How Avalara transformed its enablement and onboarding program to scale
His five-level process for onboarding and certifying new sales hires, and
How Avalara has structured its five unique sales teams while maintaining the same corporate look and feel
Listen now
to hear how Marcouiller manages the challenges of scaling and enabling five leading sales teams at once.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud or find it here.
“Sales enablement is the foundation pillar, saw sharpener and keeper of the flame.”
That’s how Chuck Marcouiller views his role as Director of Sales Learning at Avalara. With a sales force of 325 people scattered across 5 countries and numerous cities, Avalara has managed to achieve scale and maintain enviable growth rates of between 40 – 60% year on year.
“My role is to ensure that each member of the sales team has the foundational skills when they come on board, and then and as they progress they continue to sharpen their skills weekly and make sure that they stay grounded in our strong corporate culture,” explains Marcouiller. “Managing five different sales forces, each unique with their different skill sets and different needs, yet trying to get them to look and feel as if they’re one Avalara, gets to be a bit of a challenge.”
“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. And 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.”
How Nutanix prepares their channel partners for success
What is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful channel program, and
How to set benchmarks and measure the performance of a channel program
Listen now
to hear how Morales and Nutanix have successfully enabled their channel partners and find out how you can apply these best practices to rapidly grow revenue from your channel partners as well.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud or find it here.
“A good channel program is one of the fastest and most effective ways of scaling the sales motion of any company.”
Joan Morales would know, he’s responsible for partner and channel marketing at Nutanix, a company that grew its revenue by 85% to $190.5 million in the first half of its fiscal 2016. Morales is an expert in identifying channel partner needs, quantifying the business opportunity and then bringing them to life through effective channel marketing and enablement strategies.
“I see channel re-sellers as basically an extension of our sales efforts. They are part of our sales network and a very trustworthy and effective and efficient way for us to reach all the clients we need to reach as we grow as a company,” ” explained Morales. “We treat them with the same care, respect, and passion that we have for our own sales organization.”
Why it’s important to share tribal sales knowledge
What sales excellence means
Who will benefit from these insights, and
Why it’s time for the sales culture to change
Listen now
to hear Mohit Garg explain what you can expect from the Sales Excellence podcast.
In today’s world, marketing has become a highly scientific and data-driven discipline, but many sales organizations continue to rely primarily on tribal knowledge and informal processes. There’s a huge opportunity to harness this tribal knowledge and leverage the experience of those who have been successful in building a culture of sales excellence.
We’ve been fortunate enough to work with and learn from some of the best in the business, and now we want to share this knowledge with the wider sales and enablement community. The Sales Excellence podcast will bring together this tribal knowledge on people, processes, and technology and codify it for the broader sales ecosystem to leverage.
In our first episode, our co-founder and CRO Mohit Garg talks about what Sales Excellence means to him, “It’s about consistently delivering a positive customer experience externally whilst also building a strong sales culture internally. It’s about not just achieving success by closing more deals, but also consistently demonstrating excellence in how you conduct customer conversations, in your sales processes and your enablement function.”
Every month we’ll talk to guests who have been successful in building a culture of sales excellence and find out how their business has used sales enablement as a driver of revenue and value. Their insights, best practices, and learnings will uncover new ways you can create a culture of sales excellence and provide you with ideas on how to equip your sales organization with processes that are scalable and sustainable.
In my previous post, I gave you a glimpse at the SiriusDecisions framework for Sales Onboarding that was presented at their SiriusDecisions Summit 2016. Since there is so much to cover I broke it down into two separate posts.
After you structured your onboarding program in terms of Knowledge, Skills, and Processes is time to think about certifications. SiriusDecisions divides certifications into two categories:
Effectiveness and Efficiency.
For each of them, there are three levels of certification to consider:
Content Mastery
Simulation
Actual Execution
Certification is important because it validates that the sales rep can actually apply the learnings they have received. The first level of certification ensures the rep knows the material. The second level looks at whether the rep can apply the material in a simulated, pre-set scenario and controlled environment. This can be accomplished in many ways including using video role-play technology that gives the sales rep a safe environment to train in with a structured approach and the ability to obtain feedback. The third level has the rep in an actual customer engagement giving sales managers the opportunity to see how the rep applies the learnings in a real situation and also provides a great opportunity for coaching.
