lot of different ways, and processes and tools help us automate some of that process. Bring forward the insights and link them to potential tools that can help us support the rep,” suggests Maluso.
“In my example of the fat funnel, let’s say on observation the manager realizes that they don’t really do enough qualifying questions up front so they’re not able to design a solution effectively, and so things get stuck in the middle. Well by observing that the coaching tool can provide a discovery list of questions that can help in solution design, or a video of a rep who’s showing and demonstrating how to do this well or a role play that they can practice to help them get better. Those are the kinds of tools you can provide to managers so that they can coach more effectively,” she continues.
Good coaching programs are also prescriptive and link actions to outcomes.“They are very specific about what needs to be done. What the rep needs to do is understand what actions they need to take that are different. They need to practice those actions and establish a pattern where the action results in impact. Linking what they’re doing or practicing with the outcome you’re looking for is absolutely critical. You want to record in your tool or within your process exactly what coaching is going on and what we’ve asked of the reps or we’ve asked of ourselves as coaches to help them,” she explains.
One final tip from Maluso is to look at data holistically.“Look for patterns. We might see that all reps are having trouble with discovery; not just yours. We can then go back to product marketing and work with them to develop the right tools and maybe a training webinar on how to do effective discovery,” she suggests. By creating a coaching program that is prescriptive, proactive and persistent you can create a culture of support. This puts the development of your reps front and center, where it should be.

Sales Readiness for Each Stage of Your Startup

sales readiness for startupsYou can’t just set and forget sales enablement or readiness initiatives. As your startup grows and your operating environment changes, so do the challenges that your sales organization is dealing with. That’s why your sales reps will need different things to develop and improve their sales readiness at each stage of your business’ evolution.

Sales-Stages-of-Startup

1. Sales acceleration

Product stage:

Focus is on testing and validating your product
Revenue:

$100k to $500k
Funding stage:

Bootstrapping or seed funding
Size of sales team:

1 to 2 (often including the founder)
Sales structure:

Often unstructured with ad hoc process development
Sales challenges:

No dedicated sales enablement resources but the business needs some quick wins to help it validate its business model. The key challenge here is making sure they hire the right salesperson as one wrong move can lead to disaster.

Essential sales readiness initiatives:

At sales acceleration, it’s all hands on deck. While resources are scarce, putting in place the bare bones of a sales readiness program will set your business up and help new reps hit the ground running. These initiatives include:

  • Basic sales onboarding to give new hires the knowledge they need to get up to speed quickly.
  • Basic collaterals to support sales conversations and drive simple marketing campaigns.
  • Preliminary buyer personas that start defining who your target audience is.
  • Simple processes that ensure you’re not recreating the wheel either every new hire or customer conversation. This includes bringing together information and tools and putting in place same basic messaging principles.

2. Revenue acceleration

Product stage:

Refining and testing as market knowledge increases
Revenue:

$2m to $10m
Funding stage:

Series A to Series C
Size of sales team:

5 to 30
Sales structure:

As you hire rapidly the sales team is scaling. To meet the needs of the growing team defined sales processes, guidelines and procedures are put in place.
Sales challenges:

New product features are being added every week which is continuously impacting your customer value proposition and pitch. Sales team turnover is increasing as you hire rapidly and need to show investors that you can achieve results quickly.

Essential sales readiness initiatives:

It’s all systems go with both your product and sales team. To meet growth targets your sales team needs to keep up with a constantly evolving product and new team members. This small startup is now looking like a fully-fledged business.

  • As the product is refined, the customer messaging changes regularly. To keep up your sales reps’ messaging needs to be almost constantly re-calibrated.
  • Your competitors are just as active as you, which means your sales reps need to be updated regularly on your product, competition and industry changes to make sure they’re always one step ahead of their customers.
  • A structured onboarding program is now essential thanks to your fast-growing sales team.
  • While individuals have previously led process initiatives, it’s now important to develop sales processes that are driven by business requirements.
  • Getting the most from every sales reps is crucial. Driving sales efficiency, so you can achieve more with the same resources will help drive sales performance.
  • Other support departments in your business are also growing, like Marketing and Product. In order to stay on top of what they’re doing and co-ordinate efforts collaboration is vital.

3. Hyper-growth

Product stage:

This is now

well-refined
Revenue:

$10m to $100m
Funding stage:

Series D to Series E
Size of sales team:

30 to 250
Sales structure:

Distributed

sales force located in multiple markets. Your competitors are starting to take notice and more are entering your niche.
Sales challenges:

As you grow hiring and onboarding increasingly become even more challenging especially as you start hiring in new geographies and internationally. Sales management starts to feel the unique challenges of managing remote individuals and teams.

