There’s no overestimating the importance of a good sales pitch — but where do the best pitch ideas come from? Do you always have to use sales pitch templates or is it better to do what feels best? And is there even a “right” way to sell something?
At the end of the day, it’s up to you and your teams to perfect your approach. Fortunately, there are plenty of good sales pitch examples out there to light the way.
Here’s how to make a sales pitch that really shines.
What words do you use to establish trust, credibility, and persuade someone? How much pressure is the right amount of pressure? What stats, testimonials, and other validation can you use to build trust?
What are you selling, what problem does it solve and how are you going to frame that?
That’s why it can be so difficult to know how to pitch a product: These variables mean there’s no “magic bullet” that will always win you a sale. Still, pitches are vital to customer experiences, relationships and potential transactions — so you can’t afford to wing it.
Instead, you need to find a template or approach that can be changed on the fly. The bones stay the same, but you dress them up in different ways depending on factors such as “who,” “what,” “why” and “how.”
Your mission is to build good bones — and that requires knowing what makes a good sales pitch.
What makes a good sales pitch?
There are just a few factors standing between compelling, memorable sales pitch ideas and totally forgettable ones:
If you want to master the “who” and “why” elements of your pitch, it’s critical to research your target audience and create buyer personas. This helps you know how to tailor your message depending on buyer intent, job description, pain points and more.
Your unique selling proposition, or USP, is the thing that makes you stand out from the crowd; it’s the “what” and “how.” In many ways, all sales pitch templates should be built around your USP — because otherwise, you could be selling any product or service in the world.
Clear goals and objectives help keep your pitch on track. They also give you an easy way to judge success after the conversation — and to make improvements where necessary.
A sales pitch should always follow some kind of structure, for the same reason good stories have clear plots: You don’t want to lose your listener. The most basic example is:
Opening statement: This is your hook, where you get the customer’s attention or pique their curiosity.
Body: Here, you’ll share specific details, stats, use cases or benefits that highlight your USP and put your product or service in the spotlight.
CTA: The call to action inspires the customer to — you guessed it — take a specific action.
7 good sales pitch types
Need an example of a sales pitch? Look no further:
#1: Email sales pitch
All good sales pitch email examples have one thing in common: brevity. Here, powerful subject lines and preview text can work wonders — and simple, compelling body copy (ideally with bullet points) is your best friend. Most of the power rests on an eye-catching CTA button with clear value for your reader.
Example:
Hey [Recipient’s Name], Hope you’re doing well. I came across your [work/article/profile] recently and was genuinely impressed. Would love to chat and share some ideas around [helping you solve Y problem]. Are you up for a virtual coffee next week?
Cheers, [Your Name]
#2: Phone pitch/cold call script for B2B sales
Business-to-business or B2B sales pitch examples are a little more difficult to pin down, particularly when they’re done over the phone. Cold calls can still work — they should just be highly personalized, relevant, and full of immediate value.
“Hey [Recipient’s Name], it’s [Your Name] here from [Your Company/Organization]. I stumbled upon your [work/profile/website] recently, and [X specific thing] caught my attention. Got a quick moment to chat?”
#3: Sales presentation pitch
If you go looking for sales pitch presentation examples, you’ll probably find a whole lot of PowerPoint. That’s not a problem, but it can be a limitation if you don’t follow best practices. Focus on creativity and clarity, keep your customer’s attention, and use the format to your advantage (that is, don’t just read exactly what’s written on your slides — let the media enhance your message).
Always include an easy way for potential clients or investors to reach out.
#4: In-person sales pitch
In-person pitches present unique opportunities for connection. You can use tone indicators and body language cues that might not work as well in other formats — plus, you can read these same things from your customer. Build these pitches around real-time interactions and physical examples or visual aids where possible.
Think about the location’s logistics, seating arrangements, audio/visual capabilities, and potential distractions.
#5: Elevator pitch
An elevator pitch summarizes a lot of details in a short period of time — which means it has to be informative and compelling at the same time. Prioritize the most important, interesting, or valuable parts of your story and leave the details for a longer conversation.
Here’s an example of an elevator pitch you can use in your own outreach:
“Hi, I’m Alex from AquaPure.
Did you know that over 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water? Our portable, eco-friendly water purification system can purify any freshwater source in just 30 seconds, making it safe to drink.
We envision a world where clean drinking water is always within reach, no matter where you are. Imagine the impact we could make together!”
This pitch is effective because it:
States the problem: Highlights a significant global issue.
Introduces a solution: Describes the product’s unique selling point.
Invokes emotion: The idea of making a positive change in the world.
Ends with a Call to Action: Invites the listener to be part of the solution
#6: Follow-up sales pitch
When making a follow-up sales pitch, the focus is on continuing, expanding, and enriching a conversation to close more deals. That means you want to recall specific details from the previous interaction and respond intuitively to approaches that worked.
Subject: Thank you for Yesterday’s Discussion – Next Steps for [Your Product/Service]
Hello [Recipient’s Name],
I hope this email finds you well. Firstly, thank you for taking the time yesterday to discuss [Your Product/Service]. I appreciate your insights and feedback on how it aligns with [Recipient’s Company’s objectives/needs].
To recap our conversation:
Benefit A of our product can address [specific challenge they have].
Our recent success with [similar company or case study] showcases the results you can anticipate.
I’ve attached [a case study, product specs, trial version, etc.] for your further consideration, as discussed.
You had a great question about [specific question]. I’ve looked into this and [provide a detailed answer or solution].
#7: Social media pitch
With internet users worldwide spending an average of 151 minutes per day on social media, this is a perfect chance to reach customers where they’re at. Social media pitches should be slightly less formal, more action-oriented and — above all — brief.
Here’s an example of a social media pitch:
Hi [Recipient’s Name],
I hope this message finds you well. I’ve been following [Company’s Name] and am truly impressed with your recent [specific campaign or content piece, e.g., “brand relaunch”]. As a Content Marketing Strategist with over 7 years in the industry, I’ve assisted brands like [Brand A, Brand B] in boosting their online engagement by an average of 40%.
I see potential areas where [Company’s Name] could further enhance its content reach and engagement, especially in [specific area, e.g., “interactive content” or “SEO-driven blog posts”]. I’d love to discuss a few strategies that could align with your current efforts and drive tangible results.
Would you be open to a brief call or discussion next week? I promise to keep it concise and value-packed.
Best regards, [Your Name]
Mistakes to avoid while creating your sales pitch
Fine-tune your sales pitch templates with these 10 tips:
Dos
Don'ts
Personalize
Build your sales pitch around the customer’s unique needs, pain points, questions and experiences.
Tell Your Story
Your USP and differentiators should come across in every part of your pitch, from the hook to the CTA.
Ask Questions
Choose relevant, valuable questions that provide important information or set you up for a particular statement.
Be Specific
Specifics help customers remember what you’re offering and why it matters. Use stats and numbers where you can.
Connect
Anecdotes and personal background can help build rapport and make your listeners more comfortable.
Copy and paste
Never “copy and paste” templates across different formats, customers or products. Your listeners can tell when you’re reading a standard script.
Dump all the details
If you do your job right, there will be time for more detail in future conversations. Keep sales pitches focused and powerful.
Make customers lead
Questions can be helpful, but they shouldn’t make listeners feel like you don’t know what your goal is or what you’re supposed to be doing.
Complicate everything
Speak the customer’s language. That means using industry terms they’re comfortable with but skipping complex jargon.
Make it all about you
Don’t spend too much time talking about yourself. Even when “selling” the company, product, or service, focus on why this matters for the customer.
Craft your perfect sales pitch
At the end of the day, all the B2B sales pitch examples in the world won’t make a difference if you don’t have the right content management and sales enablement solutions on your side. Fortunately, Mindtickle is here to help.
By providing the perfect coaching and training to your reps, Mindtickle helps you master the “who,” “what,” “why” and “how.” Deliver the right content at the right time, learn from previous conversations, and help your teams bring sales pitch templates to life.
Train all your sellers on the perfect pitch
Connect with our team to see how Mindtickle will help you build a team of sellers who can deliver the perfect pitch each time.
Strong communication skills will serve you well in any industry, but they’re especially crucial in the sales world. Today companies are moving away from the traditional corporate structure of working in silos to adopt a more streamlined approach.
And establishing synergy among teams is really essential if you’re hoping to optimize sales outcomes and meet or exceed all of your sales targets.
On the most recent episode of Ready, Set, Sell, our guest Reid Oliver shared his tips on finding cross-functional alignment to achieve excellence in enterprise sales.
As the enterprise sales director at Splunk, Reid has found a few different leadership strategies that work for him and his team. He’s here today to let us in on all his secrets.
Who is Reid Oliver?
Hannah: Tony and I usually start by being a little bit nosy. What I’d love to do is get you to share a little bit about your career background so far — more specifically, the points that really made a difference in contributing to where you are today.
Reid Sure. I have been in software sales for seven years now. So, I’m certainly not a grizzled veteran and I still have plenty to learn. I’ve been at two companies. My first foray into sales was with a Series C company called Vidyard. We were doing B2B video hosting, data analytics, internal communications. I started there about as entry level as you can get, as a sales development representative, managing inbound leads. We had a phenomenal manager at the time and I also took advantage of a good growth curve, so I was able to move into a business development representative role as an account executive (AE). And then my final role there was with our enterprise team, selling into some of the biggest customers that we had at the time.