Measuring sales onboarding
SiriusDecisions recommends combining leading and lagging indicators to help assess the success of your onboarding program. The goal is to understand if your reps are progressing through the program at an adequate pace and if they will be ready by the time the program is over. The importance of the leading indicators is that they serve as a good early warning system that something might be amiss or that course-correction is needed. You don’t want to wait 6 months only to realize the sales rep is not yet fully ramped up because of something that could have been identified earlier during onboarding.
What to measure, is, of course, the key question, so here’s what the analysts suggest.
Examples of Leading Indicators:
Velocity by stage
Conversion rates
Pipeline to Quota
Overall pipeline flow
Forecast accuracy
Examples of Lagging Indicators:
Close rate
Average deal size
Client mix
Win/Loss ratio
Another way to look at the indicators is to consider what SiriusDecisions calls “programmatic” and “individual” indicators.
Programmatic indicators are:
Activity-based (how much time are reps spending on core selling activities vs. non-core activities)
Stakeholder feedback (sales managers, team leaders, etc. observations of the rep’s performance)
Business impact (the rep’s pipeline, productivity and performance metrics)
Individual indicators are:
Know it (test if the rep knows the material and can do certain key activities)
Demonstrate it (use a structured certification process to ensure reps can demonstrate the ability)
Execute it (can reps perform in front of a buyer, do they understand the buyer and can they drive the sale?)
Critical stakeholders for successful sales onboarding
The closing thoughts from the SiriusDecisions session on sales onboarding are that there is a functional interlock when it comes to sales onboarding involving sales enablement, sales operations, marketing, channel marketing, sales leadership.
The sales leadership has to communicate to sales managers the importance of onboarding and support a culture of measurement and accountability. Sales operations have to provide the analytics to help assess leading indicators of onboarding success and sales enablement has to develop an onboarding process that is consistent and programmatic, with rigorous certification processes that simulate what reps will experience in the field.
I hope this gives you some interesting ideas as you review your current sales onboarding plan and can apply some of the best practices described above.
During the session “Assessing Execution and Impact of Sales Onboarding”, SiriusDecisions VP and Group Director Mark B. Levinson gave a compelling presentation about the state of sales onboarding and what companies can do to get in shape.
The current state of sales onboarding is worrisome. Two key stats shared by SiriusDecisions show that 26% of sales organizations have not yet implemented a formal onboarding process
and only 7% of sales enablement leaders have indicated their onboarding program is robust and complete.
Sales onboarding as a first impression
Let’s start with the basics first, and why sales onboarding is such a critical component of sales productivity. The example Mark used in his presentation is excellent. Research done shows that you have one chance to make a good first impression and for that to happen there are several elements to take into consideration such as:
Know your audience
Exude confidence
Answer questions
Prepare and practice
Listen carefully
Dress to impress
In sales, the sales onboarding is typically the ‘first impression’ for new hires which sets the tone and expectations as well as serving as a welcoming program to the company. The problem is that it often consists of a week of ‘product dumps’ and reps are quickly pushed into the field. Sales enablement professionals must then balance driving sales competencies with the need to get sales reps productive quickly, often competing for priorities. On top of that, sales enablement leaders also need the ability to assess the onboarding process and understand if there are performance indicators that can tell whether reps are progressing as expected or if something needs to be done.
Evaluating the effectiveness of sales onboarding programs
According to SiriusDecisions, most onboarding programs are 60-90 days long, however, regardless of the length of the program the determination of whether a sales rep is “ready” is often done by the sales manager without any help of indicators or metrics to rely on. In fact, most organizations use “time to first deal” as the key productivity metric, with an alarming 23% of organizations not even measuring “time to productivity”
. It is clear that there is a lack of critical measurements to determine the ROI of sales onboarding.
That’s where SiriusDecisions Sales Onboarding Effectiveness and Efficiency Model comes in. Their framework breaks down the onboarding process into certain competencies:
Knowledge
Skills
Processes
These are great foundations to think about as you review your own sales onboarding initiatives. What are the knowledge areas you need your reps to be proficient at? Which are the skills they need to master to be able to sell effectively? What are the processes they need to be aware of? For example:
Typical Knowledge Areas:
Company history
Buyer Personas
Corporate Pitch
Product knowledge
Competitive intelligence
Pricing
Typical Skills to Master:
Core selling skills
Negotiation
Social selling
Closing
Objection handling
Demos
Forecasting
Typical Processes to Learn:
Sales methodology
Prospecting
Sales process
SFA
Lead management
Quote/proposal generation
By thinking in those terms you can create a structured onboarding program that covers all the needs of a sales rep.
