How Does a Sales Readiness Solution Differ from an LMS?

sales readiness versus LMS 1Just the mention of the phrase “sales training” usually elicits a groan from sales reps and managers alike. That’s because it’s traditionally been expensive, time-consuming and may offer little visible benefit. While technology has automated and improved almost every business area, from Finance to Marketing, sales training seems to have been left behind.

While good old learning management systems (LMS) have had an important role to play, in a dynamic and agile world they now seem a bit outdated. Content creation and delivery are still important, but the emphasis is now on how we deliver content and the outcomes they produce.

For forward-looking sales enablement leaders, the traditional LMS just doesn’t help them make the impact on the sales organization that they need. And without the desired impact or outcome, they’re left struggling to elevate the role of sales enablement within their business.

That’s why many are now turning to sales readiness technology. Sales readiness shifts the focus of sales training away from imparting knowledge to delivering real outcomes.

While traditional LMS enabled sales training, sales readiness technology enables sales effectiveness. Sales readiness platforms also enable sales training, but they also actually help your sales reps become better at selling by focusing in on improving their skills and execution.

Sales readiness is an outcome-oriented approach that identifies the capabilities your reps need to win more deals and enables them to develop these. It provides tools that enable your reps with the right knowledge and helps them develop their selling skills so they can use that knowledge in real life scenarios. It also helps sales managers and subject matter experts build a regular cadence to coach sales reps, and gives them the analytics they need to monitor how their reps are improving.

LMS only focuses in on one aspect: providing knowledge through training. An LMS focuses on learning management, while the objective of sales readiness solutions is to achieve learning outcomes. They do this by honing in knowledge, skill development, execution discipline, and analytics.

How-Sales-Readiness-Platforms-Achieve-Learning-Outcomes_3

Sales readiness solutions are a natural evolution from LMS. In an agile world, outcomes become even more critical, and sales are all about outcomes. So anything that can help your reps improve their sales performance is business critical.

Sales readiness tools help your reps improve their capabilities whenever they need to. It’s like when you’re preparing for a marathon. All those weeks and months in the gym help flex your muscles and prepare them. But your barbells aren’t going to help you on the day of the big race. That’s when you need all the little things that make you agiler and keep you performing at your best – great shoes, plenty of fluids and little bursts of energy.

While LMS have traditionally helped do the hard yards in the gym they don’t have the same agility and just-in-time capabilities that sales readiness solutions have. In this day and age, having the right information and tools just when you need it can make all the difference between closing a deal or losing to a better-equipped competitor. Which outcome would you prefer your reps achieve?

Why Sales Enablement needs to work with Sales Ops

Why-Sales-Enablement-needs-Sales-OpsThere are many functions powering modern sales teams, Sales Enablement, and Sales Operations are two examples. As a company grows each function evolves and roles are more clearly defined, it will become easier to identify the organizational structure. But organizational charts don’t always reflect the dependencies that different roles have on each other.
While Sales Enablement and Sales Operations may solve different problems in your organization, they need each other a lot more than you may realize.
Sales Enablement is focused on ensuring reps are prepared and effective at selling. They are often responsible for a broad range of deliverables from sales training, coaching and onboarding to communication, sales process and even performance analysis.
Sales Operations is the data engine room that is constantly looking for ways to improve the sales execution, optimize processes and report to sales leadership on any gaps that need to be plugged. Their role may include managing the CRM, process design, and management, territory planning, deal routing, contract management, optimizing and overseeing sales incentive plans, forecasting and performance analysis.

Sales Ops bookends Sales Enablement

As Sales Ops is responsible for much of the data analysis that supports the sales function, they are often the first port of call when management is searching for insights. For example, Ops may identify that certain reps get stuck at a particular point in the sales process, like just after they’ve given a demo. While they may be the first to alert sales leadership that there is a problem, further investigation will be required to determine what the problem is and how to fix. That’s where Sales Enablement steps in.
Sales Enablement can take these insights and investigate to identify the core problem and determine the best way to fix them. By working out what’s causing the sales cycle to stall at that particular point, Sales Enablement can determine what their reps need to speed up the process and get them closer to closing the sale or moving onto a new prospect. The quicker this problem is resolved, the more revenue your sales engine can potentially generate. By relying on Ops to help detect issues at the start of the enablement process, Sales Enablement can identify business issues and fix them. This gives them the ability to be outcome-oriented and create a measurable impact on business results.
At the other end of the enablement process, Sales Ops also plays a crucial role in measuring the impact of enablement initiatives. With all that data at their fingertips, Ops have the ability to identify the right indicators to determine if enablement initiatives are having the desired effect or if reps are still stuck at the same point. They can also track these metrics so that Sales Enablement can demonstrate that their enablement initiatives are working.

