[Podcast] Coaching the Front Line Managers with Jill Guardia (Episode 15)

Shrimithran R on April 26, 2017

Listen now, as Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, regardless of their size.
In this 16-minute interview Guardia outlines:

  • How to coach your frontline managers effectively
  • Ways to enable your sales leadership
  • Tips to deal with managers who are reluctant to coach
  • Best practices for sales enablement and coaching

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

“If you just take your reps and you say,

’Hey congratulations! Tomorrow you are a manager, and we don’t provide any support or guidance about how best to do that, or stick with them throughout their journey to becoming the best manager they can be.’

t

hen that’s just wishful thinking, and it is not going to help the selling organization,” states Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Practitioner and Leader, who is also P

resident of the Boston Chapter

of the Sales Enablement Society.
According to Guardia, “Sales enablement is really about ensuring that the selling organization and the partner community is prepared to do their job. That preparation comes in the form of skills, knowledge, systems, tools, and processes that focus on sales efficiencies and overall improvement of their sales effectiveness. In some cases, people call it an improvement to sales productivity.”

To ensure everyone contributing to sales effectiveness in an organization are on the same page, it’s crucial to enable the enablers.

Many managers don’t know how to coach well. They may have been great sales reps, but just because they’ve been promoted into a management role doesn’t mean they’re equipped to perform it.

[Podcast] How FMCG Giants Coach their Sales Teams (Episode 14)

Shrimithran R on March 22, 2017

 

In this 12 minute podcast Singh outlines the k

ey skills that a sales rep in the FMCG space should possess:

  • Different long and short-term initiatives that Dabur has implemented to achieve sales excellence;
  • How to leverage technology to overcome the challenges that field sales teams face; and
  • Key metrics to assess a sales rep’s growth and measure the outcome of your sales enablement program

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

“Dabur is a large and diverse organization, so it became essential to have a standard onboarding system in place. To address this diversity we use an online tool. It has helped us introduce visibility into who the new hires are and whether they are trained on basic sales techniques that they need to know as part of the sales team at Dabur,” explains Chirag Singh, Sales Capability Development Manager at Dabur.

Dabur is a pioneer in the FMCG space, the world’s biggest ayurvedic and natural healthcare company, it has been in existence for 135 years. In this episode of the Sales Excellence Podcast, Singh explains how sales excellence is perceived in an FMCG business and how sales enablement initiatives are executed in a large organization like Dabur.

“

Like any other business, there are a lot of internal and external factors that affect sales performance. We decided to edify our reps’ process knowledge leading to increased process adherence, using an online platform has helped us achieve that. Process knowledge has gone up big time, leading to process awareness and adherence,

” claims Singh while talking about factors that impact sales excellence at Dabur.

Listen now to learn how a large and diverse organization like Dabur manages its sales organization and leverages technology to achieve sales excellence.

What is Sales Enablement?

Shrimithran R on March 13, 2017

Sales_Enablement_Two_sides_1Are you building a new sales enablement strategy to grow revenue? Before you get started it’s worth taking a deeper look at exactly what sales enablement is.

Forrester defines sales enablement as:

“

A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.”

Topo

also does a great job at explaining the different facets of sales enablement:

“

Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.

”

So what does this mean for you?

Mindtickle POV: Sales Enablement = Sales Readiness + Sales Asset Management

There are two parts to sales enablement. The first one is foundational, like preparing your salespeople to have meaningful customer conversations. We call this “Sales Readiness” – the space that Mindtickle operates in.

Sales readiness delivers on three things:

  1. Ensuring customer-facing staff have the requisite knowledge of your products or services;
  2. Giving reps the skills to clearly articulate your unique value proposition; and
  3. Providing on-the-field coaching for contextual triggers like deal motion and skill development.

The goal of sales readiness is to ensure your reps are on message and always up-to-speed on your unique value proposition. For new hires, it is about accelerating their ramp up.

Ultimately, you are preparing your reps to have smarter sales conversations. Sales readiness initiatives are internally focused, not customer facing, so the content you produce would be consumed only by your sales team.

