Listen nowto hear how Besecker has created a customer-centric perspective to sales enablement to Qualtrics.
In this 16-minuteinterview Besecker outlines:
How to put customer experience at the core of your sales enablement strategy;
What a “white gloves” onboarding experience includes; and
How to improve the sales enablement experience of your reps.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes or find it here. “One of the mistakes that a lot of companies are starting to kind of fall into is really just death by complexity,” observes Charlie Besecker.
As head of Qualtrics’ global enablement function, his focus is simple, “You’ve got a group of insanely engaged, motivated, ambitious people that are smart and angry. What can we do to make this entire process more efficient and ultimately more effective?”
Qualtrics is the leading customer experience software, and it lives and breathes its customers first approach right down to how it enables its sales force. “Our success is directly correlated with the satisfaction of our customers. We don’t succeed if they don’t renew and if they don’t love our product and love the experience they have with Qualtrics then they won’t renew. And so that’s why we don’t really talk about Qualtrics’ success in sales without the other being the success of our customers,” explains Besecker.
This approach permeates all aspects of its enablement strategy from professional development to the onboarding experience of its new hires. Besecker has termed the latter a “white gloves” experience. “The whole white gloves concept is really akin to some of the finest hotels that you can visit, where we are attempting to anticipate that wants and needs of our new hires before they realize those needs themselves.”
This post is based on a podcast on Avalara’s five levels of sales certification. You can listen to the entire podcast
here
.
Avalara is the leading provider of sales tax compliance technology. The company has been growing aggressively, achieving an average growth each year of between 40% and 60%. Its sales team has become increasingly complex as it has grown; 325 salespeople are located across the 3 major offices in the US, internationally in Europe and Asia, and with some remote roles working from home offices across the country.
There are five distinct sales roles within the sales team that each have their own unique challenges. The diversity of the team adds to the complexity of their sales enablement requirements.
According to Chuck Marcouiller, Director of Sales Learning,
“Avalara aspires to have the most successfully, highly skilled sales force in the software as a service technology sector. For us sales excellence really is having a marketplace leading highly capable sales force, creating customers at a rate that meets or exceeds our growth plan. For us, sales enablement is providing the training and tools that meet the salesforce’ needs to meet the needs of our customers and adapt to the ever-changing marketplace dynamic.”
Avalara faced three challenges when enabling its sales teams
When Marcouiller first started the business two years ago he was faced with several challenges.
The onboarding program was inadequate
The onboarding program was originally just a week-long course. It was conducted in person and supplemented with periodic webinars. This was not sufficient to convey the necessary knowledge, engage the sales team and ensure that they remembered and could apply the messages.a
Building progressive sales skills
The business has identified different core competencies that they required from their sales team. These include marketplace skills, business acumen, sales skills, product skills and knowledge of their sales tools. Avalara’s challenge was finding a way to progress their new hires through the different levels of competency so that they could become capable and consistent sales performers.
Creating consistent messages across multiple sales teams
Managing five different sales forces with different skill sets and needs is challenging. But the key enablement issue is making sure that each team had the same look and feel from a customer perspective. This consistent messaging was considered essential to the business’ success.
The technology was key to solving Avalara’s challenges
Avalara implemented several initiatives to achieve its goals.
Use technology to engage the team in learning
“One of the first things that I knew that I had to implement two years ago was a sales enablement platform or a technology tool that would allow us to efficiently capture and deliver learnings in bite sized nuggets, meaning somewhere between a YouTube video and a Ted talk. Because great sales people are, I’ve found over time and include myself in this, are attention deficit children. You got to keep it short, sweet and focused otherwise we’re going to lose interest,”
reflects Marcouiller.
With these requirements in mind, Avalara chose Mindtickle for its ease of use and ability to deliver updates and information in quick and easily digestible formats, including audio and video.
“It’s far more efficient to have an online video that people can use to learn the base concepts then to run small classes that meet everyone’s schedule. Humans are the most expensive component and we adopted a phrase of “record once, learn many times to then only get a chance to sit in front of a live instructor,”
explains Marcouiller.
Implement five levels of competencies
The next step was to implement a learning program that met their needs, progressing sales people through Avalara’s competencies.
“We’ve developed 5 levels to certification,”
explains Marcouiller.
“The first level is when something is brand new the most efficient way to teach someone or help share information to someone is through a recording. Because we learned from study after study if you make a learning module somewhere between a YouTube video and Ted talk people will sit down and learn when they have the ability to learn, and it’s a great way to get the information out. If they want to refresh they can go back and hear the recording at any time.”