Addressing your question around getting to where I am today, I would recommend to anyone joining a startup early on in their sales career. You just get so much good exposure to wearing a lot of hats. Since then, I decided to move over to where I am right now, which is Splunk. I wanted to get to more large-enterprise complex-platform selling, with much larger deal sizes. And again, I’m really fortunate around timing and leadership and growth. I started as a commercial regional sales manager (RSM), an AE role, and today I’ve gone through a few different roles at Splunk because they are managing a strategic Canadian business. I’m now working with the largest customers and companies in Canada.
Tony: Excellent. I actually know Vidyard very well because I was a customer for a while. Sounds like you’ve done a great job climbing the ladder, but what drew you to sales in the first place?
Reid: A few factors. I think one of the biggest would be my parents and, in particular, my mom. She was always involved in our school and kind of thinking about careers and what would set us up for success. And part of that, we did some career kind of testing my brother and me, and one thing that always shone was that I always tended to score higher on EQ than IQ. So I wasn’t necessarily going to try to go for a surgeon or an investment banker. But pairing that with kind of playing a lot of sports, being competitive, maybe even just a general business interest, I thought that salesman made a ton of sense. And so that ended up where I ended up being, where I put a lot of my focus.
Hannah: Splunk is an awesome company. I’m actually working with a few people at Splunk over the last year. Yeah, I’d love to know a bit more about how you landed your role at Splunk.
Reid: Yeah. So it was, like a lot of roles these days, just networking. I was, as I mentioned, trying to figure out where my next step would be from Vidyard. I knew that cybersecurity and big data was a huge market still continues to be. And so I looked at who was a leader in that space, and Splunk was certainly top of the list (and continues to be), but at the time was really the key player. And so I ended up just looking up where I had connections and reaching out and having a cup of coffee with those individual sellers and one of the managers. And I ended up getting put into the interview process through that.
Tony: Well, it sounds like you’ve kind of been climbing the ladder. You started at Vidyard, you made your way to commercial accounts, and now enterprise. What would you say you like most about enterprise sales and what you’re doing right now?
Reid: I think the best part about enterprise sales is just the strategy behind it and the relationships that you build and the impact that you’re having on a customer account. I mean, enterprise deals are generally quite complex there. You need change agents across a company using multiple layers of champions across technical and key stakeholders. And so that’s certainly something that’s probably more absent in the more traditional kind of transactional selling model. I think it’s good to experience both, but the former certainly appeals to me from an enterprise perspective, and just getting the chance to be a part of a much larger deal cycle and impact from a revenue perspective to the company that you’re at is fun.
Tony: Yeah, the checks are always bigger, too, which helps. So that’s good.
Reid: This is true.
Hannah: When it goes right, that is.
Reid: Correct.
What is Splunk?
Hannah: Reid, I’m going to I’m going to try and remember what one of your company’s straplines are: is it data to anywhere? Is it something like that right for Splunk?
Reid: Data to everything.
Hannah: There we go. I was close! I’d love you to share an overview for those listening who don’t know what Splunk specializes in because I saw some material beneath the surface and I thought it was really cool. I’d love for you to help us understand how you help businesses grow and improve their outcomes.
Reid: Sure. In an analogy that I heard early on — and we’ve certainly grown from this — but we used to be kind of Google for IT. We were the de-facto platform to help IT professionals and security professionals dig through massive amounts of data and get to their answers quickly.
And from there, we’ve certainly developed into still being that critical query and big data ingest platform but we’re now turning also into visualizations, alerting orchestration and automation, and obviously applying layers of machine learning across these massive complex datasets. So ultimately, we’re helping security professionals ensure that their products and their companies are secure and identify when issues happen and where they are really quickly.
On the IT and DevOps side, we’re helping folks ensure that their websites are up and running and we’re ensuring that if bugs and issues are happening, they’re finding the root cause very, very quickly and, oftentimes, doing that through a predictive model rather than reactive. So it sounds like it’s a really sophisticated process there that you guys have to go through. And I’m curious about the different teams that you have to engage with on the sales side. So, you know, as you’re going through your process, what are the different teams that you typically engage with? How do you do that? And you know, how do you make sure that everything is working cohesively together?
Yeah, it’s not uncommon for our win notes on big deals to span multiple pages, and then you have to scroll through all the different teams and specialists that we have because it certainly takes a village. I would say core to our go-to-market function.
We obviously have our direct sellers. We work very closely with our sales or solution engineers. So they are the technical prowess and strategy behind a lot of the projects we’re working on that we then have specialist teams that are verticalized. We have financial services, we have oil and gas energy, we have e-commerce and we’ll often pull in those folks to get multiple layers into a conversation, to ensure that we’re helping build out a broader business case. And then I would say marketing partners are huge components that we work really closely with — Google and AWS in particular. And on the marketing side, we’re always trying to do different events and workshops and things to keep our customers engaged and successful.
Tony: Oh. You know, at this point in the pandemic, I think it’s safe to say we’re all a little bit Zoomed out.
Hannah: Well, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I love Reid’s approach to ensuring teams are communicating effectively without booking too many unnecessary meetings and touch-bases.
Tony: Exactly. I can’t stand having too many unnecessary meetings. But I think cross-functional collaboration is all about striking the right balance between working effectively as an individual and keeping communication channels open with your entire team.
Hannah: But I also love what Reid said about celebrating small wins to stay motivated. I think celebrating together as a team is a really great way to strengthen those bonds and form authentic connections.
Tony: Absolutely. And if celebrating those wins together includes a cocktail or two, then we’ll do what we have to do. But I think finding cross-functional alignment is more important than ever today as the landscape becomes increasingly competitive. So going the extra mile is always worth it.
Achieving excellence in enterprise sales
Hannah: Agreed. Let’s hear what Reid has to say next about achieving excellence in enterprise sales.
Tony: With all that in mind, do you have a specific focus for this year or is there a specific goal that you’re targeting… or how are you thinking about the upcoming fiscal year?
Reid: I guess if my manager were listening, he’d want to hear my aim is to hit our team number for the year, which certainly is a goal. But the way that I look at it, and I’m obviously newer on leadership, I try to think about it as a bit of a framework or kind of trickle-down effect to our end goal, be hitting our number. What are some of the other kinds of leading indicator goals that we need in order to get there? A big one for me is ensuring that I understand what my team’s goals are for the year. Some of them are going to be purely numbers/financially based. Others want to get into leadership or get exposure to other teams.
Making sure that I have a full understanding of what success means to them and then building that up into how we get there as a team to hit our number, that’s probably my overarching goal for the year.
Hannah: And Reid just kind of expanding on what you were saying regarding enterprise selling: one of the key differences you mentioned is there’s the inherent strategic nature of an enterprise setting, right and also the multiple stakeholders that are typically involved. What’s bringing all that together? What are some of the recent sales wins — of course, those that you’re allowed to talk about — that you are proud of? And what do you think are some of the factors that resulted in these wins? So, think of a salesperson listening, who’s thinking: What do I need to do on my next call to be like, Reid?
Reid: That’s a good question. A good win that we had that I could share happened prior to the holiday break. We were working with another data SaaS company, actually local here in Canada. They put a significant premium on security and, in turn, uptime. It wasn’t the largest from a dollar perspective but, from a complexity standpoint, it was pretty significant. So they have contracts in the US where they require steady ramp capabilities. We had unique compliance and legal components to it.
I think one of the things I’m most proud of and what’s important on the enterprise side is it was a nine to 10-month sales cycle, but we did a really good job at the beginning, building a strong relationship with multiple stakeholders — leaders at the business, technical owners — and we tried to have some of the tough conversations early on to get those out of the way. We knew it was competitive and we were going to go to an RFQ, so we tried to get ahead of where we were strong and where we may be weaker or at least what our competitor was going to be meeting on, what did our license model look like and what would the cost look like. That way, when we got towards the end, we had had a lot of those challenging conversations — the ones that maybe come with a little bit more back and forth — and it ended up being much smoother. There were still negotiations to be had, but we had built a lot of rapport early on so that we could have those conversations easily and ultimately partner. I think it’s a big reason we won the deal.
Tony: It sounds like you did a great job and, like you said, establishing those relationships was a big part of that. And touching back a little bit to something you said earlier about getting to understand a little bit more about your internal teams: what their goals are, what sort of things they’re looking to do. As you’ve collected all this data, have you found that there are certain challenges that are bigger ones that you want to make sure that you can work through with your team? Are there any challenges that stand out to you right now?
How to build natural urgency
Reid: I think one of the biggest challenges that we come up against is just building natural urgency. I always try to get my team away from just selling to the end of a quarter or picking our own timeline or deadline, because that’s often when I find deals slip and forecasts get impacted. I also know that, as sellers, we can’t make our own agenda. To get a deal done, we have to work with our customers and understand what’s a compelling event for them. And that’s much easier said than done.
Sometimes you have to do it around product launches or sprints, and the engineering team is running around dealing with other major projects that don’t even affect you, but they open up resources for your project. I try to get my team to do a far better job of just leaning in and identifying upfront, “Hey, we want to work with your team’s timelines, but we want to pick a date and work backward from it.” That inherently is a challenge, but it’s also something we’re trying to get better at because if we can build natural urgency, then we ultimately have a time and a date that we’re working towards. And we also have a bit more leverage when it comes to getting into final contract negotiations.