New products are introduced which also requires reboarding of your existing reps.

Essential sales readiness initiatives:

You’re no longer part of a small business. With growth comes the challenge of managing more people and ensuring they’re all on strategy and singing in the same key.

  • Sales onboarding continues to evolve and is now a regular and predictable process.
  • With each new product launch there is a need to co-ordinate the approach, not just within your sales team, but also between your other business functions.
  • A sales kickoff is now an integral part of your sales calendar, designed to invigorate, inspire and keep your reps on track.
  • With so many reps across a wide range of locations, keeping them all on message can be a struggle. That’s where certifying their message can help bring consistency regardless of geography.
  • Coaching is now an essential part of your sales managers’ roles. They lead this initiative to drive sales effectiveness and skill development.

4. Profit and expansion

Product stage:

Maturing
Revenue:

$100m and beyond
Funding stage:

Pre-IPO
Size of sales team:

250+
Sales structure:

Proven sales processes and methodologies are in place and they support your mature sales organization. The goal now is to achieve a predictable sales method that produces predictable results.
Sales challenges:

Sales effectiveness and capacity building are key, but they must be achieved while still managing to keep costs under control.
Essential sales readiness initiatives:

Your sales engine is now scaling to achieve predictable revenue. All your sales initiatives are designed to keep the machine humming along while identifying new and innovative ways to enable your sales team and continuously improve how they operate.

  • It’s all about the data now, so you’re constantly looking for ways to refine and improve the metrics that are helping you drive your business.
  • New capabilities and capacity are being built to ensure that predictable revenue can be achieved.
  • Your internal culture needs some focus to ensure that it is geared to constantly enable your business. This mindset should permeate every aspect of your business including strategy, analytics, logistics and operations.

What your reps need to always be prepared and sales ready is constantly changing. Even once your business has matured post-IPO your sales readiness initiatives will need to be evaluated and reviewed on an ongoing basis. This is because, just as your business always strives to achieve more, so do your competitors and your customers. This drives the momentum for continuous improvement. Once you have the essentials in place, sales readiness is about taking your sales reps to the next level so they can always stay at the top of their game.

Sales Disrupted: A Framework to Deal with Disruptive Forces

We live in an age of constant change. An age where disruption is the new normal. But there are some events that can jolt your sales organization into a new phase instantly. And in an instant, you have to rethink your approach and adapt.
Sales-Disrupted

The disruptions that impact our customer’s most often include:

  • Mergers and acquisitions
  • Preparing to IPO and beyond
  • A surprise new competitor
  • Regulatory changes that impact how you sell

Perhaps your business has been part of a merger or acquisition or is preparing to IPO, a new competitor strategy has taken you by surprise, or a regulatory change has completely changed how you can sell. These significant events can take the

sales readiness of your sales organization

back a step or two and it can take you weeks, months or even years to recover and adapt. But that doesn’t mean you need to recreate the wheel every single time. By following or framework you can identify how your business needs to adapt and get back on track quicker.

A framework for enabling sales disrupted

The key to recovering from a sales disruption is to be agile. Your reps need to be enabled so they can pick themselves up and get back out there quickly.  But speed alone isn’t enough if your reps aren’t prepared with the right things to get them back on track.

Before reacting, take a step back and look at

what parts of your business

the disruption is impacting:

  • Resources: Do you have the right resources to take your business forward? This isn’t just about having enough salespeople, but also consider whether they’re all up to standard. Perhaps you need more support resources or different tools to help your sales organization be agiler.
  • Processes: Do your processes meet the needs of your sales organization now? Your processes need to be agile enough to adapt or at least be reviewed when a disruptive change occurs. It’s also important to look beyond your sales processes and to any other business process that may be impacted like customer success or logistics to ensure that they also meet the needs of your new world order. The more stable and adaptable your processes are, the easier it will be for your business to react quickly to disruption.
  • Values: Your corporate values flow through your entire organization, but how are they applied to your sales organization. Your sales reps need to have some autonomy to apply your values, but these need to first be communicated well so they are applied correctly. This can filter down to the type of business you wish to attract or how your reps react when faced with stiff price competition. Agile businesses empower their employees to act within their values.

