How to tackle sales readiness for new product launches
How to get the buy-in from your leadership
Tips to get your own sales enablement budget
Which metrics and KPI’s sales enablement managers should track
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“I’ve been actually practicing the sales enablement role for many years. In fact, so many years that I believe I was here before the term sales enablement emerged,” mentions Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Leader, and Practitioner. She has worked in Sales Enablement for more than a decade, working with companies such as Symantec, Rapid7. She is also currently the President of Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.
Working with multiple technology firms she has established sales enablement teams from scratch. With this experience under her belt, Guardia has a lot of experience to share with new sales enablement leaders and management on where to start with sales enablement. More importantly, she also has some great advice on how to get the budget approved for your enablement initiatives.
“To be successful as a sales enabler, you need to think about how can you run this mini-business inside your company successfully,” says Guardia.
“We measure a lot of different things, but are we measuring the right things? More than often you’ll find that sales enablement people are measuring indicators with a bias to training. They are measuring a number of people who are trained, the number of hours consumed in training, and the smile sheets. Is that really telling you the success of the sales enabler, enablement team? Probably not,” says Guardia offering some great advice to new sales enablement leaders.
Furthermore, Guardia enumerates important KPI’s and metrics that sales enablement managers should start tracking. Continuing on from the last podcast, where Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, in this podcast, she takes this her advice a step further advising sales enablers on the nitty-gritty of their role.
A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.”
Topo
also does a great job at explaining the different facets of sales enablement:
“
Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.
There are two parts to sales enablement. The first one is foundational, like preparing your salespeople to have meaningful customer conversations. We call this “Sales Readiness” – the space that Mindtickle operates in.
Sales readiness delivers on three things:
Ensuring customer-facing staff have the requisite knowledge of your products or services;
Giving reps the skills to clearly articulate your unique value proposition; and
Providing on-the-field coaching for contextual triggers like deal motion and skill development.
The goal of sales readiness is to ensure your reps are on message and always up-to-speed on your unique value proposition. For new hires, it is about accelerating their ramp up.
Ultimately, you are preparing your reps to have smarter sales conversations. Sales readiness initiatives are internally focused, not customer facing, so the content you produce would be consumed only by your sales team.
The second part, “Sales Asset Management”, is about ensuring your salespeople have the right conten
t in the context of where they are in the sales process fora specific deal
. The key objectives of sales asset management are:
Improving customer engagement;
Faster content delivery; and
Simplifying content creation and management.
With so much customer-facing content being produced by marketing and sales enablement, it’s no surprise that your sales reps struggle to find the most relevant content for their prospects when they need it most. Companies like Showpad, Seismic and KnowledgeTree excel in this space.
So in a nutshell, sales asset management is about equipping your reps with the right content for their customer conversations, while sales readiness is about improving their performance by ensuring your reps have the knowledge, skills, and processes they need.
As a sales enablement leader, it’s important to communicate with your sales leadership to define and align the initiatives that will help your reps close more deals. These priorities may change from time to time. One month you may be focused on improving your SDR’s messaging and conversion rates, while in the next you could be focused on producing fresh content for a new product release.
Your sales enablement strategy will be based on the needs, challenges, and obstacles that your sales team are facing. Given how fast things change in the digital age this means your initiatives may change often, but the end-game always remains the same; to enable your sales reps so they can close more deals.
Listen now to learn how Powers deployed a successful sales onboarding program and maximized value from their boot camp experience.
In this 16-minute interview Powers outlines:
How onboarding helped MongoDB’s sales reps achieve sales excellence
How you can reinforce information after your boot camp
The key metrics that determine the success of an onboarding program
How sales enablement is structured and who owns it at MongoDB
“At MongoDB, we have a pretty thoughtful and structured approach to our new-hire onboarding. The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and solution sets. The second step is to build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify their opportunities, setting great meetings with the right people and then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects.”
That is the vision behind the sales onboarding strategy at MongoDB. MongoDB is a leading technology company who spends nearly six times the industry average onboarding their sales reps. In this episode of the Sales Excellence Podcast, Jeremy Powers, Senior Director of Sales Enablement, shares how they structure their sales onboarding and boot camps to maximize their results.