How to be easy to work with
Hannah: You were speaking briefly about the challenges that you’re working on for your team. And urgency in deals… it’s a hot topic, right? It always has been. But I’m just thinking about the wider ecosystem that you work in at Splunk. You’ve been there a few years now. You went from an RSM to it to a sales director. What were some of the key differences you noticed as you made that transition? What are some of the things that stand out with how you’ve had to work with the team as an RSM compared to how you need to work with the wider ecosystem as a sales director?
Reid: As an RSM, one of your biggest focus areas needs to be ensuring that you’re working collaboratively with your sales engineer or solution engineer. Especially with a complex sale like Splunk, they’re so critical. And I think that, just like sellers, you get a wide range of personalities when it comes to sales engineers.
And so, as I always tell my team, when I was an RSM, I was going out of my way to make their lives easier. So I didn’t expect them to do meetings, follow-ups. I didn’t. If I needed a technical document that I could Google just as easily as they could, I’d go out of my way to do some of those tasks so that when I really needed to lean on them — if we needed to go after hours and really close in on a project — they were willing to do that. I find that if a rep takes the easy way out or goes lazy, they’ll get the same in return from their SE. I made a very conscious effort to make working with me as easy and enjoyable as possible. And I now try to ensure my team is doing that so that when we need help, folks are willing and open to come and work with us.
Tony: Digging into that a little bit, how do you align with your teams? Do you see it as, “Hey, this is just something I need to do one time?” Or is this part of you? It sounds like it’s part of your overall methodology with your teams but tell us a little bit more about that.
Reid: Alignment is certainly always fluid and continuous, and it changes depending on the project and customer that we’re working with. But I always try to have consistent communication and alignment across all of our cross-functional teams.
I am cautious of having too many meetings. I try not to have just meetings for the sake of them. I try to be as efficient as possible, but I count on my team to be ensuring we have that active alignment and that folks understand their roles and responsibilities from the early stages.
So, when we’re doing our first-half kickoffs, for instance, or our quarterly business reviews, if we have accountability early on around, those folks know that they’re going to be counted on, and that generally breeds a good, healthy level of alignment and responsibility.
Hannah: I’m a big believer in motivation and positive thinking and affirmations and things like that. And I think you need a lot of that in sales, right? This is the step: that one moment where something needs to help, right? Or the universal powers. But what is motivation like for you? How do you connect with and motivate the people around you, particularly the people in your team?
Reid: Yeah, that’s a good point, Hannah. One thing I learned early on and I actually was not great at was managing the highs and lows in sales. A mentor of mine talked about just not getting too high and not getting too low either. And that was a learning curve for me. I was always more of an emotional seller and I think you’re right. You need you need to have positivity in the good times and the bad. With my team, we always try to celebrate the wins, even if they’re smaller wins. So maybe we haven’t yet closed the deal but we got through a huge milestone. Or maybe we broke into just booking meetings with an account that we know is a high priority but haven’t had much work with before.
As part of our team meetings, I try to get my team to share and open up about what’s working for them. While selling can be an individual sport, at times we try to make it like an overall open landscape where people can celebrate and also where people can identify, “Hey, I’m having challenges here. Have you folks tried to do something different?”
Also, sales folks are generally pretty competitive. So if you are the top performer on your team is continuously sharing wins, it tends to bubble up to other folks.
Hannah: It really does.
Tony: Well you said, you were a hockey player earlier, so I think you got to share the wins, right? That’s all part of the team mentality with hockey. So.
Reid: Exactly.
Tony: So it’s funny. We were talking about hockey offline before, but everybody consistently says about hockey players that they go above and beyond, right? They’re not like the guys who go down with the fake injury like in other sports. So how do you how would you relate that to sales?
Reid: Yeah, I’d say there are two components of that that I’ve noticed. Number one is just if you’re willing to put in the work and work harder than the other 90 percent, you’re going to be largely successful in sales. It’s not the only telltale sign but I have found that, for the most part, if you really are hungry, you’re passionate about what you’re selling and you’re interested in what your customer’s goals are, that’s a way to stand out in itself.
One of the big things I see is just the level of preparation. So with top sellers, there’s this framework.
It’s like the principle agent framework where you want more and more of your team to think like an owner. I think the best reps treat their territories as they own that territory, right. They’re the GM or the CEO or whatever you want to call it, of that territory. And that means slowing down. Every single action is value add and putting themselves in the framework of their customers for the largest strategic deals, thinking like they’re a part of that team. Where does our solution have to fit? What challenges does it have to meet? That’s the top sellers that I see. They’re willing to go out of their way and above and beyond and to really think like an owner, and I think that’s a huge component of being successful in sales.
Hannah: So Reid, you’ve mentioned quite a few things about what you can do to improve your ability to deliver sales outcomes for your business and your customers. You mentioned things about collaborating well internally. You mentioned acting like an owner and finding positivity during the highs and lows. But what about some of the recommendations that you’d make to somebody who’s getting started in their sales career? You’ve already mentioned working at a startup, so you can’t say that one again!
Reid: Yeah, sure. That is a big one. I will say I was going to default back to that, but I’ll follow your guidance. I think finding a space that you’re passionate about is important. I think you really have to care about what you’re selling. You’re going to be doing it every single day and it can be a grind, so if you don’t necessarily believe in the space or you’re not genuinely interested in it, I think that would show on long calls, right? And in today’s world, you have to be much more of an advocate and customers just have so many different options. If you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to care about what you’re going into. And then also just picking strong, strong products in markets with lots of upside. I’ve always loved that the reason I went to Splunk was I looked at the size of the data market, data monitoring, and cyber, and I just felt that there’s so much growth opportunity. So finding markets with plenty of upside and tailwinds is important.
Hannah: I think people often overlook that. It’s a really good point. Thanks for that.
Tony: I’m sure Splunk is changing quickly. How do you go about refining your skillset right and making sure that you’re where you need to be, not only for your personal growth, but for the organization?
Reid: One of the first things I do is try to identify people who are smarter than me or have been more successful than I have, and I just ask them for guidance and to spend time. I try to be as respectful as I can about it and I come prepared, but I don’t really shy away from it.
At Splunk, one of the first things I did and I continue to do is have mentors who I try to keep up with, learning, taking their brain, kind of being a sponge, if you will, to pick up different tactics that they’re using and make them my own.
So that’s a huge component of it. And then I also am fairly active. I use tools like Twitter and a number of different blogs from other sales leaders and go-to-market groups and just try to make sure that I’m staying up to date and relevant on a lot of the trends because I find that, once something is reaching kind of LinkedIn blog velocity, it’s already being used by a lot of sellers. Trying to remain consistent and sharp on new ways and strategies folks are using has typically yielded good results so far.
Tony: Well, you’ve kind of defined my whole career: being smart enough to know I’m not the smartest person in the room. I think that we’re very much on the same page with that.
Hannah: It takes a while to be comfortable with that and realize the benefits of that actually. I know this is definitely a valid point. We’ve spoken quite a bit, indirectly, about communication when it comes to working with internal teams and when it comes to working with your sales team. What are some of the tips you have for ensuring smooth and effective communication? Because there’s a lot of ways to communicate now, like informal, formal, etc. Tell me more about some of the tips that you would recommend when it comes to comms.
Reid: Yeah, there is no shortage of communication channels these days. I really like the concept of radical candor: the idea of being openly transparent and also very direct. I find that that’s the feedback that I always hope to get and I try to embody that in my communication with my team. I find that it’s best to be very, very open and honest about performance. And if that’s to the negative side, obviously, it’s coming with constructive ways to improve on what we’re doing. And if it’s to the positive, we need to ensure we can replicate that and make it more of a playbook going forward. I guess to your point around channels, Hannah, I find that still just picking up the phone and calling is one of the best ways to really have a conversation, particularly if it’s more of a difficult one. I think Slack and email messages can sometimes be misconstrued, but there’s a time and a place for them. I also found that shift has been really different, moving from when I was in a full office. In a setting that’s been fully virtual the last two years, it’s been even more challenging at times to really connect with folks. I find there’s always a little bit of that barrier on Zoom calls and such. And so, again, meet for a coffee or get in person if you can, but if not, phone calls generally the best.
Hannah: Yeah, but Reid, emoji or no emoji?
Reid: I’m not much of an emoji guy. I’m a I “Iike” guy.
Tony: Actually, thinking about the challenges you were just mentioning. Can you think of a time when there was a communication breakdown that had a direct impact on something you were doing? Can you think of anything and how did you solve it?
Reid: I mean, there are communication breakdowns — they happen all the time. I’m even thinking how we work with customers. Sometimes emails can be misconstrued or just missed in general. And so the best way, in my view, to solve it is, if we feel like we’re going down a path or maybe there’s a disconnect, it’s just kind of hitting pause, with me putting my own hand up and saying, “Look, I think I’m missing the point or maybe I was I was unclear. Can we do like a hard reset on this and just kind of try to figure out if there is a better path forward?” And I think identifying that early, early on and not trying to pretend like we know everything or go down a path that’s not the right one. It’s probably best to nip it in the bud when you when you have risk of a miscommunication.
Hannah: I’m just thinking about something you mentioned earlier. You said you’re relatively new to leadership. I think I was doing a little bit nosing around on your LinkedIn. It’s about a year, right, since you transitioned into a sales director?