Taking this approach one level down, you can then establish an enablement framework that considers the three areas where your reps may need support; Knowledge and Messaging, Sales Skills, and Execution Discipline.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help identify what enablement initiatives need to be in place.
Knowledge-and-messaging

What initiatives your sales organization needs the most will depend on what has caused the disruption to your business. For example:
Disruption #1: Mergers & Acquisitions:

 The core objective here is to retain customers and maintain momentum through a period of internal change. Often knowledge and messaging is the most crucial focus area for enablement activities as reps require regular communication and the value proposition may need to be rebaselined.
Disruption #2: IPO:

 As you prepare for IPO execution discipline is key, ensuring you have all your processes in place. Post-IPO this may shift to knowledge and messaging as communication becomes more important and the business’ messaging changes.
Disruption #3: Surprise competitor:

 Knowledge and messaging are critical when going into battle with a new competitor. YYour value proposition needs to be sharp and your reps will need to be up-to-date with the competitive landscape and offerings.
Disruption #4: Regulatory changes:

– While knowledge and messaging is important, depending on the regulatory change, it may impact the sales process and the skills your reps require.

Put a plan in place

To drive your enablement program put in place milestones and a process to achieve these. For example, if you want to develop a consistent message across the organization, what’s the message? How will you communicate this? How will you know that it has been a success? Who will need to be involved in the process?

This plan will map not only what needs to be done, but also which stakeholders will be involved in each step and what other tools you need to achieve it.

Measure, measure, measure

Once you know what areas require focus you can then consider what insights you require. The closer you are able to monitor your reps progress, the quicker you will be able to identify any gaps in their knowledge or skills and plug them. This will keep any revenue leakage from the disruption to a minimum.

By focusing in on leading indicators of

 sales effectiveness and efficiency

, rather than lagging indicators, the more control you will have over your revenue. For example, if your value proposition has changed then reviewing your reps’ elevator pitch will be important. Role plays can be used to provide coaching and feedback and certifications provide a mechanism to measure how prepared reps are for their customer conversations.

Dealing with disruption is never easy. Knee-jerk reactions are common, but they rarely have the desired effect. By following a structured approach you can ensure your sales reps are enabled to deal with the disruption quickly and confidently. Who knows, it may even put you in the position to outsmart the disruptive force.

Transforming from Sales Manager 2.0 to Sales Manager 3.0 and Beyond

sales manager of the futureSales managers are critical to the success of their sales reps. While sales managers are charged with ensuring reps meet their numbers, how they meet their numbers is not as simple as it once was. In the past, focusing in on pipeline and activities was the hallmark of a good sales manager, but the way customers purchase and reps sell has changed, and the role of sales managers has evolved as well.

A highly successful sales manager now invests significant time in coaching their reps to improve their knowledge and skills, drive excellence in execution, and of course keep them on track. Yet businesses often under-invest in their sales managers. Harvard Business Review reported that only 12% of organizations currently invest sufficiently in the development of their frontline sales managers.

Sales managers have a difficult job and yet we often leave them to figure out things on their own.

While the

 70/20/10 learning model

 says that the majority of learning does happen on-the-job, for managers to develop they still need to receive their 10% of formal learning and 20% through coaching or mentoring. This model just doesn’t work anymore. If we leave our sales managers to work out what they’re doing on their own it may take them years to get it right. Can your sales reps wait that long?

In this day and age that’s simply not good enough. The role of sales is rapidly evolving and we expect much more of our sales reps, so it naturally follows that their leaders also need to evolve.

As we move into the era of Sales 3.0, we’re constantly looking for new ways to help our sales reps adapt to the changing world order. This search should start with taking a good look at the sales managers to make sure they have the skills and tools they need to lead their reps through this change. The time has come for organizations to retire Sales Manager 1.0 and Sales Manager 2.0, and set about enabling Sales Manager 3.0.

Sales Manager 2.0 is no longer compatible with Sales 3.0

sales manager of the future

Sales Manager 1.0: The expert administrator

  • Manages sales and administrative tasks
  • Dealing with complaints or individual issues with sales reps
  • Executives performance management
  • Gives feedback on individual issues
  • Responds to queries by sales leaders

Sales Manager 2.0: The activity generator

  • Undertakes the same activities as Sales Manager 1.0 

    plus

  • Leverages email automation tools to improve productivity
  • Relies on scaling customer communications to broaden the reach
  • Focuses on a high turnover with power dialers and other productivity tools

Sales Manager 3.0: The strategist and mentor

  • Manages sales reps
  • Ensures execution of account and territory strategies
  • Helping sales reps create business
  • Developing and executing customer-management strategies
  • Coaches and mentors reps using a structured approach to improve performance and behaviors
  • Supports executives to make strategic decisions about a sales organization
  • Forecasting
  • Funnel management

So how do you get your Sales Manager 2.0 to Sales Manager 3.0

The key is to plan your approach and enable your sales managers to perform at their best. Here are four steps to transform your sales managers.

