Make Hiring Smart Salespeople Your Competitive Advantage

In order to have a high-performing sales team you need amazing people, but hiring smart salespeople reps isn’t exactly easy. Especially if you’re charged with finding 10, 20, or 100 new reps to scale your high-growth business. In today’s dynamic environment, it’s not enough to just put an ad online or hire a recruiting company and cross your fingers.

As a sales leader, you also need to be involved and engaged in the process to ensure you get the best candidates and close the deal with them quickly; before they’re snapped up by someone else. After all, the average time to hire an SDR or AE can now be as short as 2 weeks, so there’s no time to waste.

So how do you attract top talent in a competitive and dynamic industry?

There are some things you can do when looking for and qualifying for the right candidate. Grace Mason, Head of Sales at Betts Recruiting shared some of her best practices that will help you make hiring your competitive advantage.

Find the right candidate

While partnering with a recruitment agency can help you find some great candidates, it’s also important to be proactive about your recruiting efforts. “Implement an employee referral incentive program. Good people often know good people,” suggests Mason Tweet This. “This can help with retention. If your reps are referring their colleagues and friends to work at your company, they will likely stay at your company longer and also help get that rep up to speed with additional support.”

Another way to potentially find candidates, particularly if you need to hire several reps quickly, is by hosting a “Happy Hour” Tweet This. Mason suggests holding this after hours, bringing your entire team along as well. They can bring along referrals as well, and your recruiting firm can help you fill the room with potential candidates. It’s a good way to see how well each individual fits into the culture of your business and can cut down the number of phone screens you need to do when qualifying candidates.

Qualify candidates

Looking through hundreds of resumes can be overwhelming, but there are some things you can look out for that will help you qualify the candidate. “Look for any red flags on their resume. Overall does their resume make sense? For example, career progression or any job changes,” suggests Mason.

Checking things like tenure at their past companies; have they stayed for a while or been promoted? If their dates don’t line up or they move around a lot, that’s something to be aware of when deciding whether you want to progress to the next stage with a candidate.

“For sales roles specifically, metrics are probably the most important thing you need to look at when reviewing a candidate. So if they’re a sales rep, their resume should read like a baseball card.” Mason suggests looking at things like:

  • What was their quota?
  • What was their attainment of that quota?
  • What was their average deal size?
  • What big logos have they closed?

These are all indicators that will help you determine if the candidate may suit your business requirements.

The interview process

After making it through the initial qualification stage, you will need to interview the candidate. “Throughout the interview process it’s very important to focus on quality control as a hiring manager,” says Mason. So how do you conduct quality control checks?

  • While talking to the candidate, consider whether they will fit into the culture of the organization, and respond to your management style.
  • Challenge them on their numbers and do the math. Does their bonus equate with the quota attainment they’ve listed on their resume and their base salary and OTE?
  • Encourage them to interview you about your company so you can asses their long-term intentions and interest;
  • Find out why they want to leave their current organization, as under-performance is a leading reason why reps churn;
  • Ask them behavioral questions that give you an indication of how they would deal with specific situations, like “How would you approach a short sales cycle differently than a long sales cycle?” or “How do you research prospects before a call or meeting? What information do you look for?”; and
  • Find out what their future plans are by asking about their medium to long-term goals, and how they intend to achieve these.

Throughout the interview, always bring everything back to their resume; challenging the candidate on what they have included there. After all, if you’re recruiting a salesperson they will no doubt be good at selling themselves, so the interview process is about finding out what they have achieved and how they did it.

7 Habits of Effective Sales Enablement: Continuous Improvement

You’ve spent painstaking hours, weeks, and months designing and implementing a sales enablement plan and the results are in. You’ve reduced the time it takes to ramp-up new sales hires and make them productive by nearly a month and the sales managers are sitting up and taking notice. It’s finally time to sit back and take a break, right. Wrong!