Reid: Yes. Yeah, I’m starting. We just kicked out at this level at the end of January. So this is the start of my second year.
Hannah: What are you hoping to improve? You’ve had a year of learning and probably some shocks along the way, but how are you hoping to up level your leadership skills for 2022?
Reid: There’s a long list. I’m actively trying to find ways to get better, and I’m pretty open with my team about that too. I’m in a unique situation where I joke that some of my team members have been selling since I was in high school. So they’re all far more senior than me. One thing I try to do is just take the approach of not knowing everything and being very open about, “Hey, here’s where I can help, and here’s where I where I want to get feedback.” Something I think I can do more of is press for more critical feedback. I find sometimes asking for feedback can be really difficult, and sometimes folks, particularly if you have a friendly relationship, will take the easy way out. They’ll say, “You’re doing a great job, thanks so much.” But that’s rarely the case. There are always going to be areas that I can improve on a one-on-one basis, but I also want feedback about how I manage teams. And I’m not going to let them off the hook when I do ask for feedback because it’s really the only way I’ll improve. So that’s the main focus of mine, among others.
Tony: You said you’re about two weeks into your new fiscal, right? What’s next for you and for Splunk over the next year?
Reid: So Splunk’s going through a pretty big transformation. I think we’re one of the largest companies, aside from Adobe and Autodesk, to move from a more traditional on-prem software to being fully cloud native and SaaS. And so that’s come with some growing pains over the past two years, but it’s also been really unique to be a part of. What’s next for us is just really ensuring that we’re laser tight on just what being a SaaS company means. What are the critical metrics I mentioned that touched on whether we have organic growth? How do we land new deals? How do we ensure we have retention and renewal? So that’s a huge focus area: best practices around being SaaS company now. And for my team, it’s a matter of ensuring that we are educating our customers about those changes and ensuring that they’re aware of all the different things that Splunk can do. We’ve always said it’s a blessing and a curse, where we are very good at a lot of different areas, but we often will get stuck in one segment. So jumping over to other buying centers, whether you’re in security or moving into IT, can be challenging because the folks that own Splunk tend to hug it and keep it very close. Having the opportunity to build and grow and expand teams can be tricky, but it’s needed if we’re going to kind of continue growing at the rate we are.
Tony: Oh, that’s great. Well, Reid, this has been fantastic, but we’re not done with you yet. We have just a couple more questions that we’re going to do in our rapid-fire round. Hannah’s going to kick it off. Give really quick answers: the first thing that comes to mind.
Hannah: All right. Let’s get into it. So, OK, what is your sales philosophy in just three words?
Reid: Always be interested.
Hannah: I like it. What’s the best advice you’ve been given in your career so far?
Reid: Find good mentors.
Tony: I like that one. Your top productivity hack?
Reid: Own your calendar. I’m a huge fan of blocking anything and everything I need to get done throughout my days.
Tony: Very smart. Top prediction for the sales industry in the upcoming year?
Reid: Product-led growth is going to continue to flourish so reps need to find ways to be effective and change their models in some cases.
Hannah: What’s one thing that you believe is revolutionizing the sales industry?
Reid: It’s probably the amount of tools and resources and, in some cases, cutting through the noise of what are effective tools and how to help reps work as efficiently as possible. I think the efficiency and productivity metric is just going to become more and more important, particularly for teams, when they’re justifying raising new rounds or where they’re allocating dollars for headcount. It’s a huge component and probably will be more and more.
Hannah: I think I’m with you on that one. But on rep productivity, if you could share just one piece of advice to salespeople, what would it be?
Reid: Always be authentic and transparent. Be as open as you possibly can and then try to be somebody that a buyer likes to do business with. There are so many tools and options out there. People still like doing business with folks who they find enjoyable and whom they see they get value from.
Tony: There are a lot of voices out there nowadays with blogs and posts and everything. So where do you go to for your best sales industry news?
Reid: I’m a huge Twitter fan. I try to use Twitter and be selective of my followers, but also make sure that I’m staying up to speed. I like a few different podcasts, and then I also try to read more books. There are a lot of good books out there.
Hannah: OK, so are leaders made or born?
Reid: Both. I don’t know. I don’t think one versus the other.
Hannah: You’re allowed.
Tony: You can. You can.
Hannah: You’re allowed.
Tony: Well, this is our last question. I’m actually a big movie fan myself, so we’re going to tie this to movie quotes. But would you go with always be closing or sell me this pen?
Reid: Always be closing.
Tony: I knew you were going to say that because you gave us a couple of these already, so I had a good feeling that you are going to go that direction. But, Reid, this was a fantastic time today. We really appreciate you joining us on Ready Set Sell and we wish you the best of luck at Splunk. Thanks again for your time.
Reid: Awesome. Thank you so much, Hannah and Tony. I really appreciate it.
What we learned
Tony: You know, I thought it was really interesting with all of the different roles that Reid has had over the years, because that’s pretty consistent with what I’ve seen from a number of top sales leaders: they’ve done different things and they have unique perspectives because they’ve really been able to see things from different lenses within the sales verticals. I think that gives him a great way of being able to really visualize from a different perspective.
Hannah: I definitely agree with that. I think it even goes beyond having experience at various levels in sales. I think the sales leaders that really exceed expectations are the ones who have actually had the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of sales experience. So they’ve had incredible years but maybe they’ve had a quarter where they haven’t done so great. And the reason I mention that is that they are able to really think about, you know, how will my team be feeling right now when they’re doing great? Or how will my team be feeling when right in this instance when they haven’t hit a target? And I think when you’ve got leaders who have gone through various different roles in sales, full stop, they they’re much more relatable when they can relate to the different situations that salespeople find themselves in.
Tony: Yeah, I think it really gives you a lot of credibility as you start rising the chain. I mean, I look at my background. My first job out of college, I was selling sneakers. You know, I was the top sneaker salesman in northern New Jersey, which brought me to where I am today, I suppose. But it really gives you an idea of how to think about things differently, because even though I was selling sneakers, I learned a lot about how to deal with people and different dynamics with the people I was working with. I think every job that you go through or every stop on your way really helps define who you’re going to be and how you’re going to work with colleagues within different structures.
Hannah: Yeah, I love the sneakers. This is great. When you think about the roles that all of us had and you think about the importance of coaching now, as a sales leader, how can you coach if you haven’t done the job yourself? Or how can you really effectively coach if you just haven’t been in the trenches, the multiple roles that you play and the experience that you gather from that? I just think it sets you up to be a much stronger coach, which, in my opinion, is a key part of being in sales leadership.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. I think that all adds to credibility, right? And we’ve all had managers over the years that, you know, get put into positions of leadership and have not done the job that they’re asking you to do. And they don’t really get the credibility because they haven’t done it and they’re asking you to do things that either they don’t know how to do or just haven’t had any experience doing. I totally agree. I think it’s very important to have someone in that role that can not only talk the talk but walk the walk. Reid’s clear and articulate understanding of his role in the team really impressed me.
Hannah: I know, right? Like, it became quite clear early on in the interview why he’s moved up the ladder to a leadership position.
Tony: I know he really had some great suggestions to share about finding cross-functional alignment internally, managing teams effectively and really going above and beyond to achieve excellence in sales.
Hannah: I think one point he made that really stood out to me was the value of finding someone who’s more successful or experienced than you and learning as much as you can from them.
Tony: You know what they say? It’s funny. I use this too. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. I think Reid also emphasized the importance of following your passion in sales. You know, I couldn’t agree more with this point because if you’re not passionate about what you’re selling, people will be able to sense that and you’ll see it reflected in your results.
Hannah: It’s true. And finally, Reid’s comments about accountability and responsibility were so on point. Getting clear on everyone’s roles and responsibilities from the very beginning will help set everyone up for success and lead to stronger alignment overall.
Tony: You know, absolutely. I think, all in all, I learned a lot from today’s episode, and we hope that you did, too. Thanks again to our guest Reid for joining us today.
Hannah: Thank you for listening to this episode of Ready Set Sell.
Tony: We hope you took away some valuable lessons and insights that inspire you to reevaluate your approach to sales readiness.
Hannah: Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show when you get a minute.
Tony: And stay tuned for the next episode of Ready Set Sell.
In 1996, Bill Gates famously penned an article titled “Content is King.” Though the article is now a quarter of a century old, the sentiment has never been more true – especially for sales organizations.
There’s no doubt sales content is a key ingredient of sales readiness and selling success. And it comes in many forms. Internal content, such as product updates delivered via easy-to-consume microlearning, ensures sellers are always up-to-date, access and use accurate, consistent messaging, and are able to convey the value of their solution. On the other hand, the right marketing-approved assets enable sellers to deliver relevant content to customers throughout the selling cycle. This external content helps sellers increase engagement, set traps for the competition, and move deals through the funnel more quickly.
But getting the right content in sellers’ hands is rife with obstacles – for both sellers and administrators. If they’re going to arm salespeople with content that improves deal outcomes, organizations need to rethink what kind of content is shared, how it’s shared, and how it’s used.
It’s time for sales organizations to provide integrated sales content experiences for just-in-time learning and customer engagement.