1. Define their role

Sales management is rarely a one-size-fits-all role. In most organizations there are several sales management roles; for example inside sales managers, field sales managers, territory managers. Each of these roles has different responsibilities and requires different skills.

Before you can determine what your sales managers need to be enabled on, their role needs to be clearly defined. In this step, outline the parameters of each role and what they are expected to achieve. This sets the basis for the next step.

2. Determine the skills required for each role

Once the role of each sales manager in your organization is defined you can then determine what skills are required to perform the roles effectively. As part of this process, it’s essential to consider the behaviors and activities that your managers need to demonstrate to be successful in their role. Questions you can ask include:

  • Do they know how to focus on their team over their individual performance? Many sales managers are promoted from the field where they were judged on their own performance. Making the mental shift to focusing on the performance of the collective can be challenging for some.
  • Do they know how the business of sales runs? Forecasting, reporting, sales methodologies, and processes; these are all skills that are fundamental to leading a successful sales team.
  • Do they know how to create an effective sales strategy? Stepping back and mapping out the big picture is essential to Sales Manager 3.0. This requires being able to identify skill gaps and understanding how these can be plugged and their reps’ skills developed over time.
  • How much experience have they had leading people? A core skill for any sales manager is leading people. This covers more than just hiring and monitoring their quotas. Leading a sales team involves identifying and developing skills as well as coaching and mentoring.
  • Do they know what to coach on and how to do it? Coaching is much more than just giving feedback to reps about how they performed in a meeting. It covers all aspects of selling from lead identification to how they close the deal.
  • Do they know how to mentor individuals? Mentoring is different from coaching. It’s about guiding and providing advice to help reps develop their own skills. This is a skill that can be difficult for anyone to learn, yet it’s crucial to the success of Sales Manager 3.0.
  • Do they know what success looks like? Meeting quota is no longer the only indicator of a sales reps’ success. It’s important that sales managers not only understand what success looks like for their reps but also what it means in terms of their own role, so they can then build their own skill gaps if necessary.

3. Identify where the skill gaps are

Once you know what skills your sales managers require to perform their jobs effectively you can then overlay their existing skills to help you identify areas where they require improvement or development.

A useful tool to help identify areas where your sales managers may require development is by looking at your

efficiency and sales effectiveness indicators

. These metrics focus in on the areas that are important to sales managers when looking at the progress of their reps. So it makes sense that they need to be able to drive the behaviors and capabilities that will drive these indicators in the right direction.

For example, if your reps are struggling in their elevator pitches then they need support from their managers to improve. This requires managers to coach them on improving their messaging and pitch skills. So it follows that your managers may require some help bringing their coaching skills in these areas up to the mark.

4. Leverage technology to enable your sales managers

Just like your sales stack helps your reps perform at their best, your sales managers need a technology stack of their own. This goes beyond your CRM and really hones in on helping them perform each of the elements of their role better. Their stack can borrow from the existing sales stack and also leverage tools from other parts of the organization. The sales managers stack may include:

  • Hiring: To improve their hiring process consider tools that help test candidates for sales aptitude and competency.
  • Coaching: Sales readiness platforms can help optimize coaching by establishing a formal framework that helps managers identify skill gaps and then focus on remediation by developing reps’ skills. This should incorporate a range of coaching activities including role plays, so managers can focus in on specific skills.
  • Messaging: Video and audio tools can often be found in sales readiness platforms. These can help reps practice their messaging and get feedback, not only from their managers but also from other subject matter experts, on how they articulate their value proposition in different situations.
  • Forecasting: Tools like your CRM can help your managers accurately forecast sales results, so they can identify issues early and act quickly when necessary.
  • Managing: This can include the basics of management, like how to motivate their team or conduct performance reviews. If your sales managers have never led a team before then the basics are essential to learning.

These tools will help you enable your sales managers, but the key focus shouldn’t be on helping take your sales managers to the next level. After all, they play an integral role in the overall sales success of your business. But it’s important to remember that enablement isn’t a set and forget exercise. Once you’ve built Sales Manager 3.0 it will almost certainly be time to start working on the next model.

What Separates your Top 1% of Sales Reps from your Bottom 5%?