This is delivered to sales reps on their mobile devices via the Mindtickle app.
“The second level is after you put the sales enablement course out there, you have to have a test to make sure that they learned and were actually paying attention to the course and they got the key learning objectives,”
explains Marcouiller. He chose Mindtickle because of its ability to conduct tests online that reinforce the key learning objectives of the course.
Only once the test is passed is a rep considered ready for live instruction. “
Because sales is a contact sport we want to make sure that our sales people can take the learnings, be it the product or sales skill, and actually execute it and use it. So what we wanted to do was have an online testing tool. In order to be able to test this process and make sure we could listen to their talk track, see their demos, listen to their ability to handle objections, and then have them rehearse that and then evaluate that,”
he continues.
Mindtickle was chosen for its role play capability so reps could demonstrate their demos and objection handling. Detailed analytics allows the sales enablement team to identify which reps are competent with the material and whether any are struggling with some parts of the course and require additional time or support.
Once an individual has passed this phase they’re ready to do a live role-play in front of their manager. Once they’ve passed this stage they’re ready for the final stage and are certified to sell. This process has ensured the consistency of their sales team
Avalara is a leader in leveraging sales enablement for its competitive advantage
By leveraging technology for its sales enablement initiatives Avalara now has an onboarding program that engages its new hires while bringing them up to the requisite level of baseline knowledge quickly.
Each member of their sales team also has a clear path to progress their learning and management has an objective method of determining when an individual is ready to sell thanks to their five-level certification program.
Finally, everyone sings from the same song sheet at Avalara, regardless of the product or customer they are selling to. This means they portray a consistent and robust message to customers and prospects, clearly articulating the value of their product.
Cloudera is an open-source data management and analytics platform. Cloudera has enterprise customers in every vertical market including financial services, public sector, telecommunications, retail, and healthcare. The company has been scaling rapidly, and in just three years has grown its sales operations from a team of 11 reps based in North America to almost 200 reps globally. Supporting the sellers is an additional team of over 150 sales engineers, solution architects, business development and customer-facing staff.
As Cloudera’s sales team was growing rapidly it was experiencing several challenges that fell into two broad categories:
Consistent Messaging
With so many sales reps, one of Cloudera’s biggest challenges was conveying their message consistently and efficiently. This was compounded by market and product issues, as Drew O’Brien, Field Operations noted,
“
Cloudera is in a market that’s changing very rapidly on so many different levels. The market right now is very, very hyped and as a result, you have all these different companies entering the market. They all have mixed and often conflicting messages, so how do you come up with something that resonates and cuts through the noise. Because we deal in open-source technology, the product changes rapidly because it’s developed by a worldwide pool of developers from all different walks of life, so things change very fast on that front. Now you add on top of all that rapid hiring, it’s extremely challenging to be crisp and clear.”
Onboarding
While Cloudera had a basic onboarding program in place, like many companies, they relied heavily on marketing to undertake many of their sales enablement activities. As the team grew it became apparent they needed a structured process to onboard sales reps to be as productive faster.
Sales enablement investment
Cloudera has invested heavily in sales enablement resources and put together a formidable team. This made all the difference according to O’Brien,
“
Investing in it [sales enablement] early, making that investment in the supporting infrastructure for our sales people while building a foundation rather than after we’ve built the house already was something that we did earlier than most companies do and it saved on a lot of things for us. Secondly actually building formal infrastructure and not relying on marketing and random half-hearted webinars and weekly web access at the end of our training.”
To help create their value proposition Cloudera put together a cross-functional team of sales and marketing leaders and business development individuals over a three-week process. Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales explains, “
Together we came up with an entire kind of value framework for how do we talk about what it is we do, the problems that we solve, and companies in different segments, whether they be different revenue segments or different industry, verticals or different geographies.”
“
If you involve all of those parties in the development process, in the creation process, they feel like, in many ways, they’re part-owner of it. And for sales teams, driving an option is a matter of getting it started and then, if you can show success and you can actually demonstrate that this indeed does make their lives easier and helps them be more effective, then it kind of begins to gain its own momentum. Because we involved marketing and product management and all those different account executives in the process, it became much easier for them to understand what it was we were doing,”
clarified O’Brien.
Following this process the business then developed assets and content in various different forms, that was disseminated and communicated so that alignment could occur. The alignment resulted in a common message that everyone in the sales team could use when talking about the business, its products and value.