Together Ops and Enablement are stronger

Sales Enablement and Sales Ops have the potential for a perfect partnership. Their roles complement each other and they have the same overriding objective – for the sales organization to be more effective and efficient.
There is another key benefit for Enablement to collaborate with Ops, by combining forces the two functions can have a much greater impact and a stronger voice. While Sales Enablement may rack up some spectacular wins, it can be challenging to ensure they get the management attention they deserve. That’s where partnering with Ops can help.
As Tamara Schenk points out, collaboration is key to a productive relationship with Sales Ops. To facilitate this collaboration the business will require a defined interface that ensures their process, messaging and communication is consistent and connected. To achieve this collaboration, an alignment framework is helpful.Why-Sales-Enablement-needs-Sales-Ops
Sales Ops is typically involved in the front and back-end processes that create the strategic framework, forecasting, and analysis. They are also responsible for managing sales automation processes that often improve the efficiency of the sales organization. Sales Enablement’s role is focused on the reps and their capabilities. Building knowledge, sales skills, execution discipline, and effectiveness.
While the two roles do not overlap, they rely on each other to play integral roles in improving the sales organization. Sales Ops on its own can improve the efficiency of the sales machine, but it’s Sales Enablement that ensures it is effective.
By backing up Sales Enablement wins with metrics from Ops, together you can demonstrate how much more effective the sales organization is operating. Enablement and Ops share common goals, which means they can leverage each other’s strengths to achieve even more.


In Conversation with Jordy Brazier

 

Conversation-With-Jordy-Brazier_500x500This post is based on a podcast with Jordy Brazier, VP of Sales Operations for Qubole. You can listen to the entire podcast

here

.

Qubole is the largest cloud and diagnostic big data service, providing businesses with a self-service data platform to help them make data-driven decisions. Their vision is to create an autonomous data platform that is capable of optimizing its performance so data teams can focus on the more strategic and value-added work. Jordy Brazier is responsible for their Sales Operations and enablement, an area he is passionate about.

As a business, Qubole sells primarily to IT decision makers in data-driven enterprise companies. Their customers understand the value of big data and want to leverage it in a more cost-efficient way to improve their performance.  In an industry that’s rapidly evolving, sales enablement is key to driving competitive advantage.

“For us, sales enablement is about how we can use content and develop training that increases sales productivity. By sales productivity, we mean the productivity of our reps. Do we look at things like how can we increase their deal size? How can we increase how fast they onboard? We use several programs to execute this, onboarding boot camps, QBR’s, kickoffs and ongoing training as well,”

outlines Brazier.

For each sales enablement initiative, Brazier focuses in on a core metric.

“For example, the primary metric for the onboarding program is time to first deal. We now have a 90-day onboarding program, and we measure how we’re improving by looking at everyone who goes through that program. Are they faster to close? Do they get to their first deal quicker? If we look at other parts of the sales cycle we’re going to use different metrics, but it’s very important to measure a specific metric that’s most directly related to what you’re trying to achieve,”

he explains.

As the company has been scaling rapidly, onboarding has been an area of focus for sales enablement.

“Our sales onboarding is a 90-day program. Once a field rep starts they attend boot camp within the first 30 days,”

Brazier explains.

While Qubole would previously send Wiki and other information to new hires they had no way of knowing who had looked at it before boot camp. But using Mindtickle now gives them the ability to make this process interactive. New hires go through role play certification and now management can measure who’s actually confident and absorbed the information.

Everyone is on the same page when we start. It’s not just a 30-minute class and then a test. The questions follow the learning. It’s not a testing platform it’s a learning platform. So we know exactly what they already know and we can take it from there.”

This has allowed Qubole to refocus its boot camp.

“The boot camp is now more of a tool versus being a class. They’ve already trained in the app or in a bite-sized way with quizzes, so when they come to boot camp they’ve already reviewed all the training. And when we put them in front of our executives at boot camp the reps can actually ask much more meaningful questions,”

he continues.

“After getting feedback and looking at the metrics, we’ve focused the boot camp to be all about understanding the value of the company, why is the company’s solution the best. To achieve this we do simulations throughout the boot camp. Reps have to present twice during the boot camp, at the beginning and at the end of the week. They pitch to the rest of the class and get feedback from management, the class, and an existing rep,”

Brazier explains.

It may be intense but it gives Qubole’s new reps the confidence to pitch the product. And they need it because once boot camp is over there is a real customer waiting for them. Working with marketing and the management team, new reps attend a field marketing event within 30 to 45 days of starting, just after boot camp.

“They can pitch live, face to face with good prospects and start to build a pipeline. That really moved the needle for us and shortened the time to the first deal,”

he says. “

We then do a 60 day check in to see if they need help with anything and again at 90 days.”

Qubole also runs several other initiatives including a kickoff twice a year.

“At the kickoff, we look at overall positioning and messaging. We’re in a fast moving market so at each kickoff we revamp the company deck for the entire team,”

he explains.

Before the kickoff, new materials and presentations are made available to reps on Mindtickle. The reps record their pitches and these are reviewed at the kickoff as a learning experience.

The best ones are presented to everyone at the kickoff, leveraging the competitive spirit of their salespeople.

Ongoing learning is also important to Qubole.

“Every week we release a new course or update on what products we have or how to compete on specific products. In Mindtickle we can see who is learning and who needs improvement. We actually give a $100 gift card to the top learner each week. It’s helpful to drive adoption and it makes it fun. It’s one way that we make sure that we are prepared, are true trusted advisors to our customers and are able to deliver true value. That’s super important and that’s why we take enablement very seriously. We really invest in those programs and technology that makes our team the best and puts the firepower behind it,”

explains Brazier.

Interestingly, Qubole also found a correlation between learning scores and the performance of their reps. Their consistently low performers were also struggling to pass the tests on Mindtickle. It was a good indicator that something was just not working.