Sales enablement isn’t something you can design once, and then set and forget. Things are changing every day; new features, new customers, new competitors, new strategies. Before you’ve even seen the results from your new design it’s already out of date. This is why effective sales enablement managers always enable continuous process improvement. They aim to strive higher, set new benchmarks, and improve on their design

This doesn’t mean that you have to redesign your entire process every other week, but making time to continuously question, analyze and improve, can make all the difference to your sales performance.

Owning the sales enablement process

It’s important to first understand the key players in the process that you want to evaluate and improve, in particular, the process owner and the outcome owner.

The process owner in sales enablement is almost invariably you, the sales enablement leader. You have an overriding responsibility to ensure that the process fits within your company’s policies, existing processes, and meets its objectives. Looking at the entire end-to-end sales enablement process across a rep’s lifeline (from onboarding, ensuring consistent messaging, field communication, etc.), you understand what capabilities and tools are available and required to enable reps at each stage. Essentially you are the process champion.

However, the process owner doesn’t always own the outcomes of their process. For example, sales managers may be responsible for win rates, but it’s you who helps them achieve this. To an outcome owner, the process is just a means to an end.

This distinction is important when considering continuous improvement. While identifying the required outcomes for the process is part of the process owner’s role, you are merely facilitators to achieve the end of an objective. your evaluation process needs to look at a broad range of factors that may impact that outcome, focusing on improving the actual process, not just zeroing in on the outcomes.

Making time for evaluation

With the specific roles clarified, the real work starts. The key to continuous process improvement is leveraging data to measure and identify what’s working and what’s not.

Now you know it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, that’s why you need to schedule a time to evaluate your process. One effective way I’ve seen this done is by having a quarterly review process. For 11 weeks you run your sales enablement initiatives and then for one week a quarter you step back, review data, and business information, and identify ways to improve the process.

So in that one week a quarter, what should you be looking for? Here are some things that you could evaluate to identify improvements to your sales enablement process:

  • Undertake a cohort analysis to see what trends are evolving. For example, if your business is hiring a lot of new sales reps, look at how one month’s recruits compare to the next, in terms of ramp-up speed, readiness levels, etc. If it’s improving, what has been working and how can that be improved upon?
  • Take a look at whether there have been any changes to your organization’s sales and product strategy. Has the business started pursuing enterprise prospects more aggressively, when they previously focused on the SMB segment? What changes are needed to enable sales reps to meet these customers’ needs?
  • Review your competitors and identify if there have been any changes that may have shifted your relative strengths and weaknesses. These then need to be communicated to reps, and their readiness tested to ensure they understand this competitive intelligence and how it may impact how they talk to buyers.
  • If there have been major product releases this quarter, are reps up to speed with how these are positioned and the messaging that should be communicated to buyers? Can the product update process be improved so that reps are up to speed quicker?

By monitoring and analyzing this data you may find the areas where your sales enablement can be improved or even changed. Even if you only make small changes, over time it will make a significant improvement to your reps’ results and the bottom line of your business.

Encouraging continuous improvement

While you may be the process owner, that doesn’t mean others can’t be involved in improving the process with you. Effective sales enablement leaders find ways to share relevant data and analysis with other stakeholders, like sales managers, and obtain their input into the improvement process. After all, those who use different parts of the process each day will no doubt have ideas on how it can be improved upon. It’s particularly important for sales managers to be consulted as they have day-to-day communication with their reps and can provide insights on the coaching required to improve weaknesses.

Surveys, polls, and even one on ones, where you request feedback, can all be helpful ways to encourage others to share their ideas.

Process improvement is always a work in progress. What works today may not fit the organization tomorrow, or some new tool or technology could transform a part of your process overnight. The trick to effective sales enablement is to never stop looking for those little gems, that all add up to a transformational sales process.

The Flipped Classroom Action Plan in Just 5 Easy Steps

flipped classroom in 5 steps
Companies that implement ongoing education for their employees are setting the stage for long-term success. Your employees need to upgrade and broaden their skills periodically as well as stay familiar with the latest industry trends, technology, and practices.
This can’t be understated. Technology evolves rapidly in most industries. Failure to maintain the skills needed to succeed, makes it challenging for employees to perform their duties with any degree of productivity.

