I’m sadly not alone in having stories of prematurely losing male loved-ones to untimely, often unnecessary and tragic deaths. I never realized I was in the midst of a male health crisis of my own having lost a dear friend at 39 years old to pneumonia, a father who was only 69 to a stroke, and a grandfather to suicide.

My colleague Oscar Collingsworth-Smith, our new star FinServ Industry Exec, has similar stories of losing dear male family members to tragic, not-caught-early-enough diseases. Sadly, early male deaths are all-too-common; most everyone knows men die earlier and more often than women. What they may not know is many of those deaths are preventable. And more still, like me, may not be aware that

Movember

is a leading charity working to change the face of men’s health.

In fact, Movember addresses some of the biggest health issues facing men today: prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and mental health and suicide prevention. In 15 years, the Movember Foundation has funded more than 1,200 men’s health projects around the world. By 2030, the foundation will reduce the number of men dying prematurely by 25%.

I’m super proud to join Movember as a Mo Sista with Mindtickle, who for the month of November, will be supporting men’s health by raising funds and awareness for all the dads, brothers, sons and friends in our lives.

Across the globe, Mindticklers will be growing mustaches, getting active, and inspiring donations & conversations to bring about change in the men’s health crisis.

With Mindtickle, we’ll be tracking, evaluating and discussing our team’s Mos, using the

Mustache Capability Index

to judge style, craftsmanship, density, difficulty, healthiness, size and personal fit. The Mindtickle Mo Sistas will be moving, participating in events, and showing their support and love for the ‘Mo.

And you can help our cause here – right on Mindtickle’s very own Mo’Space!

Thanks to Oscar and a supportive executive team, Mindtickle is coming together to change the face of men’s health. And, I’m all in!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igHbLmYJT9Q&feature=youtu.be

Enablement success…or not?

According to research from CSO Insights, “organizations with successful sales enablement programs see 67% quota attainment, compared to only 42% for companies that admit their enablement programs fall short of expectations”. This is great news if you’re running sales enablement for a company or trying to get buy-in across the organization for your own enablement initiatives. The problem is, though, that even though the value of sales enablement is starting to become obvious, recent research on sales performance is putting a dark veil across what would otherwise be a positive initiative.

Over the past few years, not only has quota attainment by sales reps dropped precipitously – with the latest number hovering around 53%

– but the majority of sales leaders also maintain that their sales enablement programs are not fully meeting their expectations

.

If you’re wondering why this happens, you’re not the only one. While more and more organizations are starting to see the value of sales enablement, it seems that most programs still struggle to deliver the expected value. This predicament becomes a bit more clear when we address at a simple question that Mindtickle posed to hundreds of sales leaders at a conference earlier this year:

“If you were to listen to your sales reps on the phone, how many would you say are on-point and delivering your value proposition accurately?”

The results were startling. Over 60% of respondents indicated that they believe less than 50% of their sales teams deliver their value propositions accurately during a sales situation. This points us to two potential takeaways:

1. There’s a problem with how sales training is done today
2. Enablement teams are clearly not having the expected impact on sales behavior

Tackling these two issues in a way that lasts requires a new, revamped playbook – and this blog post will provide some insight as to how a new sales enablement playbook could potentially look like.

A new playbook for enablement

The first question we typically ask companies looking to improve their sales enablement is what are they measuring and how. If you are still tracking and reporting on course completion rates or certification numbers, the odds that you’ll be getting the proverbial “seat at the table” are pretty slim.

The most successful enablement teams we work with have been able to break out of the traditional learning and development mold and create a new measuring system aligned with what sales most needs: an improvement in seller competency and performance.

But technology is only part of the formula. If you want to create a winning playbook for enablement there are four elements we suggest you think about:

1. Approach enablement as a continuous journey through the seller lifecycle
2. Prepare reps to handle different scenarios – not follow a script
3. Guide and empower front-line managers to better coach their teams
4. Institute a data-driven conversation about enablement

Enablement as a continuous journey

Multiple events happen throughout a seller’s time with a company that requires enablement. New products are introduced and new partnerships are formed, the marketing team launches new messaging, competitors change tactics or launch new offerings, changes in the go-to-market strategy open up new territories or industries – for all of these and more, a seller should be continuously informed.

While we are all familiar with the above scenarios, if your enablement team wants to upgrade their playbook, a good start is to look at these enablement events not as isolated moments, but rather in the context of the buyer/seller journey.