Separating A Player Sales repsImagine if only one in every hundred Big Mac’s had that special sauce that gives the burger its deliciously sweet and savory flavors. You’d probably be less likely to buy one, opting for another option. It’s the fact that every single burger, everywhere in the world, has the same secret sauce that drives sales of Big Macs from New York to New Caledonia.

Now imagine if all your “C” Players, wherever they’re located, had the same secret sauce that keeps your A Players would closing deals? It would instantly transform them from sub-standard performers into predictable selling machines. The key is identifying what ingredients separate your top 1% of sales reps from the bottom 5%.

So how do we break down the secret sauce?

We know that that being a good sales rep is about being outcome driven. It’s about closing more deals, bigger deals, better deals.

But being a great salesperson involves more than just closing deals. The ability to close a deal actually starts a few steps back in the process. So if you really want to know what makes a good salesperson, have a look at what your best reps know and do to actually get their deals over the line.

It’s this knowledge and execution that drives closing rates. And this comes from their selling skills and how they execute the sales process. Essentially, the secret sauce is made up of competencies that your A Players use to deliver revenue. If you can replicate in the rest of your reps then you’ll be able to bridge the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 5%?

Five competencies make all the difference

Research

 by The Objective Management Group looked into the competency disparities between salespeople. They identified five competencies that account for over a third of the biggest disparities between the top 1% and the bottom 5% of reps.

These are all skills that can be identified, solved for and managed through coaching and development initiatives. By actively addressing them, the majority of businesses can improve the capabilities and revenue generation opportunities of their entire sales organization.

What makes your “A” Players tick?

While it’s helpful to understand what competencies drive most businesses, what will really provide the biggest bang for the buck in your business is identifying the specific competencies that are making a difference to your reps.

To do this you will first need to identify which competencies make your A Players tick. These are the skills that come together to create the secret sauce that sells your product. Isolating these competencies gives you the recipe that will improve how all of your reps sell.

This could include a range of different competencies, for example, some hold themselves more accountable to their quota; they see it as their responsibility. Others take a systematic approach to the sales process, while others have bought into the company’s message and leadership – they’re inspired to perform.

Once you’ve honed in on the behaviors that really drive sales performance you can then look at how your A Players leverage these skills to achieve. How do they negotiate difficult pricing conversations with conversations? How do they incorporate the company’s messaging into their elevator pitch? How do they manage themselves and their quota so they can track how they’re performing and make adjustments when necessary?

By defining how A Players behave and operate, you will then be well-positioned to impart this knowledge to your other reps. This can be done in a variety of ways; from success stories to structured coaching.

As the knowledge is imparted and reinforced to your reps, it needs to become an integral part of your ongoing learning and coaching initiatives. That’s because it’s the secret sauce of how your business sells. It’s how you meet and smash your revenue targets.

Over time, your recipe will improve and evolve, and your initiatives to impart this knowledge will also evolve. In this day and age, there’s nothing stays the same for long. But as things change you’ll be starting from a very different base, one where the gap between your top 1% and the bottom 5% is much smaller. By narrowing this gap you’ll have a stronger more agile sales team and more predictable revenue. So no matter what your industry or competitors throw your way, you’ll be better equipped to manage the ups and downs.
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How do you know if your business is sales ready?

Is your business sales readyYou need a license before you can drive a car. Your SAT scores open the door to grad school. Applying the same lens to sales teams, how do you know if your sales team are ready to have customer conversations?

If you don’t know whether your reps are sales ready, you’re really just hoping they know what to say and how to address your customer’s pain points.

While your business might be winning deals today, a more agile and sales ready competitor could leapfrog you and adversely affect your quarter in an instant. There are so many things that could and do affect your deals, but sales readiness is one of the few that is within your control.

Sales readiness ensures that your reps aren’t losing deals because they simply do not possess the required knowledge or skills, or they aren’t receiving the right coaching. These are all things that you may not know about if you aren’t measuring the sales readiness of your reps.

So how do you know if your business is sales ready?

Your company strategy filters down to tactics and go-to-market strategy

Business strategy doesn’t operate in isolation. For a business to be successful it’s sales and go-to-market strategy has to be continuously aligned with the changing strategy. Businesses that achieve this are able to align their sales organization with their strategy seamlessly. Consider these questions:

  • How confident are you that a random sample of 20 of your sales reps can articulate your top three value propositions consistently?
  • Are your other customer facing teams, from technology support to Customer Success, using the same messaging and philosophy when communicating with customers? How do you track whether they’re on message?
  • How often do your sales reps lose a deal because they weren’t aware that a particular product feature existed?