The reality of implementing ongoing training consistently with sales reps in the field, customer service agents on the go and busy remote employees, is an entirely different story altogether…

The flipped classroom approach presents a highly scalable way of making an ongoing training program a reality for any business that needs to keep employees up to date. The premise behind the flipped classroom is to create an environment where the lecture and homework aspects of your course are reversed. Today’s employee, more tech-savvy than ever before, is used to consuming learning content online. This enables trainers or managers to spend time in class engaging in discussion, applying concepts and answering employee questions.

In 4 Signs You Should Invest in a Flipped Classroom, we gave you a few questions to consider for an investment in the flipped classroom approach. Here is step by step tips on how to develop and implement the flipped classroom for your organization.

Action Plan for Developing Your Flipped Classroom Training

  1. Start By Setting Objectives – It’s important to know your objectives before you start designing a plan. Set the end objectives you want to achieve with your training program. For example, assume a bunch of new sales hires are joining soon. Objectives of the training could be focused on getting the sales reps prepared on buyer personas, buying habits, customer pain points and how your product addresses the customer’s needs. In addition, objectives could also cover how your product solves the customer’s problem and the positive impact.
  2. Develop a Training Plan – Once you identify what outcomes are needed from the learning activity, decide on the optimal mix of training content for your organization and develop an outline. Create a training structure based on your objectives and priorities. Then, identify topics that go inside each of the training elements.

Mindtickle Sales Onboarding Course Example

Mindtickle Sales Onboarding Course Example

Note that there is no one size fits all solution. Instead, customize your approach to every topic keeping in mind the opportunity for pre-work. You want to first have employees experience the learning activity on their own, then come to the classroom prepared for discussion.
3. Prepare Content for the Training –  Video is an excellent medium for delivering the flipped classroom approach and preparation will reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the videos. (Unless you are an improv whiz!). For example in sales onboarding, simply record your “A player pitch” for a highly engaging demo to use in your training.
As you review content, look at your objectives and include data that makes for a good introductory overview along with seminal concepts. Every topic in the Analytically evaluate if your training content will meet the objectives.
Repurpose PowerPoint presentations into smaller presentations covering the topics. Script out your presentations from slide notes. Make sure each topic is a bite-sized one so that you don’t overwhelm your employees!
Recording video is much easier than you may think. You can use your mobile phone to record videos and use simple tools to do basic editing. A parting thought on video – resist the urge to be a perfectionist when recording or editing. When delivering live training there are bound to be mistaken here and there. It’s no different with video so don’t worry about small errors!
4. Implement the Flipped Classroom – When your employees go through the course online and come back to the classroom for an effective face-to-face session, it is even more critical to foster a team of intrinsically motivated employees. Having the right incentives in place will allow you to run a successful training with enthusiastic employees. Deliver the in-class discussion questions for each topic ahead of time. Let your employees know that they should prepare for in-class conversation and questions by sharing a structured learning plan with them upfront and explaining your ground rules and expectations about participation.  It is critical that they understand that those who come to training having completed the lesson, engaged and ready to ask questions to get far more out of the experience those are unprepared.
5. Evaluate Training Results – The next step is to evaluate (through an assessment) the efficiency of the training. The analysis of the training report will give you information on knowledge gaps on which your employees can be coached in the face to face session. It is important to seek feedback from your employees and deliver quizzes and assessments to ensure that you are on track to meet objectives. If some videos are not effective, find out what is effective! Finding out what works may take some time. Once the flipped training is complete deliver a final assessment to evaluate knowledge. Now your employees are prepared to do their job efficiently!
With the flipped classroom it is important to remember that the experience can be as much of a learning experience for you as a trainer as it is for your trainees. No doubt there is a learning curve and there may also be some resistance as you make the shift away from more traditional approaches to the flipped classroom model. Give the flipped classroom a chance and keep iterating to meet your organization’s goals!
What do you think about the flipped classroom approach?