What Makes for a Great Sales Kick-Off? It’s Not What You Think…

Daniel Kuperman on January 24, 2019

During this time of year, companies are often either conducting their annual sales meetings or preparing for their upcoming sales kick-off. Either way, companies want their sales teams to feel energized, excited, and confident that the year ahead will be their best yet! Whether you have large or small sales teams, whether your sales meetings take one day or are week-long affairs – the stakes are one and the same.

After working on and attending several annual sales meetings ourselves, (commonly called a Sales Kick Off), we were able to identify a few common characteristics that set apart a great sales event from a good one. In fact, in talking with other sales enablement professionals and sales leaders alike, there’s one common key attribute that differentiates the best kick-off events from the average ones – and it’s not what you might think.

Let’s first take a look at the three most common mistakes.

Mistake #1: Focusing too much on training

For many sales leaders, the fact that the entire team is present and engaged for a few days in a common location is an excellent opportunity for some much-needed training. Leaders pack their agendas with new sales techniques, product releases, and competitive updates. Although some “information download” is a productive way of ensuring reps’ awareness of critical information, focusing too much on training and lectures is a sure-fire way to overwhelm the team.

Mistake #2: Executive speaking overload

Getting your company’s top executives onstage so that they have the opportunity to talk to the sales team and give them an update on different departments can be enticing, but while the intention is valid, spending too much time on having executives lecture the sales team can misfire and become yet another talk session. Ask yourself the tough question: how much will reps retain after all the talk?

Mistake #3: Too futuristic and blue-sky talking

Surprisingly, this mistake is far more common than most realize. The CEO/President/Chairman walks onstage and delivers an outstanding, visionary presentation about where the company will be five years from now and how everyone in the room will make tons of money. Sure, there needs to be a right amount of future/vision in a top-exec keynote and tell people that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but it needs to connect – tangibly – with specific programs or initiatives mentioned throughout the kick-off.

Here’s what makes a great SKO

The most critical element of your sales event is creating a memorable moment; sometimes called an EPIC moment. Let me explain what that means.

While it may seem obvious to create a memorable moment, it’s easy to get lost during the several planning sessions and scheduling of speakers and activities. Of course, it all depends on what you want your sales kick-off to be like, but thinking about “what do we want our reps to remember and how we want them to feel” can serve as a guiding principle when putting the agenda together.

Think of it this way, if you want to energize the team, how can you do that in a way that will capture their attention and make it memorable? Even for the critical information, you are hoping they will remember after the event, how can you make it so they truly appreciate and can use it in their jobs?

For creating these EPIC moments, the best framework we’ve seen for thinking in those terms comes from the Heath brothers in their excellent book “The Power of Moments.” In this book they describe using several examples their EPIC framework:

Elevation: Moments of elevation are experiences that rise above the routine. They make us feel engaged, joyful, surprised, motivated.

Pride: Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements.

Insight: Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations.

Connection: Moments of connection bond us together.

We want to highlight that creating these ‘moments’ requires some serious thought processes and honest discussions with everyone involved in the event. It also expects a re-think your SKO to be more than a series of lectures, training or team-building activities. It forces us to identify the essentials of what we want this crucial sales moment to be and how we can make it a milestone to our sales force.

So for your next annual sales meeting or kick-off, we encourage you to start with the EPIC framework (read the book, it’s much better than our brief reference here!) and use it as a lens for how you will plan and execute the event.

A Playbook for Data-Driven Sales Enablement

Daniel Kuperman on October 24, 2018

Enablement success…or not?

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

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

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

.

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

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

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

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

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

A new playbook for enablement

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

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

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

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

Enablement as a continuous journey

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

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

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

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

Skills, not a script

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

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

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

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

Coaching in the frontlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data-driven enablement plays

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

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

Elements of readiness typically include:

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

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

Concluding thoughts

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

Knowledge Transfer: The Achilles Heel of Sales Enablement

Daniel Kuperman on May 21, 2018

“The biggest challenge for sales reps to meet their quota is difficulty in differentiating offerings from competition or buyer status quo.”