The second part, “Sales Asset Management”, is about ensuring your salespeople have the right conten

t in the context of where they are in the sales process fora specific deal

. The key objectives of sales asset management are:

  1. Improving customer engagement;
  2. Faster content delivery; and
  3. Simplifying content creation and management.

With so much customer-facing content being produced by marketing and sales enablement, it’s no surprise that your sales reps struggle to find the most relevant content for their prospects when they need it most. Companies like Showpad, Seismic and KnowledgeTree excel in this space.

So in a nutshell, sales asset management is about equipping your reps with the right content for their customer conversations, while sales readiness is about improving their performance by ensuring your reps have the knowledge, skills, and processes they need.

As a sales enablement leader, it’s important to communicate with your sales leadership to define and align the initiatives that will help your reps close more deals. These priorities may change from time to time. One month you may be focused on improving your SDR’s messaging and conversion rates, while in the next you could be focused on producing fresh content for a new product release.

Your sales enablement strategy will be based on the needs, challenges, and obstacles that your sales team are facing. Given how fast things change in the digital age this means your initiatives may change often, but the end-game always remains the same; to enable your sales reps so they can close more deals.

[Podcast] How MongoDB Reduced Ramp Up Time with Effective Sales Onboarding (Episode 13)

Shrimithran R on March 11, 2017

Listen now to learn how Powers deployed a successful sales onboarding program and maximized value from their boot camp experience.

In this 16-minute interview Powers outlines:

  • How onboarding helped MongoDB’s sales reps achieve sales excellence
  • How you can reinforce information after your boot camp
  • The key metrics that determine the success of an onboarding program
  • How sales enablement is structured and who owns it at MongoDB

“At MongoDB, we have a pretty thoughtful and structured approach to our new-hire onboarding. The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and solution sets. The second step is to build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify their opportunities, setting great meetings with the right people and then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects.”

That is the vision behind the sales onboarding strategy at MongoDB. MongoDB is a leading technology company who spends nearly six times the industry average onboarding their sales reps. In this episode of the Sales Excellence Podcast, Jeremy Powers, Senior Director of Sales Enablement, shares how they structure their sales onboarding and boot camps to maximize their results.

“I think we took somewhere around 11 months before a rep was productive. In the last six to eight months we have really fine-tuned this onboarding program using Mindtickle from the boot camps to advanced sales training. And what we have seen is very consistently our people getting ramped in about five months. So we’ve gone from 11 plus months down to five which is just tremendous,” exclaims Jeremy.

[Webinar] Procore’s Secret to Building a Sales Enablement Powerhouse

Shrimithran R on March 2, 2017

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“Sales enablement is about your approach to empowering your team to be successful in different areas and much less about someone owning that function. It’s about an entire organization crowdsourcing and working together to focus on results, learning development and mastering the craft.”

As Manager of Sales Enablement at Procore Technologies, this collaborative approach to enablement has been core to Alex Jaffe’s

success. Procore is one of the world’s most widely used construction management software that recently hit unicorn status.

But it hasn’t been an easy ride Jaffe reflects, “New reps were coming in and we didn’t even have phones set up or Salesforce login. So we really focused on building the foundation. Depending on where you’re at in your company lifecycle you’re going to have different challenges, but it’s all going to revolve around your rapidly growing sales team.”

“Just like racing car drivers, even the rock stars in your sales team need to make sure that their car is perfectly tuned for the track they’re racing on. Sales enablement is just like this. It allows your racing drivers to go fast and go well,” chimes in Marc Wendling, Vice President of Sales at Mindtickle.

In this webinar Alex and Marc explain:

  • How to create a sales enablement program that meets the needs of each stage of your sales reps’ development;
  • What role stakeholders, technology and data play in building a sales enablement framework;
  • Why coaching your sales managers is just as important as training your reps; and
  • How coaching can be personalized to meet each of your reps’ individual needs.

Listen now

to hear Alex Jaffe of Procore Technologies, along with our VP Sales, Marc Wendling, talk with Larry Reeves of AA-ISP about how to create a sales enablement powerhouse that will help you make your sales reps successful.

Listen to the webinar now

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