Sales enablement is a priority

While some businesses have jumped onto the sales enablement bandwagon with vigor and understand its importance others are still a bit sceptical. Then there are those who set up a sales enablement team because everyone else around them is, not because they see the value in the role.

Only businesses who prioritize sales enablement at all levels of the organization will succeed. However, if you’re not sure whether your entire business is along for the ride consider this:

  • Do you have a formal sales enablement function and prioritized sales enablement initiatives?
  • Is your C-Suite aligned with the sales enablement priorities? Are they investing sufficient time to ensure that your sales team accepts your sales enablement initiatives?
  • Are you able to demonstrate the ROI of sales enablement initiatives to the C-Suite and your sales team?
  • How much collaboration is there between sales enablement and other areas of your organization (such as Marketing, Sales Operations, Product and the C-Suite)?
  • Does your sales team have access to sales enablement tools that they use regularly? Can you measure how effective these tools are and how engaged your reps are with them?

Your new hires are ramping up quickly

If you don’t start them on the right foot your reps are less likely to succeed. MongoDB has experienced sales success because they set up a robust onboarding program – this has translated into $200k more revenue per rep in their first year and a reduction in new hire ramp up time from 11 to 5 months. Some questions to answer about your organization include:

  • Are your new hires ramping up at a consistent rate or are there large variations in time to productivity?
  • How do you know whether your new hires understand the knowledge they’ve been trained on?
  • How often do you check back to see if they’ve retained this knowledge?
  • Do you have a process in place for reps to demonstrate that they know how to apply their knowledge in customer conversations?

Your sales team is meeting quota

According to SiriusDecisions only 27% of sales reps meet or exceed their quota. If the majority of your team are meeting quota then hold onto them because they’re clearly ready for any situation that’s put before them. However, if many of your reps are struggling to meet their targets then it might be time to consider the following:

  • Do you have a strong pipeline of opportunities in place? How can this be bolstered?
  • How closely are you tracking the performance of individual team members against forecast? Do you know if your reps are delivering the right value proposition to your prospects?
  • Is there consistency in your deal size, or is this haphazard? Are some reps more consistent than others?
  • How do your win rates stack up against your competitors? Are there any specific competitors that present a greater challenge for your reps? Why?

Coaching is an integral part of your organizational culture

The better your reps’ sales skills are the more sales ready they’ll be. One of the best ways to improve sales skills is through coaching. Research has shown that as little as three hours of coaching a month can increase average close rates by 70%. But if your business supports sales coaching at all levels then you already know this, if not perhaps ask yourself these questions:

  • How do your managers know what to coach each individual sales rep on? How are knowledge and skill gaps identified?
  • Is sales coaching left up to your sales managers or are subject matter experts from across the business brought in when appropriate?

Your reps are all singing from the same songbook

The larger your sales team, the more challenging it is to ensure that they’re all on message. While there was less urgency for consistent messaging in days gone by, there’s too much happening these days to wait until your annual Sales Kickoff to bring all your reps up to speed. If your reps understand your value proposition and can articulate it on-demand then you’re on track, but if you’re not sure consider these questions:

  • How well can your reps adapt their message to a specific context?
  • Do your reps know how to connect your product with their customer’s specific pain points?
  • How well do your reps understand your competitive advantages? Do they know how to articulate this and connect them to your customer’s pain points?

The bell curve of your A, B and C Players is flattening

Let’s admit it, in most companies only a handful of reps consistently meet quota, and it’s virtually unheard for every rep in a sales organization to make their target. Businesses that have effectively managed to bring each of their reps closer to meeting quota are those who are able to tap into what makes their A Players tick.

Focusing in on leading indicators is key to achieving this, yet most managers still focus their energy on lagging indicators like pipeline and conversion rates. But managers aren’t to blame, they require training and frameworks that help them identify what drives those leading indicators and coach their reps to achieve this. Here are some questions that you should answer if you’re not sure how your managers coach your reps:

  • Are you able to identify what makes your A Players tick? Do you know how to replicate their winning formula?
  • What is your plan to enable those B Players who are putting in the effort but still not meeting quota?
  • How wide are the capability gaps between your A and B Players?
  • How consistently do your reps articulate your value proposition and message to customers? Do you have a process in place to remediate message gaps and inconsistencies?