In the next post, I’ll share additional details about the framework including how to think about sales certifications and how to measure the effectiveness of your program.
This session at SiriusDecision Summit 2016, titled “Sales Effectiveness: Enablement,” was part of their ‘foundations’ series at the event and so far one of the best I attended. The analysts started by helping define sales enablement as the function responsible for the following:
Talent: How do you attract, onboard and optimize sales employees?
Assets: What are the internal-facing content and activation content being used with the buyer?
Communication: How do we make sure the sales reps get the information they need from the org and how do we get their feedback about what is working and what is not?
Functional Structure: How do we structure the organization to support this scope?
Measurement and Insight: How do we measure and identify what is working?
If you’re interested in learning more about modern sales enablement, read on here.
But if you are a sales enablement professional looking to get the basics, copy these 5 key areas and post it in front of you as these are your mandates.
I like the way SiriusDecisions summarized the role of sales enablement by saying that Sales enablement helps strategy become action
The difference between the Sales Ops and Sales Enablement was also discussed. While Sales OPs focuses more on the efficiency piece, sales enablement focuses mostly on the effectiveness part (think of SiriusDecisions Sales Efficiency and Effectiveness chart). The true power is when those are aligned to drive higher yield per rep for your organization (e.g. more revenue per rep).
What keeps sales enablement up at night?
If there is one thing sales enablement professionals need to constantly think about is “how do we drive greater sales productivity?”. Easier said than done because according to SiriusDecisions there are five challenges most sales enablement departments face:
Organizational structure and roles: how do I make sure I have the right people, processes, and metrics in place?
Sales asset management: We have too much content, we can’t find it, use it, and personalize it.
Sales talent acquisition: In this extremely competitive market for talent where only 4% of top B2B reps are looking for work how do we attract the best?
Sales onboarding: How can we accelerate time to competency for our sales reps?
Ongoing development: How can I create long-term value of my training initiatives? How can I create long-term opportunities for micro-learning for my reps in the field when I have new content, products, messaging?
Sales Talent Lifecycle Framework
During the session, SiriusDecisions introduced The Sales Talent Lifecycle Framework.
This framework is for helping sales enablement professionals to figure out how to answer questions about how to attract, onboard and optimize their sales reps? Notice how the framework shows the competencies, company actions, tactics, and employee actions throughout the process. A key learning from this section of the presentation was that companies need to approach the job of attracting quality reps from a demand generation process. With the scarcity of sales talent, it is even more important to think about attracting talent the same way you generate qualified leads to the sales team.
But what do you do after a new sales candidate agrees to join the company? Not to worry as SiriusDecisions also has a framework called the Sales Onboarding Effectiveness and Efficiency Model. Here’s a glimpse at one of the sections:
Notice how the Competencies are divided into three areas:
Knowledge
Skills
Process
Each one has suggested items to consider as you build your own onboarding program. But as important as it is to teach reps key skills, processes, and tools, can they take what they just learned and actually apply it? Role-play certification becomes very important to ensure the reps can articulate in their own words your value proposition, handle key objections, and close the sale.
A good way to do it is by giving them scenarios to practice from. SiriusDecisions also talked about different levels of certification for role-plays:
Content: Tests if the reps know the content that was taught, can be done with basic video role-play scenarios
Application: Test if the reps know how to do it, with live scenarios or simulation
Execution: Can reps actually perform in the field? This is done via active coaching of reps in the field
A good analogy used during the presentation is the first level of certification is like a Shakespearian play where you perform the script to the letter. The second and third levels of certification are more akin to improve. How are you certifying your reps?
The session about sales efficiency and operations at the SiriusDecisions Summit 2016 was focused on helping define what sales operations is and look at the frameworks in place to help sales ops professionals.
SiriusDecisions broke down sales efficiency by looking at the following elements: productivity and capacity. They define sales productivity as “yield per rep per hour”, where ‘yield’ is the revenue the rep is generating. And state that as a sales ops professional your goal is to use your sales capacity as efficiently as possible, as it is a limited resource. How your reps spend their time is important, if they are not spending it on core selling activities your yield will suffer. So in sales ops, your job is to drive efficiency into the whole selling activity.