The seller journey is related to the seller’s own experience at your company (new rep vs veteran), performance (low, mid, high), and all the other facets that might impact how this person learns, applies their learning and wants to learn.

The buyer’s journey, on the other hand, is related to what buyers are looking for throughout the sales process and how you are enabling the salesperson to engage with the buyer throughout those stages and help them make a decision. Understanding the “persona” of your sales rep, their needs throughout the buyer journey, and their needs for all of the scenarios which require enablement will help you start thinking differently about the plays you want to add to your playbook which will help guide the sales enablement team.

Skills, not a script

The next chapter in your playbook for better enablement is looking at the sales team’s skills and competencies, and working towards developing the ability for sales reps to adjust and adapt their approach to buyers based on the buyer’s needs instead of a standardized, predetermined pitch.

While the pitch certification is important to establish a baseline and ground rules, reps should be “situational-aware,” and tailor their conversations accordingly. A high level of “situational awareness”

requires better readiness for your sales team and the adequate tools to get them to where they need to excel.

Great enablement programs incorporate different ways in which reps can practice sales scenarios and get constructive feedback and coaching. Virtual role-play technology is key in this area so that you can train Account Executives on how to counter objections, help Business Development Reps hone their outbound email writing skills, and Sales Engineers to try different ways to demo a solution or answer a technical question.

Coaching in the frontlines

While the impact of sales coaching is known to drive over 27% improvement in sales wins rates

, many companies still lack this chapter in their playbooks. Best-in-class organizations, however, have decided to give frontline managers the tools they need to become better coaches. And while training sessions help, there are a few key elements that are essential when rolling out a coaching program:

1. Coaching framework
2. Coaching cadence
3. Accountability
4. Results

Having a coaching framework gives managers tangible guidance on what to coach reps on and hot to coach them. Typically, this is connected with a competency model so that managers can tie observable behaviors back to the key competencies reps need to develop.

A cadence helps make sure that coaching becomes a habit where managers drive and hold regular coaching sessions. The accountability bullet points to requiring a senior leadership sponsorship to ensure that the front line managers not only have the tools they need to implement coaching but are also measured and tracked on their coaching initiatives. Frontline managers who are held accountable for coaching their teams and have the resources to do it end up performing better than the average with the results to show.

Finally, being able to track results is the missing link in most coaching programs. Companies using field coaching forms but not compiling the information or those who coach regularly but don’t track the impact on deal velocity or size end up missing the biggest incentive reps have to spend time in coaching sessions.

When creating your own coaching playbook, make sure you have the tools to ensure both reps and their frontline managers are properly enabled to put the program into practice.

Data-driven enablement plays

Measuring and reporting on enablement success can only be done if you know what to measure and how to measure it. Any playbook will fall short and won’t be adopted if you can’t start tying those initiatives with lagging and leading indicators.

At the top of the list is what we call your “Readiness Index”. How can you tell whether an individual rep is sales-ready? And what does readiness means for your organization? The best enablement leaders are not waiting for the VP of Sales to schedule a meeting and tell them her readiness goals. If this is not clear in your organization, take the reins and put together a draft document with a definition that you believe is the correct one for the team you work with and seek the sales leaders to either agree and approve or discuss and improve.

Elements of readiness typically include:

• Knowledge score:an indicator of whether the reps are able to recall key information required to do their jobs.
• Skills or capability score:the metric showing how well each rep is doing related to the core competencies required for them to do their jobs and apply their knowledge in specific situations.
• Execution or behavior score:a key value related to true field observation (either via ride-alongs, shadowing calls or reviewing recordings) that tells how reps are actually executing or using their knowledge and skills in real conversations with buyers.

Ideally, you want to be able to have all this information in a system with visual analytics that you can share with managers and they can pull the information themselves about their teams. Once you start collecting hard data on the three key elements above, the conversations about enablement programs and priorities become grounded on true data and help show the value that sales enablement brings.

Concluding thoughts

Creating a sales enablement playbook can be hard if you try to do many things at once, but focusing on the core elements described in this post I hope we have guided you in a clear direction where you can start slowly building the different plays that tie into a continuous enablement journey, preparing reps for different scenarios, incorporating coaching and having a data-driven vision for how your programs can be measured and proven effective.

What is a learning management system? It’s not a modern sales enablement solution.