At the SiriusDecisions Summit this year one of the best sessions I attended was the one on “Sales Knowledge Transfer Framework.” It laid out the case for changing how companies are transferring knowledge to their sales teams.

However, despite all the advancements made in educating companies on the value of sales enablement, it’s surprising that many salespeople are still lagging behind.

Why is this is happening? SiriusDecisions shed some light on the problem:

  • 36% of high-performing reps feel they need more coaching from their managers.
  • High-performing reps are 3X more likely to use role-play when learning.
  • 26% of low-performing managers lack guidance, resources, or support to coach new hires.
  • Low performers are 8X more likely to

    not

    to use role-play in their training programs.

When creating great onboarding or ongoing enablement programs, it’s important to understand how your sales team learns, practices, and receives feedback. Without incorporating these elements, adoption will be low and, you won’t see results.

Competitive updates, objection handling, new messaging, market information and all the knowledge and information you need to transfer to the minds of your sales reps require a considerate plan. Technology now enables you to leverage virtual role-play to complement in-person exercises. Electronic coaching forms can assist managers in following a prescribed approach to observe and help reps in the field. And mobile-enabled micro-learning modules can reach your field team wherever they are without taking time away from selling activities. But technology alone is not enough.

If you are thinking about deploying an enablement solution, first stop to make a list of everyone involved including sales, marketing, and product marketing. Ensure you have buy-in as any new technology deployment is only as good as the people using it. Then, those who create content and want to transfer their knowledge to the sales reps will have new guidelines.

If you’d like to see how other companies have done this successfully, contact [email protected] and we’ll put you in touch with someone that has transformed their sales enablement and can share what they’ve learned. You can also read some of our

customer stories here

.

The End of Sales Training As We Know it

Daniel Kuperman on October 15, 2017

Sales training as we know it has changed.

Sales roles are becoming more specialized. In B2B tech this is most prevalent with sales teams divided into Sales Development, Sales Engineering, Account Executives, and Account Managers. Within each of these groups, there is often further segmentation – based on account size, industry, and territory. The larger your sales team, the more specialized your roles are likely to be.

This type of segmentation helps with focus, productivity, and scale. When you dig deeper you find that sales reps are also grouped based on their individual performance – “A” players, “B” players and “C” players form the traditional bell-shaped curve.

While most companies do this and it is commonly accepted, one important element seems to ignore the different segments – sales training. Training is rarely tailored to suit the different needs of each segment of the sales organization.

Routine training sessions tend to be mandatory and pushed out to all reps at the same time. Sales kickoffs, whether annual or quarterly, are notorious for treating all reps the same. Forcing them to sit in a room for hours on end listening to the same sessions. And even sales onboarding programs tend to be structured for the masses. The entire class of new hires have the same training sessions and only break apart for separate sessions that are based on the rep’s main role (e.g. SDR vs AE).

These training sessions also rarely engage reps or require them to demonstrate outcomes. There may be a quick test at the end to make sure they heard everything, but it rarely provides any real information about whether the reps are sales ready for their specific role. We know sales reps thrive on outcomes – they chase revenue because they have targets, they use content because it helps accelerate deals – so why don’t we train them to sell better rather than just rote learning?

New technologies are more convenient for training. They enable on-demand and online training and give reps the ability to consume training content at their own pace. But this approach lacks a basic tenet of adult education – it needs to take into consideration the learner’s experience, background, and preferences (e.g. accessing training and content on mobile devices vs computer).

This means your top-performing reps should be treated differently to your middle performers when it comes to learning. But that’s not all. It’s also important to understand exactly what areas of improvement each person needs and how to improve their performance.

Mapping competencies in sales training and enablement initiatives

When it comes to sales enablement, the most mature companies have created specific models for sales competencies. These have been developed with full buy-in from the company’s leadership. They understand that an ideal sales rep has certain skill sets and follows particular behaviors, and have codified those into different categories. How reps are measured is also clearly communicated to them.