“It’s all about raising the average. The top-performing reps will probably still be the top performing reps even without training, but if you can bring the majority of middle reps up then you can make a significant difference in the overall productivity,”

he says.

Qubole has certainly gone through a considerable learning curve while implementing its enablement initiatives and Brazier is happy to share his top three tips.

“First, if you don’t have a learning platform, bring one in ASAP. I think that really moved the needle for us. Also, narrow the focus of your boot camp. Don’t incorporate everything under the sun, just focus on the value. And understand that you will only be successful if there is very strong cross-functional collaboration. You need to get the best out of product management and the best out of marketing, so include them early on. Asking them for their inputs and get their buy-in.”

This approach has certainly worked for Qubole, who continues to go from strength to strength.

[Podcast] Nancy Nardin on how to Choose the Right Sales Enablement Platform (Episode 22)

In this 21

minute podcast, Nardin outlines:

  • How sales enablement has evolved
  • The role technology plays in enabling sales organizations
  • How to approach evaluating sales enablement platforms
  • The steps involved in rolling out an enablement solution

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

“There are 400 sales enablement technologies, including CRM. And there are about 45 different categories of products that we’ve segmented into six different super categories,”

explains Nancy Nardin, Founder of

Smart Selling Tools.

It’s no wonder that it can be overwhelming for people to decide what their business needs. While the task of choosing the right sales enablement platform for your business isn’t easy, it’s certainly worthwhile according to Nardin.

“There’s a real opportunity for making a big impact on the organization and revenue. No matter how easy technology is, there are no shortcuts. You really have to have a commitment to making sure everybody is lined up in terms of what’s required to keep it going, what’s required to get salespeople to adopt it,”

she continues.

That’s why going through a thorough process even before you start looking at platforms is important.

A lot of companies don’t have a cohesive plan. There’s a lot of parameters to consider before you even start looking at the technology. Get in a war room for a day with some of your constituents and just map it out. Where are you today? Where do you want to head? Then, start your technology journey.”

When Hiring for Sales Enablement, What’s the Best Fit – Product Marketing or Sales?

hiring-sales-enablement-marketing-salesSales enablement is currently at a nascent stage, which means it can be difficult to find good quality people with enablement experience. Many often fall into sales enablement roles because someone suggests it to them or perhaps they’ve taken on some of the functions of the role as part of their position in sales or marketing. It’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot at Mindtickle as we help sales organizations scale rapidly, so when our co-founder and CRO, Mohit Garg, asked this question on LinkedIn, I found the broad range of responses quite interesting.
According to Lucas Gerler, The Sales Enablement Society polled its members and found that about 40% of current practitioners come from marketing, about 30% from sales, and the remaining 30% from other roles. There are benefits to be gained from hiring from both sales and marketing backgrounds.

Sales is in your DNA

As Renee Capovilla said “If you have “walked” in the shoes of the customers you are serving your deliverables reflect that DNA.” And when it comes to sales enablement your customer is the sales organization, so having experience in sales is a big advantage. It gives you credibility on the field, particularly if the role involves delivering sales training and liaising with the sales organization regularly. Having sales management experience also gives you credibility with the C-Suite according to Chuck Marcouiller, “I believe the key customer of sales enablement is the CRO and senior sales leaders. Having a sales leadership background gives the street credibility and insight into what sales leadership is facing.”
The benefit of having sales experience extends beyond just credibility. It means that you know how to empathize with your customers and the problems that sales reps experience daily. A view affirmed by Nancy Maluso who said: “insights into the seller persona is critical.” This includes an understanding of the buying process and the sales skills that are required to convert a prospect to an opportunity and close the deal faster. Salespeople don’t need to know the thought process behind the product, they need to know their customer and how the product helps them.
But having sales experience isn’t enough as sales enablement must collaborate with so many areas and brings together a diverse range of skills. That’s why salespeople who have held a range of roles in an organization tend to be a good fit. If someone has worked in sales ops, been involved in process improvement, knows how to build partnerships internally or understands how to leverage technology to improve how they do their job, then they bring a lot to the table.
“I’ve found that folks with a pre-sales background perform very well. They understand selling and the sales process and they have deep knowledge of your products and can translate their value in a way sales (and customers) can understand,” explains Daniel West.

Marketing skills enrich customer conversations

While sales understand the customer, product marketing understands the persona and how they relate to the product. This means they can synthesize information about the customer from research and other sources and understand the psychology behind how to communicate with a customer effectively. When coupled with execution skills like lead generation this can be a very powerful skill set that enriches the sales enablement team.
Marketing skills are also favorable at the execution level for some aspects of sales enablement. Content delivery and program management are two areas where marketing can really create knowledge. It may also be beneficial to look beyond product marketing and consider people in regional marketing functions. This is because those roles often incorporate many types of enablement and field sales activities.

Blending sales and marketing may be the right mix

Perhaps the real answer lies in not choosing one over the other, but rather bringing together a blend of skills in your sales enablement team. While people with a sales background know how to approach customers, those in marketing understand how to craft a compelling message to a persona. When both come together they can create the right blend that can enable your sales team and continuously hone and improve their skills.
It’s not easy to find people who have straddled both sales and marketing over the course of their career but you can occasionally find a salesperson who has a knack for product marketing or vice versa. But if you have a sales enablement team then it is perhaps best to create an environment where you can leverage a cross-functional skill base and place people in roles that work to their strengths. This approach can give you the best of both worlds.