Cloudera leveraged Mindtickle to elevate the readiness of their field sales team and provide them with the right information at the right time. “
You can’t have a field sales team be effective if you’re trying to give every little piece of information to them and have a rep know absolutely every little thing about your products and market. The exercise of readiness is acting like a filter, distilling what’s really important from a selling perspective. What do reps really need to know, and make sure they know that and nothing more. If they need more than that, they can learn it as they need it or they can call another resource. That’s why you have systems engineers, professional services people and product managers so that when the time is right, you can bring in additional resources to help you out. So involving everybody in the process just helps solidify the mission, the goal, everybody’s on the same page, and for us, it’s been very, very effective so far,
” explains O’Brien.
More effective onboarding
While Cloudera already had a sales onboarding class in place they identified a need to make it more robust for their new hires. Krista Wiederhold, Sales Enablement Coordinator explains, “
We looked at
ways of improving it to be more effective, making it more engaging and role-based, moving a lot of the lecture to the first 30 days. So for us, we were kind of just grabbing what we already had in place, and making it better.”
Being able to leverage technology was key to taking their onboarding program to a new level. Cloudera uses Mindtickle to prepare their reps for boot camp Nilsson explains, “
Because we have offloaded or off-boarded a lot of the content that our sales reps usually get during that week of onboarding training, we bring in people from all over the world to our corporate headquarters for this week-long onboarding. We have put 3 days of content into the pre-work in the form of videos and on-demand instructor-led video content, so when they come to Palo Alto we have a lot more time to do role plays, live presentations, and whiteboard, where they learn the content and retain it. For me that was a huge value add-in, just taking all the content you have and allowing your reps to consume it before they come.”
“Using Mindtickle we get feedback from employees, specifically there are ways to do polls and collect feedback in terms of what content’s helpful, what they need to learn next, so that’s the way we gather information from the field to test its effectiveness. Within the system, we also pull analytics and other metrics we can use to see how effective the enablement efforts we’re putting forward are working,”
continues Wiederhold. “
We can see how fast a rep is coming up to speed on particular topics. Being able to look back at the courses that they completed, exams we ran in Mindtickle or to really test them for the areas that they may need a little bit more help on. So we really look at it to get more insight into how we’re revving them up or how fast it takes them to close a deal, get their first meeting or assess them on areas of our product that they may need more education on. We look at the course analytics as well as how long it takes them to close a deal or land a meeting.”
Achieving objectives
The technology was key to Cloudera’s solution according to O’Brien, “
Invest in technology, like Mindtickle or something like that, to actually structure your programs and enablement practices in an organized way and that just methodically covers everything that you need to cover.”
Using a technology that can perform multiple functions in the process certainly made the process easier for the sales enablement team according to Wiederhold,
“Investing in systems that are going to help you accomplish and teach the field and make it easier for to meet them where they’re at. Also pick a tool that’s going to have integrations from a learner perspective, and that you can modify and make it a lot easier to consume materials. We personally use Mindtickle for onboarding as well as ongoing enablement.”
Technology has also played an important role in reporting and analytics for Cloudera. Mindtickle has enabled the sales enablement team to look at what their reps are doing, what courses they are watching and then reporting back to management on this.
“
When you see these reports, and they stack rank in the different regions, and the different segments by how many of their reps have completed versus started versus not started. That sends the message loud and clear to the field and everyone who has a stake. If you are a manager and you see yours at the bottom of the stack with respect to your reps learning one of our key new values drivers, then we’re providing a tool for our leaders to manage their teams. They can then go ahead and make sure their reps get the training,” continues Nilsson.
A final area where technology can really be leveraged is in certifying and testing reps. “
Most recently we’re rolling out certifications. We’re building courses on a particular topic and certifying the field on that course with an exam, or making them do a pitch presentation,”
explains O’Brien.
Results
“
Now we have a common framework and a common set of messages that 200 individual contributor sellers and the extended teams of sales engineers, solution architects, business development, inside sales, we’re all singing kind off the same hymn sheet, when it comes to who we are, what we do, and the problems we solve and the stories we tell,”
exclaims Nilsson.
“So when we’re out there, inspiring and teaching, it all sounds the same, from the CEO down to one of my SDRs. Today there’s a lot of excitement globally, just to be able to share stories because we’ve all have common terminology, language, and value drivers. It’s actually a wonderful place to be. Took us a while to get here, but now we feel poised as this very fast moving company that wants to continue to do that. We have a lot of hopes and dreams here at Cloudera and we definitely feel poised to be able to do that with all the things that we’ve invested in and around sales.”
