This objective is at the core of Cloudera’s sales enablement strategy according to Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales, who has helped the company scale from a team of just 11 salespeople to a global selling operation with 200 sellers and over 150 sales engineers, solution architects, business development and customer-facing individuals. In this webinar you will learn:
How to methodically onboard your people and make them productive sooner
Benefits of creating an infrastructure that supports enablement initiatives
Sales enablement activities that drive conversion from discovery to final sale
How to ensure sales reps are consistently on the message to deliver a best in class customer experience, and
How Cloudera leverages sales enablement as their competitive advantage
to hear the Cloudera team, along with our VP Sales, Marc Wendling, and Max Altschuler from Sales Hacker, talk about how a modern sales organization can leverage sales enablement to bring value to their customers and prospects consistently and efficiently.
On-the-job training and continuous professional development is a critical aspect of any sales development rep’s role within an organization. Ongoing training provides many benefits, including updated best practices and strategy, improved messaging, new prospecting methods, and ensured adoption of the latest tools and technologies to assist in the sales process.
Regardless of how savvy your sales development reps appear on the job, even your sales vets can benefit from revisiting skill training and building on their foundation of learning and understanding. We asked our own internal team of sales development reps at QuotaFactory where they felt they could benefit from additional training and found there were 5 key areas for sales development managers to focus their ongoing training efforts on:
1. The role of role play
It is natural for SDRs to experience call reluctance, especially when every phone call can be slightly different than the last. The sales development rep that frequently projects anxiety over picking up the phone and tends to rely heavily on email needs a confidence boost and perhaps, more phone training.
Solution: Improvising on a phone call is a skill that will come with time and practice. The best solution is to use role play. SDRs should role play with their manager as well as their peers. Assign each participant a different “persona” to challenge the SDR to adapt to new calling scenarios so they become more comfortable with the process.
Tip: Mindtickle has a role-play feature in which you can create real-life scenarios for your SDRs to train and also allows you to give them specific constructive feedback.
2. Keep employee morale up
Using the phone to prospect inevitably means dealing with a variety of personalities on a daily basis. Therefore, SDRs must hone their ability to control their emotional response in any given situation. Every day, SDRs must control their aggravation with rude or condescending prospects and must be able to rise above negativity to remain positive for the next dial and conversation. Mastering positivity goes hand in hand with learning how to manage patience when it comes to reaching the metrics required of every SDR. It can be tough to maintain enthusiasm when effort doesn’t match results.
Solution: As a sales development manager, you must be the outlet for your SDRs. Maintain a healthy relationship with them and let them know your door is always open. Talking through negative conversations can be just as beneficial as learning from the good ones. Also, it’s important that your SDRs take small incremental breaks from the phone whether it be to take a lap around the office, play a game of ping pong, or walk outside for a breather. This helps retain their patience and resets their positivity for future calls.
3. Skills that can be mastered off the phone
SDRs have a lot less live conversations than they do dials on their report. This means that there is added pressure to make every live conversation count. Pressure equals nerves.
Solution: Practice and rework messaging strategies. Review objection handling, one-sentence “what we do” statements and key questions to ask to uncover pain points and maintain conversations. Continue with this practice until the rep’s tone of voice is even, the pace of conversation is moderate, and they can easily direct the conversation.
4. A well-documented and accessible playbook
We’ve all heard the statistic; salespeople spend way too much time on administrative tasks. Maintaining an effective and efficient daily schedule while also keeping track of accounts, call plans, and data can be overwhelming without a clearly defined process in place.
Solution: Daily structure is something your SDRs will need constant help with. Create and provide easy access to a sales playbook to define best practices. Try to automate and streamline this process for your entire team and keep all of the materials in a local place like within the Mindtickle platform.
5.Keep reminders handy
Handling an objection plus the added complication of nerves can result in some pretty quick talking. SDRs must master the skill of controlling the speed of their speech, no matter how badly the prospect on the other end of the line throws them off their game.
Solution: This is an important skill that can be acquired over time. Try posting a sticky note with the reminder to “SPEAK SLOWLY” on the SDRs computer screen. One-way call recording is also an effective training method, some reps may be surprised as to what they hear. The first step to fixing a problem is understanding and acknowledging the issue.
There has been a lot of talk about sales coaching recently, and in particular who should be driving it for the most effective results.
There are two schools of thought:
Sales coaching is driven by managers who choose what reps need to be coached on.
Sales enablement is responsible for structured coaching, as a part of an overall sales readiness program.