Sales enablement is multi-faceted

While the primary discussion is around whether sales or marketing skills are best for sales enablement roles, the reality is that enablement is a multi-faceted role. It’s not enough to understand the customer, craft a message and train the sales team. It also involves making sure they’re more effective at their role and have everything they need to be ready for every sales conversation. This requires analytical skills, an understanding of technology and the ability to improve and re-engineer processes. Sales enablement needs the skills to develop and execute content and training programs, which requires a combination of these skills.
In many respects, sales enablement requires a multidisciplinary approach, which is why some practitioners come from consulting, engineering or even training. The key for any sales enablement leader is to align the desired business outcomes to projects and milestones. They must work with learning specialists to design the right outcome-oriented program.

Each sales organization is different and must find its right blend

When it comes down to it, there isn’t necessarily a right or wrong answer to this question – it really depends. It depends on the stage your business is, the verticals you’re targeting, your product and your growth trajectory.
The needs of a sales organization also change over time and so do the skills they require in their enablement team. That’s why identifying what your organization requires now and then building a strategy and a team that can deliver those specific needs is so important.
By its very nature, sales enablement needs to be forward-looking and able to pre-empt what sales require before it becomes a real problem. This strategic outlook should translate into your hiring strategy. A sales enablement team needs to enable the acceleration of sales, and you need a team that can support your strategy to achieve this. 

Sales Disrupted: Preparing your Sales Organization to IPO

sales preparing to ipoPreparing to IPO is a massive task. It’s not enough to have the legal paperwork and financial reporting ready, your business also has to be able to demonstrate that it’s up to the task. As Joe Sexton, who helped prepare our customer AppDynamics for its IPO journey, has said: “you have to act like a public company before you actually become one.”
When it comes to your sales organization that means ensuring you have all the necessary rigors in place from your sales process to culture. This process should start about 24 months before you’re planning to IPO. There are six areas that we suggest focusing on when considering how to enable and prepare your sales organization to be ready to IPO.
sales preparing to ipo 2

Ensure your messaging is consistent

While consistent messaging is crucial for any sales organization, when your business is preparing to IPO its importance becomes elevated. It also becomes more important to look at consistent messaging from a data-driven perspective. From CEO to SDR, everyone needs to sing from the same songbook so your customers and the public see a cohesive sales machine. The entire company should be aligned on your message and articulate it because this will become a core part of your overall IPO strategy
Core to messaging is your company’s story.
MuleSoft, who recently made its public debut, refined its messaging with a core team of leaders. It then created a certification program to ensure each member of its frontline team was on message before they had customer conversations.
“We had the core team record themselves in the Mindtickle platform to provide examples and best practices. Then we formed a group of best performing reps and managers who we call black belts. This group of black belts then certified the full team. We had over 500 people go through this program,” explains Stephen Hallowell, VP of Sales Enablement at MuleSoft.
Leadership support was key to the success of their messaging as well as setting benchmarks and ensuring each rep received personalized coaching. AppDynamics also underwent an extensive company-wide process to certify their reps on consistent messaging. Each rep had three chances to achieve certification of their message or they were out.

Build capacity for growth

Investors will want to see a company that is growing and poised for further growth. This is not the time to take your foot of the pedal, a business that is preparing to IPO should be continuing to scale sustainably. In fact, public tech investors like revenue growth rates above 30% in the two forecasted years after the IPO. Others suggest that a business should already be achieving $100 million in revenue by the time they IPO, and still be growing.
Building the capacity for growth isn’t just about adding more reps though. In fact, the key to building sales capacity is ensuring you’re not over-investing.  In order to grow a business needs more reps who are selling more effectively and meeting quota. You need to do more, smarter, better with the resources you have as well.
This goes beyond just looking at quotas and considering how to ensure more of your reps are able to achieve or even smash their quota. If you’re hiring new reps, how long does it take them to ramp up and what can you do get them fully ramped up quicker. How effective are your current reps? Can you identify what is causing them to lose deals?
This can be achieved in several ways, enablement initiatives like onboarding and effective sales coaching can make a significant step change in the way your reps perform. For example, Mulesoft executed a structured coaching program to drive behavioral change. They identified execution gaps and built competency maps to help them pinpoint where to target their coaching efforts to make a real difference in the performance of their sales reps.
AppDynamics looked at the yield of each rep, being what the rep should be able to produce. This yield helped them define their sales capacity and identify what capacity they needed to hit their targets.

Button down your processes

Before IPO, all your sales processes need to be rock-solid. That means having in place everything from demand generation tools to pipeline management. Processes should be streamlined, understood and scalable. Investors will expect execution excellence. This means more than just having a consistent sales process and methodology that is used by all reps. Coaching processes should also be in place to ensure any gaps are identified and able to be rectified quickly.
It’s also important to look across your entire customer facing team. While much effort is focused on field sales reps, inside reps and even customer success teams play an important role. By qualifying leads and ensuring they are nurtured or moved onto field sales when the time is right inside sales helps improve efficiency and reduce your sales cycle. While customer success can play an important role in customer retention and renewals.
AppDynamics developed a culture of excellence in pipeline generation. Every Monday field sales reps focused on prospecting, according to our VP of Sales, Cameron Essalat, this was called PG (pipeline generation) Mondays. , in addition to marketing, partners and inbound sales. These efforts supercharged their sales pipeline and helped the business continue to scale rapidly.