“I think we took somewhere around 11 months before a rep was productive. In the last six to eight months we have really fine-tuned this onboarding program using Mindtickle from the boot camps to advanced sales training. And what we have seen is very consistently our people getting ramped in about five months. So we’ve gone from 11 plus months down to five which is just tremendous,” exclaims Jeremy.
When it’s time for your sales organization to invest in sales enablement and productivity
How to enable your sales managers to perform at their best by shifting their mindset
How to prioritize and continuously improve sales enablement and training initiatives
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“If you’ve got to double your revenue to stay on track with your projections, you can’t do that on 30k deals. And if marketing is doing great things and attracting really great logos, but sales aren’t doing the right things, you’re not going to get what you’re looking for. And if sales is doing a really good job targeting their accounts and they’re motivated to hit the phones, but marketing isn’t giving them any air cover you’re not going to get the lift you’re looking for.”
That was the problem the Marketo was facing by relying on inbound marketing for its sales leads. So it decided to find a new way to scale, and leveraging the power of Account Based Marketing Engagio was born. Ray Carroll moved to Engagio as VP of Sales and was tasked with the job of building and scaling this next generation marketing technology company. As the business grew the issue of sales productivity became more apparent.
“The incremental efficiency on the average sale price, the time it takes to get a rep to productivity, the average sales cycle; you get those gains through having a first-class sales enablement function. And that’s why you see companies like Box, Zendesk, and HubSpot have Directors of Sales Productivity. Because if you can get 500 people with all deals at a 1% more close rate or making their deal cycle less, that is a significant uplift. That’s bigger than any single deal which you close for half a million dollars,” explains Carroll.
Thanks to sales enablement the role of the sales manager is also changing. “Managers have to realize that your job no longer is having your name in lights or closing the deal. It’s helping your team be as good at their job at scale, and only when you do that will you win as a team. It’s shifting from tactical to strategic.”
Listen now
to find out how Carroll has helped Engagio make the transformative shift from tactical to strategic sales.
Why decision coaching is important to your customers
What are the must-have components of a top-notch sales training program
How to coach your sales reps so that it sticks
The link between mindfulness and sales performance
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“The new problem customers are facing is that they have too many choices. And making decisions are difficult because they’re so distracted, everybody wants their attention instantly. Customers now really need somebody’s help to coach them through the decision process.”
And that’s where the modern salesperson can step in according to Jeffrey Lipsius, Author, and President of Selling To The Point. With over 30 years experience in training salespeople, Lipsius has seen how the sales game has changed in the digital age.
“The salesperson has to be the learner, not the teacher. So the salesperson has to be very customer aware. Because if you are customer aware then you’re going to be able to respond in a way that’s going to help the customer make better decisions. All this talk about salespeople getting customer buying resistance, handling objections and being difficult in prospecting, that all goes away if the customer believes that the salesperson is there to help them make a better decision.”
That’s why Lipsius believes that decision coaching is a very important tool for a salesperson add to their tool chest. “A salesperson really only has to pay attention to 3 factors in the customer’s decision process,” says Lipsius. Listen now
to find out Lipsius’ three C’s to the customer decision process.
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have twenty-four hour days” ~ Zig Ziglar
Sales enablement is more complex for a distributed field sales team. After all, employees don’t have the luxury of wandering across the hall to ask a question. To get you started, here are six points to consider as you’re developing your field enablement strategy.
1. What is the role of sales enablement and management in your organization?
Understanding who has responsibility for what in your business can influence how you structure the development of your sales enablement initiatives. In some businesses, sales enablement takes on the broad role of enabling the entire sales organization, while in other organizations they just focus on providing sales collateral and product content. This leaves local and field enablement in the hands of sales managers, who may also be distributed, making it even harder to develop effective enablement initiatives.