The former is the proven traditional approach, while the latter is part of a new era of sales coaching. But why has this changed? Haven’t managers been effective in coaching their teams to meet their numbers?
I asked some of our customers, and they explained that, in the past, managers were effective in both tactical and strategic coaching. But that was when product training happened once a year, and product updates occurred only every 6 months (remember V2.3.4 updates?).
Nowadays, product training is a part of day-to-day training and product updates are rolled out every week. In order to ensure that all reps have a consistent message, something drastic had to change.
As business demands change rapidly, the sales training and coaching process also needs to become agiler. There are now more people involved in coaching, with sales leadership, sales enablement, and sales managers all collaborating together to determine and execute the most effective coaching process.
These changes have also led to a new framework for coaching. One that moves away from dealing with specific issues, and instead hones the reps’ skills so that they’re always ready; Ready to convey the right message. Ready to speak to their customers. Ready to sell.
It’s not enough to coach a sales rep to have a conversation with a customer. Customers can find information from many sources, and in all instances, the message from reps must be consistent. So it’s important for reps to be message ready. This forms the foundations for each and every rep to understand your value proposition; something that can be driven by sales enablement and peer-to-peer learning. Only with this solid foundation can managers make a real impact on improving customer readiness. If a manager is left to coach a sales rep who doesn’t understand the message, their time will be less effective and they will struggle to scale their coaching efforts. This is where sales enablement and online tools can be most effective.
In a dynamic environment, your customer persona is constantly evolving, so it’s no longer enough to perfect a standard pitch, your reps need to be able to take into account the customer’s specific pain points and needs. They need to be customer ready. Where managers can make the most impact is in preparing their reps for customer readiness. As drivers of growth, they can utilize their knowledge of the customer to improve reps’ tactical sales.
When you bring customer readiness and message readiness together, you get sales readiness.
#1 Message relevance
With new product updates almost every week, and competitors innovating fast, reps are constantly faced with new use cases and objection handling scenarios. To make sure their message is always relevant, your reps need all of this information to be provided to them in real-time so they can have relevant, value-added conversations with their customers.
For example, one way that I’ve seen this done effectively is by enabling the product marketing team to send out regular updates. As the team that knows exactly what the latest feature is, who it’s relevant for and its benefits, they’re best placed to provide these updates.
#2 The power of collaborative practice
What your reps say to customers, and how they deliver their message, has a significant impact on whether they will close the deal. In old-school coaching models reps were limited to learning from their manager and the immediate team only. But thanks to technology, it’s becoming easier to facilitate collaborative practice using role plays.
For example, the sales mission capability in Mindtickle enables your reps with a safe arena to practice common customer scenarios and receive feedback from managers. They can also learn from their peers. Imagine the impact on your reps’ performance if they learned how to deliver an elevator pitch, how to handle objections, or received competitive pitch coaching, from your top performers across the country and around the globe?
By learning from peers in other teams, and even other sales managers, reps can gain a much broader perspective, and become better sales professionals as well. When done well, I’ve seen as much as 80% of the message learning can be achieved through collaborative practice.
#3 Manager mentorship
Mentoring is one of the best ways for reps to improve sales performance. While every manager has their own style when it comes to coaching and mentoring, when coupled with the processes described above, they will have more capacity to focus on strategic coaching. This will allow them to really hone in on skill development for their reps, helping them to become better sales professionals.
#4 Tactical coaching from manager and peers
There are lots of deal-by-deal tips and tricks that managers and other reps have up their sleeve. When managers have reps who have a solid foundation, they can focus their efforts on tactical coaching. Managers are also privy to the success stories of other reps (and managers). By sharing these across the team, reps can also gain the benefit of this knowledge that plays a pivotal role in ensuring higher win rates.
Bottomline: The coaching process needs to be more agile
Knowing and doing are two very different things, that’s why practice is so important. In order to make the coaching process more agile it needs to include more practice, in the form of role plays, and also leverage technology to enable that practice to be continual. When combined with mentorship and tactical coaching, as part of a well-defined process, you build a sales coaching cadence that will make your company and reps successful.
We all know coaching is an important part of a sales manager’s role, and as a sales enablement leader, you enable them to do it more effectively. However, traditionally sales coaching more often than not ends up being a one-size-fits-all pep talk focusing on what formula worked for the manager when they were a sales rep. But to help a new sales hire the focus of coaching actually needs to be on their needs.