Continue to invest in capability

Creating a strong pipeline is important, but the investment will be sunk if your reps are not able to convert those leads. This is where focusing in on sales effectiveness to build capability is key.
Your reps’ skills need to continue to be developed so they can constantly improve and stay on top what they need to. Building capability can include enablement initiatives that ensure regular communication, develop structured coaching and provide reps with tools that keep them constantly up to date and primed to sell at their best.
The more you invest in your sales team the more important retention becomes. This is why it’s also important to consider the type of sales culture you want for your business and put in place processes and initiatives to help you achieve this.

Measurement is imperative

You’re no longer a small startup that’s testing a new product. By the time you’re 24 months out from IPO, your business will be still scaling but revenue should be becoming more predictable. But just because your revenue is predictable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t maintain a tight rein over your performance.
To control and identify issues before they become major problems it’s important to identify what areas have the power to transform or derail your sales. Then you can determine which leading indicators to monitor so you can stay ahead of the game and make any necessary adjustments to keep you on track. If you’ve only got an eye on lagging indicators like topline revenue, you aren’t giving yourself an opportunity to foresee issues and address them before it’s too late.

Build a sales stack that supports growth

Your sales stack should support your growth and help your reps sell, not give them yet another thing to learn. Precious time and resource can be saved by building a sales stack that is intuitive and leverages integrations wherever possible.
Many efficient businesses anchor their sales stack to their CRM so reporting and activity can be streamlined in one place. It makes sense, but of course, your sales stack must also support your other core initiatives to create consistent messaging, build capacity and capability and execute your processes. With these six measures in place, you can not only prepare your business to IPO when the time is right but also help it continue to scale and achieve its growth potential.

[Podcast] How Qubole Leverages Sales Readiness Technology to Deliver True Value to its Customers (Episode 21)


In this 20 minute podcast, Brazier outlines:

  • How Qubole uses sales enablement drive productivity per sales rep
  • Why technology is crucial to accelerate sales readiness and bring true value to your business
  • How to leverage sales kickoffs to ensure your reps’ positioning cutting edge
  • His best advice to anyone creating sales enablement initiatives

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes or find it here.
Jordy Brazier is Vice President of Sales Operations for Qubole and has been in Sales Operations for over 10 years. Qubole is the largest cloud and diagnostic big data service, providing businesses with a self-service data platform to help them make data driven decisions.
Selling to IT decision makers, they operate in a tough market, releasing new product updates regularly to stay ahead of the curve. This means their sales reps also need to make sure they have a cutting edge positioning.
“Every week we release a new course or an updated version of a course about what products we have? And, how to compete with specific products,” explains Brazier.  “To drive adoption and see who is going through those trainings is, Mindtickle lets us see who are the learners and who needs improvement. It’s great to have this ability. We want to make sure that we have the best prepared reps when we go into the field. So they can be true trusted advisors to our customers and are able to deliver true value. That’s super important and that’s why we take enablement very seriously and really invest in those programs, into technologies that make them the best and put fire power behind them.”
Qubole has also raised the effectiveness of their reps through its comprehensive onboarding program and certifications.
“It’s had a great impact for us as well. We use best practices to take control of the consumer process, bring true value and accelerating productivity,” Brazier continues.

Sales Readiness for Each Stage of Your Startup

sales readiness for startupsYou can’t just set and forget sales enablement or readiness initiatives. As your startup grows and your operating environment changes, so do the challenges that your sales organization is dealing with. That’s why your sales reps will need different things to develop and improve their sales readiness at each stage of your business’ evolution.

Sales-Stages-of-Startup

1. Sales acceleration

Product stage:

Focus is on testing and validating your product
Revenue:

$100k to $500k
Funding stage:

Bootstrapping or seed funding
Size of sales team:

1 to 2 (often including the founder)
Sales structure:

Often unstructured with ad hoc process development
Sales challenges:

No dedicated sales enablement resources but the business needs some quick wins to help it validate its business model. The key challenge here is making sure they hire the right salesperson as one wrong move can lead to disaster.

Essential sales readiness initiatives:

At sales acceleration, it’s all hands on deck. While resources are scarce, putting in place the bare bones of a sales readiness program will set your business up and help new reps hit the ground running. These initiatives include:

  • Basic sales onboarding to give new hires the knowledge they need to get up to speed quickly.
  • Basic collaterals to support sales conversations and drive simple marketing campaigns.
  • Preliminary buyer personas that start defining who your target audience is.
  • Simple processes that ensure you’re not recreating the wheel either every new hire or customer conversation. This includes bringing together information and tools and putting in place same basic messaging principles.

2. Revenue acceleration

Product stage:

Refining and testing as market knowledge increases
Revenue:

$2m to $10m
Funding stage:

Series A to Series C
Size of sales team:

5 to 30
Sales structure:

As you hire rapidly the sales team is scaling. To meet the needs of the growing team defined sales processes, guidelines and procedures are put in place.
Sales challenges:

New product features are being added every week which is continuously impacting your customer value proposition and pitch. Sales team turnover is increasing as you hire rapidly and need to show investors that you can achieve results quickly.