Geared towards company-wide collaboration, a successful learning management (LMS) system delivers a framework for managing virtual learning, and its goal is to make communication easier and increase employee engagement and readiness. While initially boasting an improvement in sales performance, LMSs are no longer up to the task of readying sales with today’s every changing products, markets, and buyer needs.

In other words, when it comes to sales, an LMS solution is simply not enough to help salespeople gain and retain the knowledge and skills they need to sell today. That’s because LMSs…

• Are complex and lack the flexibility and agility needed to respond to change
• Lack the ability to correlate learning outcomes with performance outcomes
• Weren’t designed to deliver a modernized and engaging user experience

The good news is companies’ investment in their LMS is still important and can be improved if used alongside a modern sales enablement solution that addresses those four common pain points.

Let’s unpack a few strategies that a modern learning management system can provide.

Ongoing, dependable enablement

When it comes to sales enablement leaders, it’s common knowledge that learning and retention are at their most effective and impactful when they’re implemented on an ongoing basis. At the end of the day, it’s continuous effort that nurtures skills and adapts easily to the rapidly changing needs of the organization.

With modern enablement, reps get access to any and all information they might need: all at their own convenience. Resources are always available where and when they’re needed.

It’s crucial for reps – especially when in the field – to have access to quick updates about movements in the market, new rollouts, or changes to the product line.

Analytics-driven insight

It’s incredibly important for any modern enablement solution to provide useful insights, based on hard data,  so leaders can ascertain their team’s time to productivity, effectiveness, specific competencies, and overall capabilities.

Because when an enablement solution is based on data, managers can start to understand the impact of sales enablement programs by looking at leading indicators, such as sales pipeline or sales activity metrics.

An engaging user experience

Today, regardless of where your reps are, they’re being bombarded with all kinds of information – both visual and otherwise. Distractions are common – and the effort to keeping your team engaged can become time-consuming in and of itself.

In order to make the material you share with your reps not only accessible but also engaging, you can use a sales enablement solution to create a consumer-level experience that includes mobile access, micro-learning, easy search, and gamification.

With a modern sales enablement solution, one that starts where an LMS ends, reps should be able to:

1. Access content and training wherever and whenever they need it
2. Receive short, bite-sized updates that provide the latest market or company news
3. Practice real-life scenarios
4. See and understand how their peers – specifically top-performing reps – handle the same scenarios

To learn more about the potential benefits of switching to a modern sales enablement solution, download our eBook today. 

In a recent Forbes article, VP of Enablement Excellence and Innovation Pat Lynch touched on a few different strategies that contribute to being successful when organizing sales enablement programs.

In the post, he explains how success consists of laying a solid foundation of commitment and communication, delivering powerful content and building up processes that are measurable so that the data can reinforce the methodologies.

It’s not back to the basics, but forward to the facts, so we can give salespeople the help they need to win.
Establishing and maintaining strong communication

As a rule of thumb, it’s essential to communicate strong, visible executive support. Visible support means that leadership is communicating the importance of the initiative from the top down, looking at the metrics and following up. At the end of the day, reps are going to focus on what helps them to close business. Show them how it works, and demonstrate that you’re dedicated to their success.
Curating meaningful content

All of your content — sales assets, videos, gamification modules — must be aligned with strategic initiatives for the business and must directly impact success in the field.

The right content at the right time can go a long way toward driving revenue in a more direct way than traditional approaches, such as relationship building.
Minding the metrics

To win more deals, you need solid information about the impact of your sales enablement program.

With the learning platforms and data available today, front-line sales managers can start to correlate learning outcomes with performance outcomes.

For a bigger picture of Pat’s advice,

check out his Forbes article here.

While the ever-changing tech world urges us to have tunnel vision on the numbers associated with sales, what often is not so obvious is the value of cultivating genuine relationships with clients throughout the sales process. While it’s easy to single-mindedly charge towards quarterly goals, outstanding salespeople develop sales rep skills that can make their performance consistently effective over the long haul.

1. Embrace sales storytelling

There are hundreds of ways to deliver a value proposition to potential clients – but what unites them all is the fact that at the end of the day, you’re weaving together a narrative about your product or service. Any salesperson can go through a list of benefits and features, but putting them together into something that’s relatable through sales storytelling makes selling far more effective.

In other words, sell your story – not your features.