Another factor to consider is the proximity of each team. If your field teams are all located in the same state, there may be more opportunity for them to meet periodically to discuss issues and updates and share success stories. Whereas if you have a globally distributed team more enablement effort may be required to foster collaboration and communication between teams and individual reps.
2. What are your business objectives?
Your business objectives are the guiding light that drives all aspects of your enablement strategy. While increased revenue is a given objective for every business, your underlying business needs may differ considerably depending on the agility and stage of your sales organization. If you’re a high growth startup that’s scaling rapidly by hiring, ramping up reps in remote locations is likely to be high on your agenda. Whereas if you have a large and distributed sales team, then feeding them ongoing competitive updates and ensuring your reps are executing your business strategy effectively is your number one priority.
Regardless of your industry, accountability is key for field sales enablement. Particularly as your managers can’t be physically present to see the activity or application of knowledge by each rep every day. This means leveraging technology, to track their knowledge and how they apply it, is essential.
3. What type of sales do your reps need to do?
Field sales reps tend to focus on either complex or consultative selling (like selling security software to a Fortune 500 company) or simple commodity selling (for example selling FMCG beverages and electronics to mom and pop stores). Being agile at scale is a priority for both scenarios. This is where enabling mobile communication with bite-sized push notifications is important.
Pro tip: We’ve seen gamification work really well to drive engagement in these circumstances.
By the nature of their role field sales reps also tend to work remotely. This means they miss out on water cooler conversations with their peers about how they closed that big deal. Peer success stories that can be delivered through a mobile app are a good way to open up communication across geographies and learn from each other.
4. What kind of sales culture do you want?
There is often a danger that field sales reps can miss out on being part of a team culture or even develop their own individual work culture. Because many field reps don’t see their colleagues regularly that doesn’t mean they can’t be part of a broader team culture, it’s just harder for you to create.
The first place to start is by clearly defining what type of sales culture you want your team to have. How should your reps position themselves when in front of a customer? What values should they share? Once you have defined your vision you can then determine how to execute it. Whether it’s through a weekly podcast where you share business updates and wins or structured coaching programs.
With field teams, it’s also important to pulse check their engagement more regularly to ensure they’re still satisfied or have any feedback to improve the culture. This can be achieved by pushing a quick survey to their mobile device each month or quarter. This one small exercise could potentially save you thousands of dollars in staff turnover in the long-run.
5. What does your industry/product/customer require?
As field reps tend to spend more time out of the office, their mobile device can become like a pseudo office if they’re enabled well. This is where the value of mobile sales enablement really comes to the fore for a field rep. So if they’re selling FMCG products they’re likely to need access to large catalogs, promotional and pricing updates, while a niche software rep may need access to complex product information.
Enabling your field reps with content that they can access on their mobile device, even when they’re offline, that is easy to search and bookmark can be a life-saver. They won’t be left fumbling through huge documents when they’re sitting in front of a customer and can quickly search and read up on something before a big meeting.
6. When do they need information?
Field reps are time poor and always on the go. While it may be convenient for you to push out information as it becomes available, it may make more sense for them to have periodic updates. By feeding your field sales reps information and content when they actually need it, they are more likely to consume it. So consider whether a spreadsheet of next month’s pricing updates should be sent out now or at the end of the month.
These six points each help provide the basis for putting in place a comprehensive framework for field enablement. Once you have a framework in place and your initiatives outlined, you’ll be on your way to achieving your business objectives.
In this 15 minute interview Duchen and Reisert outline:
What makes a great SDR onboarding program;
How you can reduce the ramp up time for your new SDRs;
What role a manager plays in the onboarding process; and
What sales enablement professionals can do to improve the success of their SDRs.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes or find it here “Onboarding SDRs can actually be really tricky especially for an organization that is doing this for the first time,” explains Ryan Reisert who’s seen his fair share of inside sales onboarding programs.
Along with Mike Duchen, Reisert is co-founder of Inside Sales Bootcamp, a sales acceleration engine for high growth. They help companies onboard and ramp up their SDRs.