Your sales team know what’s going on internally and externally

New product features, competitor movements, industry changes; things are changing so quickly in the digital age. This means sales teams need to receive and absorb a lot of information quickly to be sales ready. When your team is on top of everything they’re well placed to stay one step ahead of their competition. If you’re not sure whether your reps are up-to-date, consider these things:

  • Do your reps often complain that they weren’t aware of a new product feature or industry change?
  • Do you have a process in place to coordinate and communicate product, competitive and industry updates to your sales reps?
  • Can you measure or identify how well your reps can apply this new knowledge? Do they understand what it means to their prospects and how to articulate that effectively?

Unicorns like AppDynamics, Cloudera, Mulesoft, Nutanix and Qualtrics rely on sales readiness to power their sales success. What are you doing to make sure your sales team is successful?
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5 Steps to Evaluate a Sales Readiness Solution

steps-evaluate-sales-readiness-platformYou know that sales enablement can help your sales reps be more effective at their role, but how do you know which sales enablement platform is best for you? There are so many to choose from and some have very different features, which can make comparing them confusing.

Generally, sales enablement platforms fall into two categories;

sales readiness and sales asset management

.

Sales readiness platforms help you prepare your sales reps to have meaningful conversations with their customers. Sales asset management platforms enable reps to manage their sales content. In this post, I’m going to focus in on the five steps that will help you find the right sales readiness platform for your business.

Step 1: Step back and define your objectives

While you may be eager to pick a solution and get started, it’s important to take some time to reflect on what you’re trying to achieve first. While you may feel like you’re wasting precious time, in the long run, this step will save you from making the wrong decision, and it will help you gain clarity on what your business really needs.

There isn’t a one size fits all approach to sales readiness, what your sales reps need to be sales ready may be very different from other businesses. Consider the following questions:

  • What stage is your business in?If you’re scaling rapidly perhaps you’re struggling to ramp up all your new hires effectively with your current onboarding program. If you’re an established business with a large sales team perhaps you find it challenging to keep all your reps on message.
  • How dynamic is your industry?If your competitors (and you) are releasing new product features every other week, then communicating regularly and keeping your reps on message is crucial to their readiness.
  • How much visibility do you have on your reps’ capabilities?If you don’t have a process in place to identify skill or capability gaps then a solution that enables you to assess their capabilities would be helpful.
  • Are you developing a culture of coaching and sales effectiveness?If the majority of your reps aren’t meeting quota regularly or turning over too soon then your coaching process may need more structure to give your reps the cadence they need to close more deals. Your managers may also need more support to create a culture of coaching and feedback, enabling them to focus on broader sales effectiveness, rather than just pipeline and sales skills.
  • Is your business in need of a sales transformation?If you’ve recently gone through an M&A or you’ve launched a new product you may need an effective way to ensure your customer-facing team is aligned to the new messaging quickly and effectively.
  • Is your current system really working?Old school LMS and classroom training sessions just don’t cut it anymore. To keep your reps engaged, achieve ROI for your sales enablement efforts and keep up with your competitors, it may be time to update your system to something that addresses the sales issues you face today.

Once you have identified your key objectives, you’re ready to move onto the next stage.

Step 2: Identify your dependencies

Your sales readiness platform is probably not the only tool in your sales stack. While all these tools are designed to make life easier for your sales team, they can actually make it more challenging if they’re not integrated. After all, how many logins can you remember?

That’s why it’s a good idea to identify what tools or platforms you would like your sales readiness platform to talk to. Would reporting be easier if your sales readiness platform could report based on the categories in your CRM? Would your sales reps find it useful if your sales readiness tool could help them identify contextual content for customer conversations from your sales asset management tool?

By including this level of integration on your wishlist you can narrow down the sales readiness platforms that best suit your needs.

Step 3: Prioritize what’s important

This is where the objectives you identified in step 1 become important. They should drive the features and functionalities that you need the most from your sales readiness platform. It’s helpful to identify what your priorities are using a basic framework and then listing out the key elements that your business needs under each category. I suggest using a framework that includes knowledge enablement, skill development, scenario-based training, analytics and other features:

Knowledge Enablement:

This refers to the ability of your reps to use knowledge in the context of their sales situations.

Feature: Learning modules

You need this if you want to

    • Assign modules to personalize learning tracks for different learners or groups.
    • Selectively invite individuals and groups to learning modules.

Feature: Mobile app and bite-sized content files

You need this if you want to

    • Share regular updates on new product features, competitive insights, success stories and marketing collateral in real time.

Feature: Assessments and Certifications

You need this if you want to

    • Customize benchmarks or pass scores for goal-based assessments.
    • Generate and award certificates to reps when they complete a level.