At many organizations, content chaos is the norm
Virtually every sales enabler and marketer spends a lot of time creating content to support the sales team. Different content serves different roles – and it can take many different formats. For example, “internal use only” tools such as just-in-time training and recordings of top sellers in real-world interactions help reps prepare for upcoming meetings more effectively. And customer-facing assets such as pitch decks and sell sheets can help accelerate deals.
The right content can have a significant, positive impact on a rep’s ability to close more deals. But according to SiriusDecisions, up to 70% of B2B content goes unused. And one of the chief reasons is that sellers don’t know the content exists. Or, if they do, they don’t know how or where to find it.
Because multiple stakeholders create sales content, storing and managing content gets out of control – and quickly. Keeping content in Google Drive, Dropbox, or SharePoint may have sounded like a good idea at the time, but making sure the current messaging, positioning, or competitive talking points are being accessed becomes an impossible task when your content repository wasn’t built for the task.
Even worse, there’s no organization of content along business lines. If a rep wants to see an example of pitching against a competitor, watch an SME video about the competitor, and then share some marketing assets for the same purpose, will all of that information be in the same place? Will it be up-to-date? Will there only be one copy of all of it? If your organization is like most, the answers to these questions are no, no, and no.
It’s content chaos, and sellers don’t have what they need to succeed.
Modern sellers need integrated content experiences to succeed in the field
Today’s B2B sellers have high expectations. Sellers must walk into meetings ready to deliver value, and content is a big piece of the readiness puzzle. In fact, according to the CMO Council, 87% of B2B buyers indicate content has a major or moderate impact on their purchase decisions.
Organizations must make it a priority to provide integrated content experiences that empower reps to access, learn, and share the right content at the right time. Whether it’s an internal competitive update from a subject matter expert or a marketing-approved, customer-facing brochure, content should be housed in a single, easily searchable platform. The problem is that conversation intelligence data – which can provide those real-world conversation snippets reps find so valuable – is often housed in an entirely different location than just-in-time learning content and marketing assets, making a single platform more of a fantasy than reality.
Reps need content stored in intuitive hubs that match business workflows. The subject matter in hubs may be competitors, personas, industries, sales plays, etc. But it’s hard to create these hubs when data comes from multiple locations.
Instead, you need a centralized location like Mindtickle’s Asset Hub, that pulls data from other aspects of your sales stack – enablement, conversation intelligence, etc. – and delivers it in one integrated solution. Then your content becomes more valuable, it’s used more frequently and effectively, and your reps become more consistent and productive.
Reduces time wasted on searching for content
Research suggests that reps spend less than a third of their time on revenue-generating activities. The remainder of their time is spent on myriad other activities, including paperwork, training, and servicing customers. Of course, those are all important tasks. However, a good chunk of a reps’ time is also spent doing busy work – including hunting down the right content. And if they can’t find what they need, they may take matters into their own hands and sink even more time into developing their own content from scratch. And we’ve all seen how that ends.
An integrated content experience ensures reps can always find exactly what they’re looking for, quickly. That means they can spend less time hunting for content and guessing which will help improve sales outcomes – and more time doing what they do best: selling.
Ensures accurate, consistent messaging across the sales team
Let’s say the enablement team sends out a new sell sheet via email. But shortly after it’s been released, the content becomes outdated. Reps save the sheet and continue sharing it, even after it’s been updated, and propagate outdated information to their buyers. This scenario happens thousands of times per day, and enablement teams often feel powerless to do anything about it.
Providing reps with one-stop content access for all of their training and sharing needs ensures they have a single source of truth when it comes to content. They know they can easily find the approved version of what they need and deliver accurate, consistent messaging during sales interactions.
Better win rates
If a seller can’t find a piece of content to address a customer’s needs and objections at a specific stage of the sales cycle, it can slow down a deal.
With integrated content experiences – where content is both arranged in business-focused hubs and easily searchable – reps have access to all of the content they need in a single location. And when admin teams can easily manage content and correlate both training and marketing content to business outcomes, reps also know the content they use has been successful with top reps.
With the right content and insights into content effectiveness, reps can more effectively communicate with prospects, overcome objections, and build a strong case for their solution. They’re better equipped to close more business – faster.
End the content chaos
Sales reps need access to the right content at the right moment to move more deals forward. But a disjointed approach to content management doesn’t cut it. To turn chaos into structure, organizations need an integrated platform with three key attributes:
Integrated enablement, conversation intelligence, and just-in-time content to create a tight bond between training and selling
Centralized administration to ensure the right content is always available – and the wrong content isn’t
And insights into content effectiveness, helping stakeholders across the organization understand the impact of content for both training and selling
It’s now a given that more sales meetings will be virtual for the foreseeable future. But keeping people engaged and focused while virtual is a challenge. Too many people turn off their camera and multitask. While people may commit to attending a meeting but they don’t necessarily attend with purpose or feel energized when attending.
There’s an opportunity for salespeople to flip this around. Most people take their foot off the pedal once a meeting is scheduled. But there are things that you and your sales team can do between getting a meeting scheduled and making sure the time your buyers invest with you is engaging and useful.
Whether it’s a meet and greet, a kickoff meeting, a critical sales pitch, or a discovery call, you need to define the parameters that make a successful meeting and help your salespeople skill up in their teaching skills. What’s surprising is how seldom sales teams define meeting facilitation as a critical sales skill to be taught, reinforced or observed in salespeople. There is a need for a systematic process to upskill your people on those critical behaviors that make for a successful virtual sales meeting. They should be part of your onboarding experience and your coaching cadence.
You can’t ever over-prepare people on how to put the ACTIVE in interactive presentations. You have to help them build their mindset and skillset so they have hardened muscles in terms of the core selling skills and habits that apply to greater influence in a virtual world. One that doesn’t require technology, but enables all to benefit from it.
The perfect sales meeting
There are four factors that define a successful sales meeting:
Being on time, prepared, and ready with an “ENGAGEing” presentation
The next meeting is scheduled
Checklist of outcomes reviewed
All standing items are resolved
Without all of these in place, you will probably not get a next meeting.
We are increasingly in a complex buying and selling cycle. Today’s buyer is not a single entity, it’s actually many people working with the buyer – procurement, finance, the user, process owners. Similarly for the seller, the sales experience has gone well beyond simply the account executive.
At the meeting, every member of your sales team has to be on message. They need to know exactly what their role is in the meeting, what specific skill sets they’re going to need and what content they need to bring to the table. This all needs to be completely aligned. Aligning all of your sales team, not just your account executives, is crucial because you need to help them understand their audience and empower them with the right content with the right skills to conduct a successful virtual sales meeting.
Engaging virtual participants
Too often, salespeople can sound robotic as they focus on pitching rather than engaging their buyers. You need to make sure you understand the persona of your buyer and tailor your content, pitch, pre-work and facilitation to engage and add value in the time you have with them.
To engage them, design your meetings so people feel like they are the center. This means you also need to know your technology so it’s seamless for you. You can then really focus on the people and deliver in a way that brings out the brilliance of your product, service, and how you are solving the buyer’s unique challenges.
When designing your sales meeting, you can engage buyers by thinking about it differently. You’re not running a sales meeting, you’re training your customers. This means your salespeople aren’t selling, they’re teaching. This is a big differentiator. If you have a 20-minute sales call, your mission should be to teach your buyers everything you can.
A seller may spend most of their time thinking about what they want to share and very little thinking about how to share it in a way that resonates. You need to flip that equation and spend most of your energy designing your virtual meetings so that the buyer is fired up. You want your buyer to spend 30% of their time learning the content and 70% practicing.
When people log into a sales presentation they want it to be all about them. That requires some very powerful shifts. You want to let people talk and open up to you. This flips the design of a typical sales meeting where the presenters usually do all the talking and the buyers are processing.
You want your buyers to have a high level of involvement. To engage them and prevent them from multitasking you need interactivity every two to three minutes. This can be listening to other voices, talking themself or doing fun stuff.
There are lots of ways that you can do this virtually, and I’ll explain some of these in more detail below.
To help you achieve this, I’ve identified six steps to holding an engaging virtual sales meeting.
1. Energize participants
Really engaging participants starts by energizing people. Data tells us the average human attention span is 20 minutes, but for online video interactions it’s about 60 seconds. We’re competing for attention span from buyers trying to get work done on a 10 by 12 inch screen.
The faster you energize people when they log in, the faster they’re involved. Ask them a tough or interesting question and get them to type their answers in the chat box. You want them to realize that it’s important that they show up to this meeting, they can’t just sit back passively. A hint, don’t start with a super tricky question. Perhaps start with a simple question, like where they’re dialling in from and then move to more complex questions.
You can also energize people ahead of the meeting. Send out a book, article video or even an online survey, and ask them to take a look at it if they have a few minutes before the meeting. This activates the reticular activating system in their brain so they come in already energized and excited to learn.
2. Navigate content
Before you share the information that you want to share, you need to be crystal clear about what your objectives are. What do you want your buyers to do differently as a result of the time with you?
If you know where you want them to get to, then you can work out how you’re going to get them there. When you’re face to face, it’s pretty clear because you can see people nodding, but virtually you have to put in interactivity along the way. You can do this by asking them questions or putting them in a breakout room with a buddy and ask them a powerful question that you need to know so you can position your solution. You could also get them to experience what you’re selling and then go back and deconstruct it.
When you’re presenting, you want to use multiple modalities so you can connect with multiple senses. Every time you shift the modality or the sense, you’re activating a different part of the brain which captures and keeps attention as well as helps people retain what you are sharing.