There has been an interesting change in the sales operations function, as it has evolved from a tactical, reactive function to a primary driver of sales change.
Sales operations cross the entire sales ecosystem. There are challenges, including:
Maximizing return on value from investment in sales technology
Developing, managing, measuring and improving sales execution processes
Evolving sales operations capabilities and contribution.
The Relative Productivity Framework
This is a handy framework from SiriusDecisions to answer the question: where are your reps spending most of their time?
The problem that SiriusDecisions found is that many of the stages and steps in sales activities are mostly internally-focused. Unless you align the sales process to the buyer’s journey, understanding how the buyer makes decisions, you won’t be able to effectively move the deal forward. And that’s where the Attribute-Based Sales Process from SiriusDecisions helps, map buyer attributes with buyer activities, and seller attributes and activities.
Finally, as it relates to sales technology, SiriusDecisions says that it must fit the user and organizational needs across six key categories:
Criticality: how crucial is this technology to the business?
Risk: what is the likelihood of losing the availability of the tool to the sales organization?
Fit: How well does the tool help fix the problem for which you purchase it?
Scalability: As the organization grows, can the tool accommodate the increasing number of sales reps, products, users?
Data: How secure is the data? How is data maintained?
Integration: Is the tool for sharing the data across all the other platforms?
Another element that SiriusDecisions has added to their thinking is end-user engagement. According to SiriusDecisions, the end user must move beyond adoption to engagement in order to realize the full value of the technology investment. The journey is:
The SiriusDecisions Summit 2016 kicked off to a great start with a series of ‘foundations’ sessions talking about some of their core models and approaches. The first session I attended was the “Sales/Marketing/Product Technology”.
How do you select a technology? Which vendor should you work with? These are questions the session addressed. According to SiriusDecisions, you shouldn’t think about technology first, but assess your current capabilities inside the organization. How are you currently providing for that capability in the organization, where are you currently and where is the gap? This will help you focus on the specific capabilities you need a technology vendor to provide.
Another interesting piece of advice is for you to not look at a technology purchase from an organizational perspective, but rather from an ecosystem perspective. What are the key processes and capabilities that are required to support your business? The focus of your technology selection has to be on strategy so that you can ask “how are vendors going to operationalize my requirements?”.
There are five key challenges most companies face when it comes to sales technology:
Selection: Understanding and navigating the market to choose the vendor that best suits the organization’s needs
Enablement: Training and up-leveling individuals and teams to use the tools and services
Measurement and Reporting: Establishing and maintaining accurate and actionable measurement and reporting to make smarter decisions
Alignment: Managing proliferation and maintaining a tech and service portfolio that serves the needs of the business, not just its components
Roadmapping: Developing a proactive technology and service strategy as well as a planning approach that aligns with long-term business goals
Killing the “Tech Stack”
The best idea I heard on this session was that there shouldn’t be a ‘marketing stack’ and a ‘sales stack’, terms that have become prominent and used to show the point technologies companies are using in their sales and marketing organizations. The problem with this terminology is that it has a silo mentality, that sales should go and look for its own solution set while marketing should focus on its own needs. The SiriusDecisions analyst had a great point, saying that the technology should be aligned to both sales AND marketing needs. Food for thought.
Last week we attended the TOPO Sales Summit 2016 event in San Francisco. It was a great event with over 650 attendees, all interested in improving their sales edge.
Scott Albro, TOPO founder, and CEO, opened the summit with a great talk about the State of Sales in 2016. According to Scott, there are 5 key themes to pay attention to this year:
Data-driven sales
The specialization of Sales
Value meets volume
Account based everything
The sales tech stack
What are Data-Driven Sales?
Scott discussed how data analysis is increasingly driving sales decisions; from correlating activities and pipeline metrics to better efforts at understanding all the data that is being collected to actually make sense out of it.
Part of the data-driven decision making in sales also has to do with the ICP or Ideal Customer Profile. Data drives the ICP which in turn drives decisions. For example:
Data collected: internal, external, qualitative
ICP: geo, industry, behavior
Decisions: GTM, sales process, messaging, sales plays
Based on the data you collect you can create your Ideal Customer Profile, which in turn will influence your go-to-market strategy, your messaging and sales plays. Think about how you are doing this today at your company.