Feature: Flexible content formats

You need this if you want to

    • Import content from other sources (like Dropbox, Google Drive, Slideshare or Youtube).
    • Directly upload or amend content in any file format.
    • Create short and long form training content.

Feature: Quick quizzes

You need this if you want to

    • Measure knowledge retention with pop quizzes and reinforce key information.
    • Intertwine quizzes with content for effective reinforcement.
    • Conduct timed quizzes and randomize questions.

Feature: Easy content search and discovery

You need this if you want to

    • Enable your reps to be able to find content easily when they need it.
    • Ensure your reps can bookmark content so they can access easily.
    • Enable content to be saved offline so they can find it anytime.

Feature: Gamification

You need this if you want to

    • Drive adoption and ensure your sales reps actually use the platform and even enjoy using it.
    • Customize rewards based on content importance.

Feature: Integration with other systems

You need this if you want to

    • Integrate with your sales asset management tool so you can enable your reps to access content that is relevant to their specific situation at the time they need it most.
    • Integrate with your CRM so you can leverage the segmentation and team profiles you have created there for analytics or to allocate learning tracks.
    • Integrate with HR systems so you can leverage the team and individual profiles you have created there for analytics or to allocate learning tracks.

Skill development:

These features help your reps handle specific sales scenarios.

Feature: Structured coaching

You need this if you want to:

    • Enable contextual coaching so managers can objectively observe reps while they are in their sales motion. They can then provide feedback and training and support reps when navigating complex sales scenarios in real time.
    • Give your manager the ability to conduct on-the-job coaching, even when they’re in a different location to their reps. They can observe and rate how reps perform their sales activities

Scenario-based training:

These features help your reps execute your plan through coaching. This teaches them to follow the sales process and even receive specific feedback on their deals.

Feature: Video / audio role plays

You need this if you want to:

    • Help your reps practice how they respond to specific and contextual sales situations.
    • Ensure your reps are articulating your product value proposition consistently, know how to demo your product or can deliver a compelling elevator pitch.
    • Enable managers to review video, voice over powerpoint, voiceover screen capture and audio responses in real time.
    • Enable managers to review and grade email responses and offline learning.
    • Customize evaluation parameters for role plays.

Feature: Automated workflows

You need this if you want to:

    • Enable your sales managers, sales enablement or other team members to provide qualitative and quantitative feedback on the video or audio recordings your reps submit.
    • Create accountability and a cadence for coaching, so it becomes something that your managers and reps do every day.

Feature: Best practices library

You need this if you want to:

    • Share best practices and success stories across your team and facilitate peer to peer learning.

Feature: Contextual remediation

You need this if you want to:

    • Suggest training tracks to reps based on identified knowledge or skill gaps.
    • Automate training based on gaps identified by their manager.

Analytics:

These features help you drive accountability, identify knowledge and skill gaps, and report back to sales managers and leaders.

Feature: Drill down views and reports

You need this if you want to:

    • Measure and track the engagement and retention of each rep, sales team or region.
    • Track cohorts (based on their onboarding batch, sales kickoff attendance etc) to see how each has performed against other cohorts.
    • Export user data into Salesforce.

Feature: Reporting on content effectiveness

You need this if you want to:

    • Identify which content has an impact on your reps’ performance and which do not.

Feature: Reporting on business impact

You need this if you want to:

    • Correlate sales enablement activities with business outcomes. This will help demonstrate the impact on revenue of initiatives or improvements in capability.

Other priorities

Aside from features, there are several other questions that you may want to ask a vendor including:

  • What is their roadmap in terms of product enhancements and expansions?
  • What are the minimum software/hardware requirements to use the solution?
  • What are the solution’s implementation strategy and process?
  • How long will the implementation process take?
  • How much of your support is typically required during implementation?
  • What Is Customer Success support available after implementation?

Step 4: Evaluate platforms against your priorities

It may be tempting to just pick the first platform you demo but it may not have everything you need. It’s important to at least compare two or three sales readiness platforms so you can see just how different they are. By listing out the criteria that are your priorities, and then assessing each platform against that criteria, you can objectively identify which platform will best meet your needs.

Step 5: Get feedback or read reviews

Once you’ve identified the sales readiness platform that best meets your needs, it’s always helpful to hear from people who actually use the product. This is actually easier to do than you may realize. Websites like G2 Crowd allow users to provide unbiased reviews of software platforms they’ve used in real time. You can see how people rated different aspects of each platform and read their comments about what it’s like to use the tool.

While it may sound daunting, by taking a little extra time to evaluate and choose the right sales readiness platform you will save yourself a lot of time and effort in the long run.