“I see a lot of companies struggle when they start to create their outbound program. Because they’ve had success with inbound, they’ve got a lot of leads coming in, but they start their outbound function without actually going through the data or at least trying to understand what expected outcomes can look like. Without setting that up front, you’re set yourself up for long term failure,” he continues.
“This is not an easy role when you look at what the day to day of an SDR actually looks like,” adds Duchen. “A rep will be doing 100 activities per day, every day. It’s a lot of work. And on top of that, they’re probably getting rejected eight or nine out of ten times.”
Inside sales is a tough job, which is why every enablement initiative you implement that helps your SDRs do their job will lead them (and you) on the road to success.
You’ve just recruited some really promising sales reps with an impressive track record as rainmakers. On day one, HR arranges their computer, gives them a smartphone, and takes them through the company’s online onboarding portal. The following month is a blur of job-specific training workshops and e-learning, as your new reps try to get up-to-speed on your product, target customers, and industry intel. The volume of information they are scrambling to absorb is overwhelming.
Fast forward 8 months and the rainmakers appear to be going through a dry spell. Many of your sales teams haven’t met their quota and your Sales Managers complain that their reps don’t seem to understand the product, let alone the needs of their customers. And you’re left having to explain the lackluster sales results to the Board.
It’s easy to blame the recruitment process here, but it’s more likely that your sales onboarding program could benefit from a more systematic approach.
You are not alone, according to a research done by Brigade Group, 50% of new hires never meet their quota even after onboarding.
What is onboarding for sales reps?
Onboarding is about making sure that the sales rep is truly sales-ready. It’s about understanding the industry, building detailed product knowledge, getting under the skin of the customer persona, learning how to qualify a lead, and pitching to them effectively. In short, onboarding is about learning “what to sell” and “how to sell”.
While new hire orientation can be done relatively quickly, onboarding is a process that can take up to 12 months. In my experience, with a robust process, the right tools, and effective measures, it is possible to cut down sales onboarding time by at least 30-40%. In fact, I’ve seen companies with about 100 sales reps increase their revenue by 8% as a result of effective onboarding. The potential value to the top line can be even higher for smaller sales teams.
I suggest following a five-step high-level sales onboarding process:
How do you measure if the onboarding was effective?
Following a process is one thing, but it’s only useful if you can measure and track how effective the onboarding has been for the new hire. I’ve found it to be most effective to benchmark new hires against existing sales reps. While no individual is the same, generally your existing sales reps fall into three categories:
The A Players – These are your high performing sales reps who consistently exceed targets
The B Players – They are just about meeting targets, and need some attention to keep them on track
The C Players – These reps need some help and guidance to get them performing on quota
By predicting which category the new hires fall into, your sales managers can personalize their coaching efforts based on the needs of each individual. I’d suggest using the following 4 metrics to measure your new sales hires and the effectiveness of your onboarding program:
Time to Complete Training – Where your training includes some self-paced learning modules and assessment, you can measure how long it takes someone to complete the program and demonstrate that they’ve absorbed the knowledge. This is one of the reasons using an effective online training program is particularly helpful for sales onboarding as it lets you automatically track this metric.
Time for Sales Readiness – Ready to engage customers without the assistance of a more seasoned team member.
Time to Close First Sales Deal – The amount of time it takes to make the first sale is a landmark measurement for both the individual and the business. However, when coupled with Time to Meet Quota, it provides a good indicator of the potential success of the new hire as well.
Time to Meet Quota – At Mindtickle, we define productivity as the first month that the sales rep achieves their quota so this measurement is the most appropriate for our business. However, other industries with longer lead times or more seasonal products may consider it more appropriate to measure the first quarter in which quota is achieved instead. The important thing with this metric is ensuring that it is easy to measure.
Average sales cycle (time to close deals) – In my experience, the time spent to close a deal is the best proxy for productivity. It shows how efficient the rep is in taking a customer through the sales process and getting a result. It also should be easy to measure through the tools available in your CRM.
This also helps provide a handy framework when you’re reporting upwards on how your new recruits are performing.