Taking each of these categories into consideration, enablement and training initiatives are then mapped to each category. It’s important to note that ‘training’ and ‘enablement’ are different and the sales team should be evaluated against each of them.

If you map each sales rep against the respective competency list for their specific role you can then identify if there are any gaps and start tailoring their training requirements and deliver specific training to address them. This means each rep will receive very specific training that they require to improve how they sell and excel. Reps that are already at the required competency level won’t have to participate in unnecessary training.

We have also seen companies take this to the next level by tying sales compensation to reps corresponding “sales readiness” levels.

Automating competency mapping

I know this all sounds great, but how do you actually implement something like this without hiring more staff? The answer lies in technology. Traditional LMS focus on solving the perennial HR problem of whether employees have completed their required courses. They tend to focus on compliance rather than building competencies.

Sales reps need to build specific sales competencies and leaders need to see how each directly contributes to revenue. That’s why sales readiness technologies have gained traction. They help companies transform their approach to sales training.  They can do this in several ways including:

  • Identify trends in sales performance: Using outcome-driven analytics your leaders can see how teams are performing against specific sales competencies and identify trends. For example, see what kind of information or training teams have completed (like commercial insights, negotiating techniques or pricing), and determine which of these are translating into more sales.
  • Identifying competency gaps: Using analytical tools that allow you to drill down into regions, territories and even individual sales reps, you can see whether there are any gaps in sales competencies or if perhaps there are other areas that need to be addressed.
  • See the big picture: Put all your training initiatives into one place – including role-plays and coaching initiatives – so you can have a precise picture of their combined impact in achieving the competency levels. This also allows you to identify opportunities to tweak or even create new programs.
  • Share insights and reports with sales leadership: It is easier to demonstrate what leaders need to do when you can show them hard data. By proactively sharing reports on gap analysis along with your suggestions for improvement, you can highlight how sales performance can be improved.
  • Demonstrate how training has improved sales: Overlay the reports on your training and enablement programs with pipeline and sales reports to show just what improvements the initiatives have made to topline revenue, your pipeline, and deals.

Sales readiness technology has the power to help your sales organization refocus your training toward sales competencies. This can dramatically change how your training is delivered, how your reps perceive sales training, and your sales team’s overall performance.

The end of traditional sales training is nigh and successful companies are already riding this new wave of competency-based dynamic training. It’s helping them scale their sales teams and enabling them to beat the competition. Are you ready to jump onboard?

Sales Knowledge Transfer: The New Enablement Framework

Daniel Kuperman on May 30, 2017

sales enablement knowledge transfer

Last week, during the

SiriusDecisions Summit 2017

, analysts Peter Ostrow and Christina McKeon unveiled a new framework. This addresses the top challenges sales leaders face today:

  • The inability of sales reps to connect their offerings to the needs and challenges of their buyers
  • The inability of sales reps to differentiate their product from that of their competitors or the status quo
  • Their sales reps’ general knowledge gaps, such as product knowledge, understanding their customer or industry

Resolving these issues is not easy, but the new Sales Knowledge Transfer framework lays out how to approach each challenge. In particular, it focuses on ensuring the sales team can articulate value, connect with buyers, and properly use their knowledge about products, industries, and competitors during each phase of the sales cycle.

Companies that have complex solutions, operate in a competitive environment, or have an evolving product line, are especially vulnerable to these three challenges. Sales enablement leaders need to prioritize and architect how they will educate, assess, certify and keep their sales team up-to-date on a routine basis.

The five phases of knowledge transfer

SiriusDecisions outlined five phases for a successful knowledge transfer program:

  1. Audience
  2. Knowledge
  3. Planning
  4. Programs
  5. Adoption

This is an interesting approach that helps focus your enablement efforts in a sequence that builds upon itself to deliver a comprehensive program. The first step involves creating

“Sales Personas”

. The knowledge required is then mapped to each persona before creating an enablement plan and rolling out the program. The final step requires a dashboard that enables you to track adoption and course-correct elements of the program.

Is this involved process too much?

I don’t think so.