Essential sales readiness initiatives:

It’s all systems go with both your product and sales team. To meet growth targets your sales team needs to keep up with a constantly evolving product and new team members. This small startup is now looking like a fully-fledged business.

  • As the product is refined, the customer messaging changes regularly. To keep up your sales reps’ messaging needs to be almost constantly re-calibrated.
  • Your competitors are just as active as you, which means your sales reps need to be updated regularly on your product, competition and industry changes to make sure they’re always one step ahead of their customers.
  • A structured onboarding program is now essential thanks to your fast-growing sales team.
  • While individuals have previously led process initiatives, it’s now important to develop sales processes that are driven by business requirements.
  • Getting the most from every sales reps is crucial. Driving sales efficiency, so you can achieve more with the same resources will help drive sales performance.
  • Other support departments in your business are also growing, like Marketing and Product. In order to stay on top of what they’re doing and co-ordinate efforts collaboration is vital.

3. Hyper-growth

Product stage:

This is now

well-refined
Revenue:

$10m to $100m
Funding stage:

Series D to Series E
Size of sales team:

30 to 250
Sales structure:

Distributed

sales force located in multiple markets. Your competitors are starting to take notice and more are entering your niche.
Sales challenges:

As you grow hiring and onboarding increasingly become even more challenging especially as you start hiring in new geographies and internationally. Sales management starts to feel the unique challenges of managing remote individuals and teams.

New products are introduced which also requires reboarding of your existing reps.

Essential sales readiness initiatives:

You’re no longer part of a small business. With growth comes the challenge of managing more people and ensuring they’re all on strategy and singing in the same key.

  • Sales onboarding continues to evolve and is now a regular and predictable process.
  • With each new product launch there is a need to co-ordinate the approach, not just within your sales team, but also between your other business functions.
  • A sales kickoff is now an integral part of your sales calendar, designed to invigorate, inspire and keep your reps on track.
  • With so many reps across a wide range of locations, keeping them all on message can be a struggle. That’s where certifying their message can help bring consistency regardless of geography.
  • Coaching is now an essential part of your sales managers’ roles. They lead this initiative to drive sales effectiveness and skill development.

4. Profit and expansion

Product stage:

Maturing
Revenue:

$100m and beyond
Funding stage:

Pre-IPO
Size of sales team:

250+
Sales structure:

Proven sales processes and methodologies are in place and they support your mature sales organization. The goal now is to achieve a predictable sales method that produces predictable results.
Sales challenges:

Sales effectiveness and capacity building are key, but they must be achieved while still managing to keep costs under control.
Essential sales readiness initiatives:

Your sales engine is now scaling to achieve predictable revenue. All your sales initiatives are designed to keep the machine humming along while identifying new and innovative ways to enable your sales team and continuously improve how they operate.

  • It’s all about the data now, so you’re constantly looking for ways to refine and improve the metrics that are helping you drive your business.
  • New capabilities and capacity are being built to ensure that predictable revenue can be achieved.
  • Your internal culture needs some focus to ensure that it is geared to constantly enable your business. This mindset should permeate every aspect of your business including strategy, analytics, logistics and operations.

What your reps need to always be prepared and sales ready is constantly changing. Even once your business has matured post-IPO your sales readiness initiatives will need to be evaluated and reviewed on an ongoing basis. This is because, just as your business always strives to achieve more, so do your competitors and your customers. This drives the momentum for continuous improvement. Once you have the essentials in place, sales readiness is about taking your sales reps to the next level so they can always stay at the top of their game.

How does Data Drive Content Adoption and Learner Engagement?

data-drive-Content-learner-adoptionDid you know that

up to 80%

of all content produced for sales teams is never used? By leveraging microlearning and knowledge retention techniques in your sales enablement programs you can drive content adoption and learner engagement and ensure your investment is not wasted.

What is microlearning?

Microlearning, or bite-sized learning, is where information is broken down into smaller chunks so that it’s easier for sales reps to consume and retain. The bite-sized content is also perfect for just-in-time training, which means it’s more likely to be consumed.

A programme of content, or

a “micro-curriculum,” can be drip-fed over days, weeks and months. Leveraging quizzes and knowledge checks, with techniques like repeated retrieval and spaced repetition, sales reps can retain more information long-term.

Who benefits from microlearning today and how?

Millennial salespeople make up a significant portion of the current sales population today. B

y

2025 it’s estimated that millennials will account for 75%

of the global population. That’s why it’s important to address the preferences of the millennial workforce when implementing sales enablement initiatives, and millennials have a preference for brief, bite-sized content.

But it’s not just millennial salespeople that benefit from microlearning. All sales reps can benefit from microlearning, particularly with busy schedules and distributed locations. But just because information is bite-sized doesn’t necessarily mean it’s engaging. You still need to ensure the content is engaging.

How do you develop engaging content?

There are two common challenges to overcome when creating engaging content:

How long should the content be?

This depends on several factors including:

  • The demographics of your audience (like age and education level)
  • The subject matter (is it about new product features, process changes or specific skill development)
  • How important the content being shared is (is it ‘good-to-know’ or a business imperative)
  • How frequently the content is updated (is this static or evergreen content, or dynamic information like competitive insights)
  • How frequently will learners be exposed to this information (is it once-off baseline or onboarding knowledge, or part of ongoing training)

How can you drive learner engagement?