How ForeScout’s 30 – 60 – 90-day onboarding program is structured;
What the pitch back is and how it’s used to keep new hires on track;
Her advice to new sales enablement directors on how to build an onboarding program from scratch; and
How ForeScout has leveraged technology in its onboarding.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to
Soundcloud
,
Stitcher
,
iTunes
or find it
here
.
“
The best way to learn is to have the trainees apply concepts to real deals so we have them do teach back concepts. We do a lot of these role plays where the trainees have to present what they’ve learned to their peers and it’s through that collaboration that the learning really starts happening.”
Renee Capovilla, Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, is reflecting back on what has been critical to ramp up their new sales hires quickly. “Our goal is to really pack those first 90 days with a lot of learning and effective training and then get them out into their territory. But it’s about month six to nine that they start hitting their productivity targets.”
Ramping up new sales hires so quickly is no mean feat and Capovilla puts it down to a combination of effective learning and smart use of technology. “You want to know how they are using [their learning] on a sales call and the only way you’re going to know that is if they tell you. So the pitch back is so important for us, to hear what they are going to say when they get to the customer, a great way to reinforce the learning through listening,” she says explaining the importance of online role plays.
When prompted to explain her secret to success she offered humbly, “I think what I might have as an advantage is the fact that I enabled the technology sooner rather than later. Don’t feel intimidated to add technology early on, because it won’t just help with the cycle time.”
What is covered in ForeScout’s corporate pitch certification program; and
How their scorecard works to ensure all their new reps are on the pitch.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to
Soundcloud
,
Stitcher
,
iTunes
or find it
here
.
As Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, Renee Capovilla was set an ambitious goal. “The goal was that when asked about ForeScout and what ForeScout did – a consistent message would come out. And so we have this corporate pitch program which serves as a framework to which we present our capabilities, our differentiators and our value to our customers.”
Capovilla not only took on the challenge but developed a company-wide corporate pitch certification program. But this isn’t just a quick elevator pitch. It’s a detailed three-part process that all sales reps are required to be certified in within their first 30 days.
“It enables that discussion around the security buyer’s challenge, we present use cases, the current infrastructure gaps that could be occurring and then we help walk the customer through how Forescout can uniquely address each one of them.
It’s really more than just a pitch. It’s taking our customers on a journey of our security platform.” Listen now
to hear how Capovilla introduced and implemented a company-wide corporate pitch certification program.
The 6 core elements to ForeScout’s sales excellence
How their sales playbook helped the business scale
When is a good time to develop your businesses playbook
What your sales playbook should include
Listen now
to hear how Capovilla has used their sales playbook to turn A Players into Forescout superstars.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to
Soundcloud
,
Stitcher
,
iTunes
or find it
here
.
“The goal of a sales playbook is to capture and certify what your top performers are saying, asking and doing at every stage of the sales cycle.”
Renee Capovilla is Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout and she came up with the concept of a sales playbook when she was a one-person team looking to scale their sales team quickly. She’s since taken the playbook and created the company’s own ‘sales university.’ Core to the sales playbook is the sales process.
“The sales process has to be the representation of your top performers so it’s going to be as detailed as it needs to be to capture what they are doing, saying and asking,”
explains Capovilla. “The playbook’s main objective is to drive excellence throughout the sales process. The playbook begins at the onboarding program. It’s the basis for developing the university courseware and the reference coaching guide that drives our overall process and best practice application post the onboarding experience.”
“Our sales playbook has enabled us to give clear direction and guidance on what the rep should do say, do and ask it at every stage of their sale cycle, replicating the best of the best.”
So often in the recent decade, we have read reports revealing the impact new hire orientation programs have on new hires and organizations working on arriving at an effective program for their employees. But the million dollar question is “Is the new hire orientation program a success?”
Like any process, new hire orientation programs requires consistent measurement and reporting. Organizations can only reliably measure the impact and effectiveness, i.e. whether the new hire orientation program has achieved its objectives if relevant data is being captured at appropriate stages of the onboarding program.
Just as there is no one new hire orientation program that fits all, there is no one way to measure the effectiveness of the program. Factors influencing can be company size, employee demographics, business objectives, but most importantly identifying what needs to be measured and when.
Look at the larger picture
Here’s a hint. Measure those aspects that directly contribute to your business goals. Establish a baseline, which is more or less similar for most organizations – Rate of employee turnover or retention, time to productivity and employee satisfaction. Once the areas to be measured are identified, integrate methods for periodic assessments into the onboarding program.