3. Generate meaning
Generating meaning is about letting your buyers know what’s in it for them. If you just keep sharing more and more information, their brain tries to work out what’s important to remember and what has no relevance to them. By generating meaning you stop people from checking out, reengage them in why it is valuable to pay attention and it allows you to move to the next step.
You can do this by overtly asking your buyer questions. What does a tool like this mean for you? What does it cost you not to have this tool? What are you currently doing?
Buyers can put their answers in the chat and you could then call them out by their name and ask them to tell you more. This not only generates meaning but it also helps you make a connection with the buyer. For other people on the call, it also engages them. They’re hearing different voices and they realize they may be called on to speak soon.
You can also use breakout rooms as another way to build interaction. Ask them to tell each other their stories.
What I’ve noticed in a lot of sales calls is that salespeople often tell buyers why their tool is important. When you ask the buyer to tell you what’s important, it flips it around and their answer allows you to fine-tune your sales approach.
4. Apply to the real world
When you generate meaning you can see how your buyer will apply what you’ve taught them, or your solution, in the real world. Help your buyer practice what they’ve learnt immediately by popping them in a breakout room immediately.
You can also structure your questions so they see the need for what you’re selling without realizing it. This is tricky but you can do it.
For example, I’m working with a group that teaches people how to use cameras and systems in the operating room. They ask a range of questions to help the buyers understand how they would apply their solution in the real world. Does your patient need a stent? Do they need open heart surgery? What if you saw this with the camera, what would that mean?
These questions position their product. They can then let the buyer practice with their product so they can see how it would apply to them in the real world. Anything you can do to have them demonstrate that they learned something from you in your sales presentation, and can apply it in the real world will help you.
Other things you could try include giving your buyers a mini case study and letting them go into a breakout room to figure it out. The more they apply the information you’ve taught them with you, the better the questions they’re going to ask and the more you can refine how you’re going to train them next time. Your buyers will also feel more excited and engaged with the learning experience they’ve had.
5. Gauge and celebrate
The next step is to gauge what your buyers have learned and celebrate it with them. You could do this by having a little Jeopardy game or quiz where they test their new knowledge. This gives them a chance to feel empowered that they’ve learned and sets both them and you up for success. People love to feel like they’ve achieved and it will let them log off on a high.
You can also use this approach in your own internal meetings. Ask your top-performing peers to show others what they’re doing to get those sales. All of a sudden you have a much more engaging team meeting because one of your superstars is presenting their success drivers.
6. Extend learning to action
Giving a buyer the gift of extending learning to action keeps you top of mind. This involves following up after the meeting. In this age, where everybody is multitasking, follow-up is one of the most critical things you can do to keep the learning alive and keep the focus.
That follow-up should happen the next day. It can be as simple as sending an article, book or job aid to the buyer. There are a range of things you can do to keep your organization top of mind with buyers from holding regular learning sessions to sharing success stories to email campaigns.
At the end of the day, these principles really come into play best when people have been taught, they’ve prepared and they’ve been assessed. Enable your salespeople with best practices like agenda templates, pre-meeting reminders, polls and surveys so they can go into their meetings prepared. Also give them the opportunity to drive self-confidence by developing their skills, whether it’s by role play, model pitches or accessing great examples of openings and closings.
You can also crowdsource social learning. This involves enabling your managers and top performing peers to mentor as part of your ever boarding experience – that starts with onboarding and upskilling over the journey. You can also leverage tools like artificial intelligence and embed that into your sales coaching cadence at scale to help your managers become more effective because they no longer have the luxury of shadowing or doing ride-alongs.
When building sales skills, practice really does help people make progress because we never get it right the first time. It’s not what you do once, it’s what you do better the next time. This applies to teaching in sales presentations. Teaching, in any forum, is the art and science of bringing out the brilliance that drives transformations. These tips will help you achieve brilliance in your sales presentations.
The shift from office to work from home has made sales enablement even more essential. As we prepare for 2021 and beyond, the promise of learning from our mistakes and the ability to pivot is critical. Companies around the world are changing at a rapid pace unlike anything we’ve experienced before. As companies re-evaluate and re-prioritize, they need to ask critical questions about how to succeed. What kind of mindset is needed to thrive today? How is this mindset and plan for development built? How are we helping our team with coaching, competencies and experiences that are most valuable for the future of sales? The how and why of enablement must adapt accordingly in order to thrive in today’s remote/hybrid-remote environment. Passionate enablement professionals must shift and ensure a deep belief in the power of customer-driven innovation. While the world may prefer to return to pre-COVID experiences, the reality is: only those that are resilient will quickly incorporate the wins and benefits of virtual sales and enablement and will expand the scope into a new future.
Shift gears for higher win rates: build an engaging enablement experience
In 2020, remote video was effective, as people were working hard to keep their jobs. In 2021, video training alone will be less effective and take longer to get teams aligned on goals and to be able to effectively shift. There is an abundance of data and information at people’s fingertips. 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years alone. Couple this with the fact that technology is advancing quickly. The rapid development and adoption of breakthrough technologies are changing how we interact with each other. In 2020, content was king but not any longer. Content provides background and a frame of reference. Now it is “what is the right solution to support the customer and is it the right solution?” Innovative companies are moving from having thousands of assets and high consumption of resources, to designing experiences unique and personalized to give teams the practice, confidence, competence, and resources needed to help clients.
Improve time to productivity: continuous onboarding and reinforcement
How do you provide a frictionless experience for new team members remotely? Engaging and interactive technologies help teams learn and develop skills in a simulated environment, thereby increasing engagement, productivity, and retention. Strong virtual onboarding, reinforcement, and ongoing training programs help fuel enterprise growth in an intentional and responsible way while enabling teams to do more with their current resources. Peer-to-peer collaboration will help teams become problem-centric, not program centric. As enterprises limit available financial resources, tech that helps sales teams become more nimble, more efficient, and successful will continue to deliver value that extends far beyond this pandemic.
Growth mindset: leveling up sales skills
High-growth companies require today’s teams to have a mindset geared toward continuous innovation, constant re-invention, and continual improvement. Enablement teams are in a key position to help their company succeed throughout this fundamental shift. Virtual practice empowers people to learn the skills needed to execute. Teams gain experience to broaden their perspective and their belief in what is possible. This provides the foundation for today’s workforce to be successful. During monumental shifts, reputations are either won or lost. Who on your team is positioned to succeed in times of adversity? How are you helping them execute virtually? The speed of change, the challenge of change management, and speed of content and experience creation are critical to keeping pace with the speed at which a business must move.
Leadership: where deals are either won or lost
This changing world requires a fundamental shift from managing to coaching. Leaders need to be less focused on the rear-view mirror or taking over a deal, to be more of a guide who provides suggestions. Companies, like Chamberlain, Schlumberger and Farmers, who have made this shift find it accelerates revenue. Leaders and coaches drastically impact performance in a positive way. The beauty of coaching excellence is that it is never about you. It is about discovering the individual strengths of the person you are coaching. It is about using that experience to turn those strengths into a solution that provides real value to clients. A coaching culture is required to develop rock stars and innovators in the next year. Leading-edge companies gain insights into the coaching capabilities of their leaders. They are then able to use these insights to level up their leaders and align these capabilities to accelerate a positive cultural change within their organization.
Sales productivity, capability and results: where opportunities are either won or lost
Readiness only gets you so far. Your most successful reps are driven by emotion. How do you challenge your team or plan to do so in 2021? How are you evaluating productivity and capability so you can bridge skill gaps? Everyone learns differently, so how are you handling continual training virtually and differently? Revenue leaders must see stronger correlations between programs and outcomes, and quantifiable insights. Furthermore, it is critical to have the right mix of up-front, just-in-time, coaching, reinforcement. This effectively delivers the largest return on investment when the company scales and expands these behaviors across the sales organization. As business leaders aggressively look for strategies to increase output while keeping costs in check, having the right mix positively impacts performance.
In 2021, teams need the right foundation, info, tools, and confidence to be at their best. The goal is for enablement to provide the formula for the best customer outcomes. Doing so provides the roadmap to drive the choices, systems, and behaviors that drive effective selling. It also will enable your teams to sell more, better, faster, and easier in order to ensure company and customer success.
Sales leaders at most high-growth companies are constantly training and upskilling their teams to be more effective in the field and/or hiring new talent and ramping up them faster so they can start selling and closing deals as soon as possible. Sales Leaders can drive better effectiveness in sales and achieve their team quotas faster by leveraging readiness data to assess the readiness of their reps and then working to drive the right knowledge, skills, and behaviors. In fact, Gartner studies show that coaching effectiveness leads to a 19% improvement in sales performance. Informed by its comprehensive data-driven readiness platform and years of experience in helping to build world-class readiness and enablement programs across multiple industries and Fortune 500 and Forbes Global 2000 companies, Mindtickle has recently developed more effective and impactful sales manager analytics and reporting to help Sales and Enablement leaders drive sales efficiency.