This is important for a few reasons. Mostly, it’s important to remember that most people learn through storytelling because they can establish their own connection to the topic at hand. Here are three steps that can help you develop your storytelling skills:

• Articulate the potential. Describe where the opportunity lies for your prospect and address how they will benefit from the onset.
• Align the opportunity with the pain point. Acknowledge your prospect’s pain point and provide an example of how the opportunity will help them solve it.
• Acknowledge their concerns. By paying attention to your prospect’s concerns and addressing them (perhaps even before they do!) you’re showing how your product can be uniquely suited to their particular needs.

2. Cultivate emotional intelligence

All relationships have ups and downs – including those with customers. So, when it comes to the conversations you’re having with your clients, especially when they don’t go the way you want, it’s crucial to nip any possible emotional stressors in the bud so as not to negatively impact the outcome.

If you take some time to focus on recognizing your reactions and emotions throughout the ups and downs of any sales cycle, you can actually turn potentially emotionally fraught situations into opportunities.

If during a demo or pitch, you’re frustrated or worse, ask yourself these questions:

• Am I prioritizing instant gratification or is the development of my sales skills and abilities a long-term process with tangible accomplishments throughout?
• Is the time I’ve devoted to engaging with my prospects focused on relatable content and conversations, or am I going back to a one-size-fits-all approach?
• Are those who I’m having conversations with actually influential in my sales process, or am I avoiding high-pressure situations out of fear of the sale not working out?

3. Take care, you are not what you do

President and CSO of Salesleadership Inc. Colleen Stanley said, “Teach your salespeople the concept of separating what you do for a living from who you are. Your role in sales is just that — a role.” Indeed, when fostering a high-EQ, successful sales culture, managers should encourage their reps to take time away from their work with the goal of taking care of yourself.

But how is downtime supposed to help you foster active self-reflection? At the end of the day, it’s easy to discourage, especially after a presentation doesn’t go the way you planned. Instead of focusing on what went wrong, try analyzing your process from the inside out.

Customer Experience Insight suggests asking yourself these five questions:

• What was the reason for my reaction to the prospect or customer?
• What would have been a better response during the sales meeting?
• What can I do differently to prevent getting into a dead-end selling situation?
• Who did I need to ask for help and perspective?
• What did I do well, and how do I repeat that behavior?

If you go through asking yourself these questions and take time to actually go through and answer them, your ability to take a situation with a less-than-desirable outcome and turn it into a learning experience will ultimately help you become a more effective sales rep.

Selling is hard, and it can often feel like your sales team is running against gale force winds. It’s no wonder sales reps use weather and sporting metaphors to describe the selling environment. For many sellers, it seems like the “perfect storm” of outcomes-focused buyers and low-cost competitors. Frontline managers sweat their forecasts all the way to the “finish line.” Successful sellers go down in history as “rainmakers.”

In this environment, sales reps have reached the upper limits of what they’re able to do to engage attention-challenged buyers.

In an effort to just get out ahead, companies have spent the better part of the last fifteen years automating the front office with new technologies – unleashing waves of new methodologies, processes, and investments in reporting and forecasting. Technology-savvy CMOs and CIOs have turned to front-office automation as their solution – their new rocket-fuel if you will. Low-tech vendors are criticized for running a ‘foot-race’ toward obsolescence.

Yet, several billions of dollars in enterprise IT spending later, we still can’t accurately measure the revenue power of a sales organization – the measure of their seller readiness and effectiveness. Management is pointing to dark clouds and the seemingly intractable problem of speeding sales.

So, what did everyone miss?

Companies, both purposefully and accidentally, have missed some useful and obvious truths. This short-sightedness also applies to sales consultants and training or learning tools vendors. All of whom have implemented or offered otherwise great technology for sales enablement. In order of importance, the truths of the revenue race are:
The race for revenue is not a sprint, but a marathon

No matter how long the race, the only winning outcome is a delighted customer. By preparing for a dash, companies have built sales management and organizations for the short distance instead of the long-term outcome – customer lifetime value. Readiness cannot happen with a one-time event such as a training course. Every process and tool for skills development should be designed and implemented with the longer term in mind.
Sales is a team sport

It’s best to think of the race for revenue as a bicycle road race, where the riders work in tandem to support the overall success of their team. To sell today, organizations find themselves needing to pull in and draft as necessary experts in different functions. These may be technical experts, solution sellers, customer success managers, customer marketing experts and in some cases even product managers. Then if that wasn’t enough, the selling team must also orchestrate their efforts to create the perfect symphony for the customer.
Environments are dynamic and ever-changing