While many consider this question after sales training is completed, this question really should be addressed as the program is being designed. This will ensure the design can incorporate any features that will drive engagement, like knowledge checks.

How does Mindtickle solve these challenges?

Mindtickle is a sales readiness platform that helps high-growth customers like AppDynamics, Nutanix, MuleSoft and Cloudera solve these issues. Our experience gives us access to data (1)

from of over 200,000 sales representatives that span a broad range of demographic parameters – including age, education level, industry and type of sales team set-up (inside, field, BDRs etc.).

To find answers to these questions we conducted a deep-dive analysis to identify trends and best practices for content adoption across industries.

As a part of this analysis, we looked at several factors including the length and type of the content, time spent reading content, and whether the content included assessments. We also conducted additional analysis to find points of relevant correlation and to identify actionable results.

Now, let’s look at our findings for each of the challenges.

Challenge 1: How long should the content be?

Across all industries, salespeople are more likely to complete a module if the document is less than 5 pages long, but this drops drastically when the document contains 15 or more pages.

Document length and completion rate

But the size of the document isn’t the only factor, it’s also important to consider how much information is on each page and how it’s presented. To ensure the information is easier to read:

  • Use bullet points where possible to reduce text
  • Summarize content in graphics where possible
  • Use a complementary palette of colours that’s easy to read
  • Don’t use images just to add aesthetic value
  • Limit yourself to one concept per page

Of course, it is sometimes necessary to have longer documents due to the complexity and nature of the content or to achieve the desired learning outcome, but the document can still be made easier to read with these suggestions.

Challenge 2: How can you drive learner engagement?

The concept of ‘Test to Teach’ has been

well-accepted as a preferred alternative

to traditional testing in the context of school education.  The same principles apply to adult learners.

In her article 

Facilitating Adult Learning: How to teach so people learn

, Dr Lela Vandenberg talks about ‘Application and Action’ as an important principle when designing a program for adult learning. She says, “adult learners are busy, practical, and learn by doing. They learn best when:

  • There is an immediate application for the learning
  • They participate actively in the learning process
  • They can practice new skills or test new knowledge before leaving a learning session.”

Our data on sales reps confirm this. We found that sales reps spend more time on modules that included a quiz than those that didn’t. In fact, the presence of a short quiz improves engagement by 34% on average.
time spent content length

Though the overall findings are consistent across industries, the impact on each industry is different.
time spent industry

Including a quiz in the sales training module increased the time spent on a course considerably, particularly in the Pharma, BFS, E-commerce and Electronics industries.

Whether or not you should include intermittent quiz or knowledge checks will depend on the objectives of your sales enablement initiatives. And in case you were wondering, there is a difference between a quiz and a knowledge check. According to

The Training Doctor

:

  • A quiz is used to test a learner’s ability to apply content. Their responses are scored based on predefined parameters, with results often recorded and compared to their peers.
  • A knowledge check is used to review the content a learner has received to ensure learning took place. Learners are usually able to review the content until they feel confident enough to apply this knowledge.

In summary, optimize the engagement and adoption of your sales enablement initiatives by:

  • Leveraging microlearning – keep content short and to the point, between one to five minutes
  • Keeping content brief – below 15 pages but preferably less than five pages if possible
  • Making it easier to read – use bullet points, short sentences and graphics
  • Using quizzes and knowledge checks

While this analysis provides insights into how content can be made more engaging, it is always important to consider your own specific circumstances. Conducting a similar analysis with your own data will highlight any unique factors that may improve engagement and content adoption amongst your own sales reps.

By leveraging powerful data analytics you can empower your managers to make informed decisions and design more effective sales enablement initiatives. Data analytics will also help you prepare your sales reps for more effective customer conversations and equip them to become true champions for your organization.

 Footnotes:

1

Data Source: Usage Data of 200k+ Sales Reps on Mindtickle from January – April 2017.

Transforming from Sales Manager 2.0 to Sales Manager 3.0 and Beyond

sales manager of the futureSales managers are critical to the success of their sales reps. While sales managers are charged with ensuring reps meet their numbers, how they meet their numbers is not as simple as it once was. In the past, focusing in on pipeline and activities was the hallmark of a good sales manager, but the way customers purchase and reps sell has changed, and the role of sales managers has evolved as well.

A highly successful sales manager now invests significant time in coaching their reps to improve their knowledge and skills, drive excellence in execution, and of course keep them on track. Yet businesses often under-invest in their sales managers. Harvard Business Review reported that only 12% of organizations currently invest sufficiently in the development of their frontline sales managers.

Sales managers have a difficult job and yet we often leave them to figure out things on their own.

While the

 70/20/10 learning model

 says that the majority of learning does happen on-the-job, for managers to develop they still need to receive their 10% of formal learning and 20% through coaching or mentoring. This model just doesn’t work anymore. If we leave our sales managers to work out what they’re doing on their own it may take them years to get it right. Can your sales reps wait that long?

In this day and age that’s simply not good enough. The role of sales is rapidly evolving and we expect much more of our sales reps, so it naturally follows that their leaders also need to evolve.

As we move into the era of Sales 3.0, we’re constantly looking for new ways to help our sales reps adapt to the changing world order. This search should start with taking a good look at the sales managers to make sure they have the skills and tools they need to lead their reps through this change. The time has come for organizations to retire Sales Manager 1.0 and Sales Manager 2.0, and set about enabling Sales Manager 3.0.