Gain a greater level of visibility and insights into your team’s readiness
Sales managers as well as sales leaders play a critical role to get teams ready and ramped up to sell. Greater visibility into their sales team readiness has allowed the sales leadership at one of Mindtickle’s enterprise customers to reduce rep ramp-up time by half, from 12 months to 6 months. Leadership buy-in and visibility into the progress and impact of readiness initiatives through their team’s reports were critical to their success. Mindtickle enabled leaders to share their strategic guidance for enablement programs and for Sales managers to show continuous, incremental improvement in their reps’ readiness performance. Sales managers were more able to quickly identify and remediate readiness gaps among their Sales reps to ensure they’re onboarding & ramping up faster. A faster ramp timer means they can start working on and closing deals faster to bring in revenue sooner and more efficiently.
This company found that while launching a new product across global markets to the existing salesforce, the real-time visibility into the progress and gap insights enabled leaders to take corrective actions. The leaders worked with the management teams of the specific geographies and drove adoption and certification on product knowledge programs. Simplified and contextual real-time reporting for sales managers and leaders helped them benchmark and track their teams’ sales readiness.
By using the new Manager team reports, Enablement teams can provide their sales and other organizational leaders a greater level of visibility and insights into their teams’ readiness with just one click. These actionable reports allow leaders to identify gaps, slice and dice the data across their teams, and take corrective actions as needed to help improve team readiness. What’s more, greater functionalities in Mindtickle’s Manager Reports make tracking enablement programs easier to view, filter, customize, and confidentially share as needed across the organization.
In short, Mindtickle Manager Reports provide Managers and leaders real-time access to roll-up reports covering contextual enablement and readiness initiatives so they can benchmark progress and quickly resolve any factors affecting the readiness of sales or customer-facing teams. Use cases include:
Reducing ramp-up time: Leaders get granular visibility into the progress of their teams’ onboarding to identify and resolve roadblocks or address any lagging deficiencies and ensure reps hit quotas faster
Gaining Insights to build a profile of success for your teams: Leaders and Managers can identify behavioral as well as soft and hard skills of the best reps and replicate that ‘profile of success” accordingly across teams
Making readiness initiatives successful: Manager reports automatically align to your organizational structure or org chart to help better drive readiness and enablement with real-time visibility into initiatives aligned with company strategy
Improving the effectiveness of enablement: Get contextual insights into gaps of enablement initiatives among both teams and individuals. This will help Enablement Leaders better understand which reps perform the best and why, as well help determine why other reps are lagging to offer them customized enablement programming to improve their performance
Driving a culture of coaching and accountability: Incorporate a culture of accountability through actionable insights into enablement initiatives, while also developing a culture of coaching for Managers to hone and improve their reps soft and hard skills
Empowering enablement teams: Give enablement teams the ability to easily customize and share their enablement progress reports with stakeholders across the organization
Ensuring teams are on message: Give leaders and managers insight into whether or not teams and/or reps are successfully completing Assessments, Missions, and Coaching sessions, which helps ensure reps are on message and able to have a meaningful conversation that brings value to customers based on the challenges facing their sales/customer-facing teams and industry.
For more information, check with your CSM or contact us to schedule a demo.
COVID-19 changed the game of life and by extension changed the way we think and do business. For people that sell, support customers, and manage clients for a living, 2020 will mark the end of an era that focused on interpersonal, in-field skill. What the pandemic has not changed is the pattern of sales leaders running full speed ahead to hit and exceed their quarterly numbers. This is both a paradox and an existential crisis. If you are a CRO and are looking at a hockey stick of quarterly sales goals you have a small window to enable your inside and outside teams. I recently hosted a webinar with two Sales Enablement experts, Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Hang Black, VP of Global Sales Enablement at Juniper Networks, to discuss how CROs at the most competitive organizations are ‘democratizing B2B sales’ and building digital-first, customer-ready teams in the remote and ready era.
Our discussion opened with a clear acknowledgement that Sales team effectiveness was an issue even before the pandemic hit. According to a March 2020 research report from the Sales Management Association, 44% of companies surveyed said their sales force isn’t effective, 57% said they’ve not been able to improve sales effectiveness over the past 12 months, and 82% don’t have effective development programs for their sales reps. All these deficits have left many companies struggling to prioritize opportunities, engage with the right buyers and connect with important prospects, demonstrate value, and retain business.
From there our discussion moved to seven trends, underlying these alarming stats, that Mary and Hang did a great job of covering in the webinar:
The downward trajectory of the on-site sales meeting. A Forrester survey conducted pre-COVID-19 revealed that one in seven business buyers prefers not to meet with a sales rep in person. This momentum increased as the digital-native generations became the economic buyers. Post-COVID-19, we’re likely looking at 80% of B2B sales taking place digitally anyway — over Zoom, for example — forcing sales reps to increase and improve their skill sets and close the gap between buyer expectations and seller capabilities.
The convergence of inside and outside sales.Forrester research shows that about 40% of field sellers’ activities are essentially the same as inside sales, all as a result of increased digital activation of buyers. The point is that they’re all sellers now, and as such, they all require the skills and training needed that will help them be successful.
Use of digital tools for buyers and sellers. Buyers are increasingly doing more on their own to self-educate, browsing peer-review sites, engaging with analyst communities and downloading digital content. They’re also engaging through interactive digital tools, whether that’s on a supplier website or through a remote meeting share. As the buyer does more of the legwork to understand foundational concepts of a product or service, the seller’s role becomes more consultative, where they’re advising and coaching the buyer with stats, inside information and industry trends to support and supplement the buyer’s decision. On the sales side, it’s becoming increasingly important for sales and marketing tools to be interconnected and automated.
Increased investment in remote selling models. Companies are pouring money into the inside sales channel. For example, Microsoft completely restructured its selling organization a few years ago to account for its cloud-based business; and ADP transferred a lot of its external sellers into an internal remote selling model, making it the company’s largest quota-carrying channel.
SaaS-ification of industries outside of technology. Traditional businesses are now starting to embrace the subscription and SaaS delivery model.
Sales motion is perpetual, not a one-time spike.The flurry of one-time sales activity before a deal closes or before renewal is unnecessary; in fact, Forrester found that the actual selling motion is only about 16% of the entire sales cycle. Buyers now expect ongoing and consistent value-added interactions across the entire customer life cycle, which could include providing ongoing data or other support even after the deal has closed. It also broadens the number of employees on the seller’s side that are involved in customer interactions, which again reiterates the need for all customer-facing personnel to have the skill sets and training required to be successful.
Buyers are indifferent to how sales organizations are set up. Customers don’t care whether they’re buying from inside or outside sales reps. They just want to engage consistently and fluidly across any channel at any point in the buy cycle.
As you can see, while COVID-19 didn’t create these trends, it certainly accelerated them. And, as we all agreed, with the remote-work environment likely here to stay, sellers must make that 16% of their “selling motion” impactful and effective in a wholly digital landscape. Here are three tips from our discussion to keep your sales force — and sales organization as a whole — effective, efficient and successful:
Audit your sales tools, renegotiate contracts, keep only the vendors that are providing consistent and ongoing value, and create a digital selling platform at scale. There was a time when digital transformation was reserved for high-margin tech and services companies, but no more. Given the transition to digital selling, every company should be building some sort of digital selling platform that can scale.
Rethink traditional seller hierarchies and focus on establishing a universal set of skills across revenue-generating teams. Despite the fact that customers really don’t care about whether a seller is inside, outside, SDR, etc., companies continue to hang on to the hierarchical nomenclature and terminology. It’s now time to rethink how they organize, align and train sellers and how they’re branded.
Activate more employees on behalf of revenue goals and make readiness a CRO objective.Ensure that everyone in your company is equipped at any moment to have a customer-facing conversation because in 2021, they’re all going to have to do so.
While the pandemic has been a great global challenge, it is also driving opportunity for transformation. Just look at the gig economy: Uber, Airbnb and others emerged in our last global economic downturn in 2009. Today, companies can see this new, challenging sales landscape as teh graveyard for the good ol’ days and ways, or they can look at it as a transformational opportunity to really change the way enablement and all customer-facing teams can succeed at selling in the “next normal,” all-digital environment.
Learn more in this on-demand webinar featuring Sales Enablement experts Mary Shea, Principal Analyst at Forrester and Hang Black, VP of Global Sales & Technical Enablement at Juniper.
Every quarter, sales teams work tirelessly in pursuit of leads that might not ever turn into a sale anyway because they were unwinnable to begin with –the epitome of wasted time. Why not just eliminate unqualified leads and focus on pursuing only the qualified leads? (Sales is likely collectively chuckling at that question right now. If only it were that easy, they might ruefully say.)
But what if it was that easy? What if there was a methodology that significantly boosted the quota-carrying professional’s ability to disqualify opportunities unlikely to close and instead focus their energy on opportunities that would help them exceed their goals? And, what if sales people could be trained on that methodology, develop the requisite skills, and be coached on it through the Mindtickle platform?
Lucky for our global enterprise customers, our new go-to-market partnership with MEDDIC Academy makes this all a reality. With this partnership, MEDDIC Academy makes available its sales qualification methodology (“MEDDIC”) content on the Mindtickle platform in the form of self-paced e-learning, bite-sized microlearning content, virtual and in-person instructor-led training, and blended learning.
Created 20 years ago, MEDDIC itself emphasizes customer qualification specifically. It is often used as a complement to existing sales methodologies such as target account selling, which focus on enabling predictability and turning uncertainty into success across the sales cycle.