Numbers say it all – quantitative data
It is human tendency to associate numbers with every process, onboarding is no different. But which of these numbers help us determine the success of the onboarding programs?
1. The headache of the modern business – employee turnover
This critical figure helps you identify the success or an employer as well as the onboarding program as it is directly tied to the business goals of the organizations. Organizations can compare figures of the year gone against figures obtained as early as 3 months after the onboarding program is completed to avoid early-stage turnover.
2. Headcount Vs. output – performance and effectiveness
Time to productivity should be measured both at an individual level and team level. Organizations often assess a new hire based on the time taken by him to contribute to the team’s performance against the average 6.2 months, as stated in the book “The First 90 days” by Michael Watkins. However, assessing teams can take the “headcount vs. output” approach. For example, let’s take this scenario. If Today your team of 8 (comprising of a few new hires) completed a task in the designated time effectively as opposed to last year, when a similar team of 10 was required to complete the same task at the designated time, then it is obvious that not only has the time to productivity improved vastly, but have contributed to cutting costs as well. A simple tool to capture this data is to use an onboarding software product that suits the needs of your employees. Automated systems help capture data pertaining to performance, onboarding checklists, training schedules milestones etc of the new hire.
The Human element – Qualitative Data
Modern day new hire onboarding programs have digressed from focussing only on forms and tasks to the emotional aspects of employer-employee bonding. Hence the need for qualitative data. Onboarding managers’ need to conduct periodic assessments with the new hires and assess both employee and employer goals at intervals best suited to the team and the organization.
1. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may – Not to sound poetic, but this is exactly the point
The simplest of tasks when compared to the Himalayan challenges coming ahead, assess the needs and wants of the new hire early, as early as the pre-onboarding phase or the first week of joining. This information can be obtained by simply asking a few questions to the new hire and consulting the hiring manager. It is critical to plan the coming months of the new hire.
2. Is your new hire engaged?
The answer to this question clearly indicates the effectiveness and success of your new hire onboarding program. But, how do you actually measure if an employee is engaged enough?
Put together a survey of questions that relate to the new hire understanding of the following topics,
the company culture and his job,
his role in the team,
His first likes and dislikes etc.
Alignment With company goals
The timeline of when these assessments have to be conducted pay a crucial role in determining the success and will depend on the needs of the organization. For example, some employers will need to assess early engagement levels as soon as 30 days into the onboarding program.
3. Have you met the expectations of the new hire and vice versa?
After an early assessment of needs and wants, it is important to take feedback from the new hire. Schedule an informal meeting a few weeks into the onboarding program to discuss the new hire’s satisfaction regarding what has been provided to him. This may also be a good time to put forward the company’s expectations for the new hire.
4. Have the objectives of the Training programs been met?
The progress of training programs needs to be reviewed and assessed periodically. An integral part of any onboarding program, training through formal and informal learning help new hires reach proficiency levels. Scheduling formal meetings and collecting feedback regarding these training programs help onboarding managers decide on how effective the training has been and if the approach needs to be changed.
5. Is the new hire a team player?
While an individual’s performance can be categorized as quantitative data, a new hire’s contribution to the morale of the team, proactive participation in sharing team responsibilities etc. is rather a qualitative metric that is critical for the success of an onboarding program. A feedback can be obtained from the new hire’s peers and managers to determine the new hire’s assimilation into his team.
6. Do exit interviews have a point?
As a Manager what frustrates you more, the fact that your best employee has resigned or that you do not know the actual reason for his resignation. This may not fall under the realm of onboarding programs, but as exit interviews are not of much value, employers can adopt stay interviews which are conducted during the course of the employees’ tenure with the company and can help employers cater to the needs and in turn help retain the employee.
Regardless of the tools and metrics involved in measuring the success of new hire orientation programs, it is important that both qualitative and quantitative data should corroborate. An onboarding manager should deduce similar conclusions from both sets of data gathered and then in lies the success of new hire orientation programs. How are you measuring the success of your new hire orientation program?
“One of the mistakes that a lot of companies are starting to kind of fall into is really just death by complexity,” observes Charlie Besecker.
This post is based on a podcast on Avalara’s five levels of sales certification. You can listen to the entire podcast
This post is based on a webinar on 
“
As Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, Renee Capovilla was set an ambitious goal. “The goal was that when asked about ForeScout and what ForeScout did – a consistent message would come out. And so we have this corporate pitch program which serves as a framework to which we present our capabilities, our differentiators and our value to our customers.”
“The goal of a sales playbook is to capture and certify what your top performers are saying, asking and doing at every stage of the sales cycle.”