Using a data-driven approach to coaching, rather than relying solely on intuition, can provide your sales managers with direction on what skill gaps each individual rep need to be coached on. You can even leverage technology to make the coaching process more efficient – through video recordings and online feedback forms for example.
This can have the additional benefit of making coaching a regular and planned activity that is in the calendar without the need to sync schedules or travel in the case of distributed teams. By implementing a structured approach, your sales manager can be more effective at coaching and spend less time doing it, leaving them with more time driving sales.
When creating an effective coaching plan for your new sales reps, you need to look at it in the context of the entire onboarding process. I recommend introducing coaching after you have trained and tested the knowledge of your new hire. Sequencing it in this order has several advantages. Firstly, the new hire will get more out of your coaching sessions as they come in prepared with all their baseline knowledge, and you will spend less time explaining the basics of “what to sell” and “how to sell”. Secondly, and more importantly, sales managers can build on the data collected from the first two steps in the process to put together a customized coaching plan that will help address the specific areas that require development and reinforcement.
To coach or to give feedback
Before I get into the details of creating a structured coaching plan, it’s important to clarify exactly what coaching is. Many managers confuse coaching with giving feedback, but in reality, they are two very different things. Feedback is where a manager tells a rep what they think about their performance and what they could do differently. It’s not really about the rep at all, but rather about the sales manager’s perspective on their performance. On the other hand, coaching is all about the sales rep; what would address their gaps, how they can perform better, and strengthen their skills. Coaching is a structured and intentional process to guide your new sales rep to be sales ready so they can achieve their maximum potential. Coaching a new sales rep is a critical step in onboarding them, and when provided in a structured manner, it can accelerate the onboarding ramp significantly. Tactical feedback can then be given once they’re out in the field. For this reason, it’s important that sales managers are able to set aside time for coaching, as Jeff Hoffman correctly states:
Identifying skill gaps
Typically, after the training and certification stages of onboarding have been completed, the sales reps should understand “What to Sell” by this stage, but may be struggling with aspects of the “How to Sell”. Perhaps they need more work articulating the value proposition of the company’s offering or they may be struggling with objection handling or even competitive positioning. But each new hire may have a different Achilles heel and this is where technology can really help you. If you could record and file away voice-over presentations or videos of the reps practicing their pitches, this would be a goldmine of insights for the sales manager, helping them identify where the exact skill gaps are – for each individual.
Creating a structured sales coaching plan
Once you know what needs to be coached, you can then help the sales manager create a structured plan, with tasks and activities that have been designed to reinforce their training. This stage of the onboarding process can be completed over 4 to 6 weeks; 3 to 4 weeks of intense coaching, followed by 1 to 2 weeks of on-the-job coaching. An integral part of the process is to complement the coaching by having the newbie shadow one of your A players. Where possible, the new hire can shadow someone when they are demonstrating the specific skill sets that are being coached. This will give them the opportunity to see how it’s done in practice as
No two coaching plans will be the same. Even if two reps have passed their sales certification process they may still have different areas of weakness so their coaching plan will be different, and customized to address their individual skills and needs. However, there are four main areas where coaching is likely to be required when onboarding a sales rep:
Articulating the product value proposition
Objection handling
Creating the customer pitch deck
Following the sales process
These areas cannot be taught solely through an online training platform, they require coaching and face-to-face time to make sure they are perfected. But before the sales manager does that, you can assign the rep different tasks or activities to complete that meet these objectives and can then be used as part of the coaching process.
For example, if they need to improve how they articulate the value proposition, then they can do some more simulation missions that include practicing, videoing themselves, and then watching back with their sales manager. The coaching can occur as they play it back together and identify areas where they can improve their articulation of the value proposition. If following the sales process is an issue, then practicing with dummy leads will help identify where behavior needs to be corrected.
To make this job easier for you, I suggest putting together some pre-designed exercises that cover each of these areas. You can then select and assign the ones that are to be included in the coaching plan for each individual rep.
Once each of the assigned tasks has been completed the sales rep should be ready for face-to-face coaching. The sales manager can use these recorded tasks and data from the assignments to give the rep structured coaching where they need it the most.
Combine this coaching with a shadowing program, where the newbies can watch your A players in action and see a realistic view of how the coached techniques are applied out in the field. This integrated approach to coaching can be very powerful and will have your newbies ready to get out there and sell quicker.
“If you can structure and enable your sales team to get out of a bad deal early or bring it home to Papa as quickly as possible, then you have enabled your sales team to do the right thing at the right time.