Specifically, through our partnership with MEDDIC Academy, customers will be able to:
Improve seller productivity and effectiveness with MEDDIC, and benchmark their success through assessments and checklists in Mindtickle
Standardize on a common language and sales methodology for teams to better qualify opportunities. (This will be achieved through the MEDDIC approach as well as by practicing knowledge learned on Mindtickle.)
Validate high performance provided by the MEDDIC methodology and leverage the Mindtickle Sales Capability Index™ (SCI) to measure seller effectiveness
Provide a way for recruiters and hiring managers to find high-performing candidates who are MEDDIC-certified, and then use Mindtickle to replicate their success across the entire sales team
MEDDIC has been used by many well-known software and SaaS vendors like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com and EMC for years, and is regarded as one of the most effective around. When applied to each stage of the customer engagement process, MEDDIC culls the qualified leads from the unqualified, ensuring only the right leads make it into the sales funnel. It truly shifts the urgency onto the buyer, positioning the product or solution as something the buyer needs to have and it’s now up to them to decide whether or not to move forward. It covers six elements, which can be defined as follows:
M = Metrics: Quantifiable measurements and proof of the business benefits of the solution
E = Economic Buyer: The individual within the customer’s organization who is required for the final approval
D = Decision Criteria: The formal solution requirements against which each participant in the decision process will evaluate
D = Decision Process: The process by which the customer will evaluate, select and purchase a solution
I = Identified Pain: The catalyst for the buyer solving the problem within a set time frame
C = Champion: The person with power and influence inside the customer’s organization who is actively selling on your behalf
The MEDDIC-Mindtickle partnership is a natural fit for any company that wants to help their sales team focus on opportunities they’re more likely to close. And really, what company doesn’t? If you’d like to read more about MEDDIC, take a look at Darius Lahoutifard’s new book, Always Be Qualifying, available now on Amazon.
For more on MindTicke’s partnership with the MEDDIC Academy, listen to the podcast with Darius Lahoutifard here!
Most strategic revenue initiatives fail – research from Bridges Consultancy found that 67 percent of well-formulated strategies fail due to poor execution. When only five percent of employees understand their company’s strategy, it’s not hard to see why. Employees don’t want to execute strategies that they don’t understand or feel connected to.
What can enablement leaders do to help teams become more effective in executing strategies? Planning alone is not enough – you have to give your teams the resources, oversight and support needed to bring your strategies to life. Follow these steps to effective sales enablement that will provide your enablement and sales leaders, as well as salespeople, with the tools, knowledge, and motivation they need to turn your company’s strategies into action.
Lay the groundwork for success
Before you pull your reps off the floor for the next training exercise or activity, ensure alignment and support from sales leadership. It is important to proactively address natural skepticism about enablement initiatives and ensure that sales leadership understands how you will help improve their team’s effectiveness.
Provide visibility and seek feedback early and often – sales leaders can help identify potential objections that you may have missed. They can also help you articulate the WIIFM – what’s in it for me – to help you “sell the seller” and land the desired outcomes of training. Ask sales leadership to partner with you on holding their teams accountable for leveraging the new training and practicing it in the field while measuring impact. Soon your teams will look forward to your training, knowing just how much value it brings.
Ask and address key questions
Great outcomes start with a great understanding of what you’re looking to accomplish. Before you begin building your plays and training content, you need to have a clear vision of the business goal and the outcomes you are striving to impact. This will also help you measure the ROI of your enablement efforts. To ensure your training and sales plays resonate and land, ask six foundational questions:
Examples: In the discovery phase, during customer implementation, etc.
What’s in it for the sellers?
Examples: Hit quota faster, increase ASP to close fewer deals, recognition from leadership, etc.
Having strong answers to these questions will be essential in getting buy-in and feedback from your sales managers. Further win over managers by determining If you can plug into an existing sales event, rather than creating a new one.
To motivate sellers and increase engagement during the training, assign pre-work and reading before the training begins. A blended framework that includes pre-work, self-paced content, virtual role-play and webinars create an engaging training experience. For example, having a sales leader record a video that demonstrates a best-in-class pitch or demo is a great way to keep learners engaged. Self-paced voice-over slideshows and pre-recorded videos that teach information and show what great looks like can help with pre-training engagement. Save the live training session for discussions and Q&A.
With clear goals, managers on your side, and an established training format, you’ll have laid the foundation for effective enablement.
During the training
We’ve all been met with lackluster stares during our training sessions before – a primary reason for lack of engagement is your sellers not understanding what’s in it for them. In their eyes, you may be taking an hour away that could have been spent generating more leads, or even time they would have rather spent making prospecting calls. It’s your job to “sell the sellers” and convince them that your training will help them drum up higher quality leads in the same – or even less – the amount of time.
Capture attention immediately by previewing your next-generation sales play. Gone are the days of traditional, one-size-fits-all playbooks – a dynamic sales environment demands a dynamic playbook. With advanced sales enablement technology, you can provide your sellers with plays that contain both content and guidance designed to prepare your team what they need to know, say, show, and do in every unique selling scenario.
Make your session interactive and engaging. Ask questions, have sellers share their stories, or breakout into groups for activities to help connect the dots between the training and action. With the right play and training delivered in an interactive, audience-first way, your salespeople will begin to look forward to your sessions, knowing the knowledge provided will ultimately make them, and the company, more successful.
After the training
As impactful and inspiring as your training might have been, salespeople are busy juggling dozens of tasks a day. Unless your training is reinforced and muscle memory is built in the field, it will quickly be forgotten.
Promote the play or training materials via multiple channels such as email, your CRM, and your sales enablement platform, so that it’s easily accessible where reps spend their time. To overcome the forgetting curve that naturally happens after training, it’s important to include spaced reinforcement of knowledge and training after the event to ensure reps have adopted product messages and have time to internalize that information. Ongoing training will also play a critical role. You might provide courses, quizzes, coaching sessions and more directly within your sales enablement platform to help your reps stay sharp on their skills.
In order to gauge your enablement effectiveness, you can measure key metrics that indicate whether or not your training landed internally and helped reps take off externally with their customer conversations. Metrics like sales play adoption, curriculum completion, and pitched content performance can all be indicators of enablement success. In addition, use technology to request feedback on what worked, what didn’t work and what could be improved moving forward. Showing that you heard and acted on feedback will make sellers more likely to show up, engage and share.
Turning strategies into action
Even the best strategies are rendered useless without execution.
Enablement plays an essential role in ensuring customer-facing teams not only understand the strategies, but are committed to executing them in a way that drives business results. Get started with Highspot’s new eBook How to Enable Revenue Teams with Plays that Turn Strategy Into Action.
Balancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team is a delicate act. Although closely intertwined, each plays a critical role in your sellers’ success – and the success of your business.
In the age of the customer, success ultimately does not come down to how many dials a seller makes, but to the impact and quality of the customer conversation. Sellers often get one shot to deliver value to buyers who have already completed much of their journey alone. A rep’s confidence and readiness in these critical moments can mean the difference between a win or loss.
Many leaders live and breathe the philosophy: “Keep the reps dialing – we can’t waste time on non-selling activities.” But what if the time spent off the floor is directly correlated to making reps more effective in closing deals? Used wisely, this time can create consistency and predictability in your reps producing desired results.
When done well, pulling reps off the floor to make them more effective can have a massive impact on performance. Efficiency may save time and effort – but effectiveness closes deals.
THE KEY TO IMPROVING SELLER EFFECTIVENESS
You’ve made the decision to invest time in enabling your salespeople – now what? The most successful companies ensure that their enablement activities are aligned to business initiatives and focused on increasing sales effectiveness.
To prepare your teams to have the most effective customer conversations, your sellers need the perfect combination of role- and regional-specific content and training plus guidance on when and how to use it – all at the moment of action.
Within Highspot’s sales enablement platform, training and guidance come to life in the form of industry-first SmartPage technology. Enablement leaders can build out dynamic sales plays that help salespeople what they need to know, say, show and do in every unique customer conversation. With context on how to use the content, combined with experiential training, sellers are equipped to make the most of critical customer moments.
When preparing to pull your reps off the floor for an enablement session, follow these do’s and don’ts to ensure your training is relevant, actionable and measurable.
What to Avoid
What to Do
Generic presentations for all customer-facing teams
Role-specific content aligned to the buyer’s journey and sales process
Global training programs that lack specific regional intelligence
Role- and region-specific training programs that are interactive, engaging and ongoing
Long-form static playbook used primarily in onboarding
Plays that provide guidance for specific scenarios at the moment of action
Massive dump of competitive information
Dynamic, curated competitive intelligence with customer stories to prove differentiation delivered in consumable microlearning formats
Enablement updates sent via email
Engaging homepages with the latest content, training and best practices to win with customers
Communication of business initiatives solely at the annual sales kickoff
Consistent consumable communications and a feedback loop on business initiatives, as well as guidance for customer-facing teams on how to execute
No clear way to measure the adoption and effectiveness of your business initiatives
Scorecards and analytics to measure the effectiveness of enablement programs and understand the sellers demonstrable capabilities with the ability to segment by initiative, role, region and more
MASTERING THE BALANCING ACT
Efficiency alone is not enough. Your reps might be holding one hundred conversations a day, but if they’re not the right ones, then they will not be successful in driving your desired business outcomes.
To help your salespeople be more effective in producing results, you have to build, land, and optimize your training and guidance. Take action with Highspot’s Guidance Framework eBook that outlines how you can enable your revenue teams to provide value in every customer conversation.