How is Sales Becoming Specialized?
The second topic Scott discussed was the specialization of sales. He painted a picture of two types of specializations that are now becoming more prominent in sales organizations:
Task specialization
Account assignment
Task specialization is the creation of groups to deal with specific tasks. By understanding that certain task groups are better done with a dedicated team, companies are forming SDR groups, Account Executive groups and Account Management groups, for example. Account assignment involves focusing of sales teams on accounts that match a certain profile, like their size or a specific vertical. More mature sales organizations are very good at applying specialization and account assignment to drive sales productivity.
The Need of Value Plays
A concerning item that was mentioned was the trend related to volume and velocity in sales, especially among fast growing startups in the Silicon Valley area. Scott listed several bad habits that are forming including:
Limited discovery
Demo roulette
Hands off trial
Fire and forget proposals
I myself have been the victim of more than one of these habits, which only erodes the sales person’s reputation and decreases the likelihood of closing an otherwise healthy opportunity. This is why the third item on the list from TOPO is the need to add VALUE to the volume and velocity game, which can be done by applying what Scott themed “Value Plays”. These include:
Discovery to uncover pain
Discovery driving demo;
Guided trial process;
Stakeholder workshops to get buy-in; and
Proposal review meeting focusing on re-articulating value.
It is a good time for you to review how your sales team is executing on each step of the process and understand if they are playing a volume+velocity game or adding value to the equation as well. It’s never too late to fix things!
The Rise of Account Based Everything
Account Based Marketing (ABM) is so 2015, now we are talking about Account Based Everything (ABE)! According to Scott, 90% of TOPO’s client inquiries are about ABM. The problem with ABM is that it reaches only a small percentage of your target accounts unless you can have coordinated efforts between marketing, sales development, sales and customer success.
What this means is that the entire organization, (or at least the customer-facing departments), have to change to an account based mentality.
The attributes of ABE are:
Target high-value accounts
Data and intelligence-driven programs and campaigns
Orchestration across marketing, sales, sales development and customer success
Experiences that are valuable and personalized
High effort and frequency of outreach that’s coordinated
So as a takeaway of this section, if ABM is part of your toolkit, it’s time to evaluate the results and determine how you can improve on them by coordinating with other teams, transforming it into an ABE program.
Evolution of Sales Technology
The fifth item in the mix is the Sales Tech Stack. When discussing the latest technologies available for sales teams it is clear that the best performing organizations are now looking at it not just from a ‘how we use technology’ point of view, but also from a ‘how we can leverage technology to sell’ mentality.
The new ‘tech stack’ for sales is aimed at improving the sales process, but there has been a mass proliferation of tools making it difficult to judge which are the best for your company. Another issue is sales rep adoption, which is still the number one challenge among companies that want to adopt new technologies.
Sales technology has evolved from simply recording what is happening, to automating sales activities, to finally being able to enhance human sales skills. The three questions you should ask yourself before adopting a new sales technology are:
What technology can I adopt that will have the biggest impact on revenue growth?
Where will the technology be more successful?
What benefit will it deliver?
Sounds simple, but not everyone does it.
Summary of The State of Sales in 2016
For a great visual summary of the TOPO Sales Summit keynote presented by Scott Albro, check out the infographic below.
TOPO’s first ever sales summit last week was a great success. Two packed days of engaging sessions, great food, and interesting discussions. The conference was divided into four tracks:
Sales Leadership
Sales Development
Sales Technology
Sales Effectiveness
This helped attendees get to the sessions most relevant to their needs. But the best thing about the conference is that most of the sessions were given by industry veterans and practitioners from companies such as RingCentral, Linkedin, Google, Nutanix, Bloomreach, Cloudera, AppDirect and more.
If you missed the conference, don’t worry! Mindtickle has got you covered. We have created a visual summary of some of the keynotes and main sessions for you to download.
Check out the infographics below and re-live the event or check out what you missed!
“Sales enablement is the foundation pillar, saw sharpener and keeper of the flame.”
“A good channel program is one of the fastest and most effective ways of scaling the sales motion of any company.”
In today’s world, marketing has become a highly scientific and data-driven discipline, but many sales organizations continue to rely primarily on tribal knowledge and informal processes. There’s a huge opportunity to harness this tribal knowledge and leverage the experience of those who have been successful in building a culture of sales excellence.
Last week we attended the 