Sales Manager 2.0 is no longer compatible with Sales 3.0

sales manager of the future

Sales Manager 1.0: The expert administrator

  • Manages sales and administrative tasks
  • Dealing with complaints or individual issues with sales reps
  • Executives performance management
  • Gives feedback on individual issues
  • Responds to queries by sales leaders

Sales Manager 2.0: The activity generator

  • Undertakes the same activities as Sales Manager 1.0 

    plus

  • Leverages email automation tools to improve productivity
  • Relies on scaling customer communications to broaden the reach
  • Focuses on a high turnover with power dialers and other productivity tools

Sales Manager 3.0: The strategist and mentor

  • Manages sales reps
  • Ensures execution of account and territory strategies
  • Helping sales reps create business
  • Developing and executing customer-management strategies
  • Coaches and mentors reps using a structured approach to improve performance and behaviors
  • Supports executives to make strategic decisions about a sales organization
  • Forecasting
  • Funnel management

So how do you get your Sales Manager 2.0 to Sales Manager 3.0

The key is to plan your approach and enable your sales managers to perform at their best. Here are four steps to transform your sales managers.

1. Define their role

Sales management is rarely a one-size-fits-all role. In most organizations there are several sales management roles; for example inside sales managers, field sales managers, territory managers. Each of these roles has different responsibilities and requires different skills.

Before you can determine what your sales managers need to be enabled on, their role needs to be clearly defined. In this step, outline the parameters of each role and what they are expected to achieve. This sets the basis for the next step.

2. Determine the skills required for each role

Once the role of each sales manager in your organization is defined you can then determine what skills are required to perform the roles effectively. As part of this process, it’s essential to consider the behaviors and activities that your managers need to demonstrate to be successful in their role. Questions you can ask include:

  • Do they know how to focus on their team over their individual performance? Many sales managers are promoted from the field where they were judged on their own performance. Making the mental shift to focusing on the performance of the collective can be challenging for some.
  • Do they know how the business of sales runs? Forecasting, reporting, sales methodologies, and processes; these are all skills that are fundamental to leading a successful sales team.
  • Do they know how to create an effective sales strategy? Stepping back and mapping out the big picture is essential to Sales Manager 3.0. This requires being able to identify skill gaps and understanding how these can be plugged and their reps’ skills developed over time.
  • How much experience have they had leading people? A core skill for any sales manager is leading people. This covers more than just hiring and monitoring their quotas. Leading a sales team involves identifying and developing skills as well as coaching and mentoring.
  • Do they know what to coach on and how to do it? Coaching is much more than just giving feedback to reps about how they performed in a meeting. It covers all aspects of selling from lead identification to how they close the deal.
  • Do they know how to mentor individuals? Mentoring is different from coaching. It’s about guiding and providing advice to help reps develop their own skills. This is a skill that can be difficult for anyone to learn, yet it’s crucial to the success of Sales Manager 3.0.
  • Do they know what success looks like? Meeting quota is no longer the only indicator of a sales reps’ success. It’s important that sales managers not only understand what success looks like for their reps but also what it means in terms of their own role, so they can then build their own skill gaps if necessary.

3. Identify where the skill gaps are

Once you know what skills your sales managers require to perform their jobs effectively you can then overlay their existing skills to help you identify areas where they require improvement or development.

A useful tool to help identify areas where your sales managers may require development is by looking at your

efficiency and sales effectiveness indicators

. These metrics focus in on the areas that are important to sales managers when looking at the progress of their reps. So it makes sense that they need to be able to drive the behaviors and capabilities that will drive these indicators in the right direction.

For example, if your reps are struggling in their elevator pitches then they need support from their managers to improve. This requires managers to coach them on improving their messaging and pitch skills. So it follows that your managers may require some help bringing their coaching skills in these areas up to the mark.

4. Leverage technology to enable your sales managers

Just like your sales stack helps your reps perform at their best, your sales managers need a technology stack of their own. This goes beyond your CRM and really hones in on helping them perform each of the elements of their role better. Their stack can borrow from the existing sales stack and also leverage tools from other parts of the organization. The sales managers stack may include:

  • Hiring: To improve their hiring process consider tools that help test candidates for sales aptitude and competency.
  • Coaching: Sales readiness platforms can help optimize coaching by establishing a formal framework that helps managers identify skill gaps and then focus on remediation by developing reps’ skills. This should incorporate a range of coaching activities including role plays, so managers can focus in on specific skills.
  • Messaging: Video and audio tools can often be found in sales readiness platforms. These can help reps practice their messaging and get feedback, not only from their managers but also from other subject matter experts, on how they articulate their value proposition in different situations.
  • Forecasting: Tools like your CRM can help your managers accurately forecast sales results, so they can identify issues early and act quickly when necessary.
  • Managing: This can include the basics of management, like how to motivate their team or conduct performance reviews. If your sales managers have never led a team before then the basics are essential to learning.

These tools will help you enable your sales managers, but the key focus shouldn’t be on helping take your sales managers to the next level. After all, they play an integral role in the overall sales success of your business. But it’s important to remember that enablement isn’t a set and forget exercise. Once you’ve built Sales Manager 3.0 it will almost certainly be time to start working on the next model.