Much like a marathon, the course, the countryside and indeed the weather are constantly changing. The rules are also contextual to those changes and therefore often elusive. For example, new competitors may emerge, customer and internal teams may re-organize, training philosophies and best practices may evolve or change. So how do you create an enduring enablement framework and programs that adapt no matter what is required at any given moment?
Many lifecycles

The lifetime of a seller, like the life of an athlete, has a beginning, an end and most importantly, a middle. Then you must consider various lifecycles are intersecting with other lifecycles – the buyer lifecycle, the company lifecycle, the manager’s lifecycle, and product lifecycles. Without a way to address the intersections of these life cycles, organizational strategy, front-line management, training and enablement efforts will typically fail.
Technology is not absolute

Technology should not target a single capability at a single point in time, but rather a set of capabilities used on a continuum, over time focused on higher order business outcomes. This then mandates that technology focuses on usable data and insight. That’s why emerging technologies like artificial intelligence or machine learning can be leveraged for interesting applications like sentiment analysis, but all of these need to be looked at in the context of continual sales readiness as a business initiative.

Looking at your customers’, partners’ and sellers’ needs now and what they might be in the future, and asking how and where your company should invest in their success will change how you approach sales readiness and enablement. Looking at sales readiness with a longer-term focus on building customer and partner-centric sales relationships is key to preparing your team to run the long marathon that is selling.

As technological disruption and change impacts companies and ultimately, their revenue, it’s absolutely crucial for your sales enablement strategy to be adaptable. But with a team of seasoned sales professionals who have years of experience under their belts, just starting to make that change can seem daunting. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, right?

So when it comes to modernizing your sales enablement technique without the right guidance or goal, it becomes easy to run into roadblocks and get stuck. With digital-first selling, it’s particularly important to work from the inside out.

For organizations, recognizing that there is always room to grow, and enabling their reps to make the shift to digital-first selling is a crucial first step. Traditional sales training methods like classroom learning and the use of LMSs (learning management systems), are not just outdated, but are time-consuming and lack inspiration.

That’s why we’re making it easy for your sales strategy to undergo a digital transformation.  I

n the “Building Sales Capabilities for the Digital World” eBook, Mindtickle explains:

 

• The successful traits of a 21st-century digital seller
• The difference between a traditional and digital-first approach
• How truly innovative companies put the customer first
• How your organization stacks up against today’s digitized B2B market

With the help of our eBook, you can transition your sales strategy to a modernized, digital-first sales approach.

Download here today!

It’s no secret that learning from experts and pundits who have worked in sales enablement helps companies get up to speed faster and avoid common mistakes. And while a lot is talked about in the sales enablement community about theory, looking at practical examples from someone who has done it is invaluable.

For this reason,

we decided to put together a webinar

with an industry guru Roderick Jefferson that addresses some of the points of debate when it comes to choosing a sales enablement strategy that will work to help sales engage more prospects and win more deals. And if you’d like a deeper dive into what exactly sales enablement can empower your company to do, read on here. 

For exampl

e, communicating the role of sales enablement to your team can be a challenge in and of itself. Most sales enablement veterans agree that the position needs to be understood and presented as a key strategic role, not just as glorified sales support.

Furthermore, while everyone can agree that gaining buy-in from executive leadership is important, the key strategy you use determines whether or not you’ll be successful in getting the budget and resources you need for your sales enablement programs.

In this webinar,

we’ll help guide you towards a strategy that fits your current enablement needs.

Listen to Mindtickle’s Pay Lynch and sales enablement veteran, Roderick Jefferson on how to handle your next enablement strategy.

While reliable and useful at times, age-old (supposed) sales training best practices can turn into myths and urban legends. In fact, they can even become your sales training program’s roadblocks.
How do you know if a time and tested best practice have become outdated? To avoid myopia when it comes to your sales enablement, make sure you don’t let “traditional” sales training objectives overshadow innovation.
In this article featured in Training Journal, our Director of Product Marketing Daniel Kuperman exposes the myths for all sales professionals – rookies and gurus alike.

• Myth 1: People tend to forget everything they learn, regardless of how they learn it.
• Myth 2: Sales skill training cannot yield quantifiable results.
• Myth 3: Adapt your sales training to different learning styles.

He concludes: “While it’s comfortable to maintain consistency, it doesn’t help businesses and their employees achieve their short- and long-term goals—or revenue numbers…For a sales force to be truly effective and produce positive outcomes, the conversation must shift from sales training to sales enablement.”
Learn about why sales enablement is your key to overcoming outdated methods of sales training myths.