In my experience, each of the steps outlined in the key requirements for rolling out a program that will have an impact. In particular, I like the idea of creating “sales personas.” This involves identifying the different types of sellers your organization has, how they best learn and their challenges. This is similar to creating “buyer personas” – but for an internal audience. After all, we all know that one-size-fits-all enablement programs don’t work, but we rarely take the time to truly break down our own sales teams’ needs into different documented personas. This approach will benefit not only the Sales Enablement team but also Product Marketing and Corporate Marketing as well.

Sales Training 2.0?

On the surface, this approach looks like you’re just organizing your sales training better, but there is one major point of difference. Most companies approach sales training as a one-time effort to get their sales reps up-to-speed on a certain topic. This means training is often short-lived and often done in isolation or in response to a particular event (like a new product or a change in selling methodology).

SiriusDecision’s concept of knowledge transfer takes a different approach.  Rather than look at what training reps need, it considers what type of sales knowledge they require at each stage of the buying cycle and how it should match different sales events.

Taking a sales enablement perspective, the approach requires you to define all the different ‘knowledge elements’ your sales team needs and determine the best way to achieve this. In addition, it requires consideration of how to ensure the team is actually absorbing the information, certifying them so they can actually use their knowledge in specific sales scenarios, and determining how to identify what else needs to be transferred to the team.

Effectively implementing a ‘knowledge transfer’ program means taking control of what your reps need to know and rolling out a repeatable process. The process shouldn’t disrupt the team, but rather ensure they are always on top of the latest product, customer, industry, and competitive information they require to be successful.

Sales readiness and knowledge transfer

For Mindtickle customers the framework may look similar to our sales readiness approach. Being sales ready involves putting together a process to routinely update your sales team without disrupting their work. At the same time, the process should give them quick access to the knowledge they need to do their jobs effectively.

To address their key challenges, sales enablement leaders should take a closer look at how they are managing the sales knowledge transfer process at their company. By putting in place initiatives that better coordinate enablement efforts for their teams, they can overcome some of the issues that are currently impacting their sales performance.

Sales Onboarding at Hyper-Growth Companies: Key Learnings from Autodesk, Google, LinkedIn and Zenefits

Daniel Kuperman on December 5, 2016

sales_onboarding_aurodesk_google_linkedin_ZenefitsLast week I attended the

Onboarding 2025

event in San Francisco at the beautiful

Autodesk Gallery

where Sales Enablement leaders from some of the top companies in Silicon Valley shared their sales onboarding plans and their experiences in what proved to be an extremely productive discussion.

Here are part 1 of the key takeaways from each session. You can find part 2 here.

Autodesk: Julie Sokley, VP Global Sales Operations

Julie gave a great overview of the challenges she faced when taking over Sales Ops at Autodesk. She had to enable a team of over 250 sales reps globally. Her approach followed three key elements: Processes, productivity, and people.

Focusing on the “people” element, she established a sales methodology, built out a hub-based selling approach and created a sales onboarding program.

Key Learnings:

  • Think about structuring your sales onboarding into three phases:
  1. Before you join
  2. While you are here
  3. After onboarding
  • Pre-work is important. Autodesk gives new sales hires 50 hours of pre-work.
  • Autodesk transitioned from product-based selling to pain-point selling, which contributed to their growth. How are your teams approaching selling situations?
  • Don’t send sales reps data, send them stories. This was a critical takeaway as we sometimes get so focused on data that we forget that you need compelling stories to change sales behaviors.
  • Focus on the “why” of training, not the “what”. This will help you get executive buy-in and involvement in sales onboarding.

Google: Jen Bradburn, Sales Training and Development Lead

For the past ten years, Jen has led sales training programs at Google for different groups. During her presentation, she explained how she has changed the sales onboarding for new Google sales reps from a pure online and self-serve experience to interactive and case-study based training. The use of real scenarios during the onboarding program has helped prepare and give reps the confidence they need to work on deals as soon as their onboarding is over.

Key Learnings:

  • Use real sales scenarios and make them interactive case studies for the reps, so they can apply the theory into real sales situations.
  • By overloading the reps with the information they would face in a live selling scenario you can simulate what they would encounter in real life and assess their selling skills.
  • Reps face many surprises in real life, so how can you add those dynamics during onboarding? Google reorganizes the teams going through onboarding so the reps have to scramble and form new teams as they work on case studies which mimic challenges they will have in real situations.
  • Google has designed their sales onboarding with a mix of 50/50 instruction and practice. Find the right balance for your organization.

LinkedIn: Amy Borsetti, Global Director of Sales Effectiveness; Naomi Davidson, Sr. Operations Mgr of Sales Effectiveness; Thomas Igeme, Sales Effectiveness Strategy & Innovations Lead; Jade Bonacolta, Strategy, Innovation & Analytics Associate

Four people from LinkedIn led an incredibly interesting session focusing on data-driven sales coaching, which aims to address the most important question in everyone’s mind:

Are sales reps truly ramping effectively?

Amy had a great slide that said:

“Successful onboarding calls for mutual accountability across sales effectiveness and sales managers”

She talked about the importance of involving sales managers during onboarding and beyond. The new sales onboarding at LinkedIn also has a different approach, focusing on five phases:

Phase 1: Structured pre-work

Phase 2: Classroom-based simulation

Phase 3: Role-based sales clinics and leader-led series

Phase 4: Sales coaching

Phase 5: Success program for under-performers

They also have an interesting approach in which they talk about “Learning Quota” (Phase 1 and 2), “Behavioral Quota” (Phase 3) and “Sales Quota” (Phase 4 and 5).

But the most impactful change the team at LinkedIn did was related to sales coaching. They deployed a “Coaching for Gold” program to train sales managers on how to coach. It explained why to coach, how to coach, and who to coach. They also taught managers the difference between teaching, coaching, and mentoring and implemented a tracking tool to help them record and track their coaching sessions.

Key Learnings:

  • Approach your onboarding program with the different types of quotes in mind and create KPIs for each phase. You want to identify reps that are not going to be a good fit early on.
  • Focus on your B players. LinkedIn saw the best results in terms of lift in performance from their B players.
  • Managers should prioritize coaching efforts and identify the reps who need the most. In fact for reps that received 3 or more coaching sessions on the same competency the lift in quota attainment was up to 14% more than before. That’s a huge impact on revenue.
  • Identify what are the core competencies every rep needs to master and document it and measure how each one impacts results.
  • Build a culture of coaching at your company starting with senior level executive sponsorship so that it becomes a habit for all sales managers.

Zenefits: Elizabeth Pierce, Director of Training and Enablement

Elizabeth walked us through the sales onboarding program at Zenefits and the technology they rely on to get reps up to speed. From pitching, flashcards, quizzes, and more, the sales reps are fully supported by a variety of technology tools that help them ramp up faster.

At Zenefits she implemented a 70:20:10 learning model that splits the time reps spent on different learning activities:

70%: Experience (immersion, experiential learning, learn and develop through experience)

20: Exposure (social learning, learning, and development through others, feedback, and coaching)

10%: Education (formal learning, learning and development through structured courses and programs, in-house and outsourced training and e-learning)

Key Learnings:

  • Leverage the technology your reps are comfortable with. At Zenefits most of the new hires are millennials and use SnapChat, so they created specific training that leverages the platform the team is comfortable with. It also has the added benefit of giving them 24 hours to see and act on a video or other training component. Very creative!
  • Link sales reward with certification. By linking opportunities in SFDC with sales certification, they ensure reps can only see sales opportunities if they keep their sales certification up to date (as soon as their certification expires, they lose visibility into new opportunities).
  • Ramp time needs to match the company’s stage. Startups can’t wait 9 months for a rep to be fully ramped. Your ramp time needs to acknowledge your company’s stage in growth and lifecycle.
  • Use ongoing assessments in the form of short quizzes to keep reps on top of their game and share the data with the sales manager so they have full visibility.

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