Using this process and measurement framework provides not only your managers with a well-structured process, but also gives your new hires the required support that will help them become sales-ready sooner and close deals faster.
So, are you ready to increase your top-line revenue?
This post is based on a webinar on how to accelerate new hire productivity for consistent production with sales onboarding. You can listen to the entire webinar here.
CrowdStrike is one of the fastest growing technology companies in Silicon Valley. It is on a mission to stop breaches through next-generation anti-virus, endpoint detection and response (EDR) and managed hunting – all in the cloud. CrowdStrike has a unique ability to not only prevent cyber attacks but also respond to malicious attacks. It’s no surprise then that they were recently ranked number 40 on
Deloitte’s’ technology Fast 500
, North America, recognized for the exponential growth of 2,665% in the past 3 years. Thanks to this stunning growth trajectory the company’s sales force has doubled recently and is continuing to grow rapidly. Rapid growth comes with its challenges
Trying to maintain exponential growth was CrowdStrike’s biggest sales enablement challenge. To achieve this Tracey Meersman, Director of Sales Enablement, believed the key was to focus in on how they onboarded their new sales hires. It’s a sound strategy when you consider that 60% of businesses with onboarding programs ramp up faster and achieve double the top line revenue per rep with an agile structured onboarding process.
To create their successful onboarding program CrowdStrike ensured it was: The onboarding program has five distinct phases
“The complete program is pretty quick, just 90 days with ongoing mentoring and coaching opportunities. One of the things that we’re tasked with is helping our B players become A players, and to ramp people as quickly as possible as the cost of onboarding is very expensive. And we’re tasked with trying to get everyone ramped on their phones, so they’re out in the field, selling and achieving quota as quickly as possible,”
comments Meersman.
The 5-part onboarding program was designed to achieve this while incorporating CrowdStrike’s four building blocks of onboarding; compliance, clarity, connection, and culture.
Pre-Boarding
Phase one begins prior to the new hire commencing with CrowdStrike, leveraging technology to deliver courses to future employees. “
Topics include the company’s strategy, resources, benefits, and compliance. The objective is to identify CrowdStrike’s advantages, complete onboarding activities and reaffirm their decision to join CrowdStrike,”
explains Meersman.
Pre-Bootcamp
“Phase 2 occurs on the new hire’s start date with a virtual webinar. Topics include a product overview, initiatives and most importantly an opportunity to ask questions. The objective is to accelerate their ramp and productivity by utilizing tools and resources, engaging in the culture and finalizing onboarding requirements. For sales new hires, they are added to the CrowdStrike Sales Academy. A learning platform powered by Mindtickle which we use specifically for sales. New hires are assigned specific learning activities related to their role. This includes the mobile capability to complete learning through the Mindtickle mobile app,”
continues Meersman.
Bootcamp
“And Phase 3 is an in-person program featuring executive presentations and departmental overview. For new sales hires this includes an additional 1.5-day interactive boot camp to align selling strategies to the company’s growth objectives by articulating our key messages and unique business value. New hires are onboarded a minimum of one week prior to attending the in-person program and there is pre-work to provide foundational knowledge. The boot camp provides an opportunity to pitch back messages in CrowdStrike’s unique business value as well as align with the sales process in the key prospect and customer program. “That allows us to be able to use a scenario-based approach through the Mindtickle platform as well,”
explains Meersman.
Post-Bootcamp
With boot camp completed the next aspect is to align the learning with real-world selling.
“So how often have we heard from sales reps, ‘I’ve never used this or that. It’s not what my customers want/need to hear’? More than once, right? So our onboarding program aligns with real-world sales scenarios with learning activities at specific intervals in their onboarding journey including the opportunity for sales scenarios and coaching by their manager. they also have the opportunity to have a buddy to be able to reinforce the learning and provide just-in-time information,”
explains Meersman.
Continuous Reinforcement
“
[Continuous reinforcement] is also a key component that includes personalization, scalability, structured and milestone-based approaches. So each learning activity in CrowdStrike’s sales academy includes a knowledge transfer. We have the ability to teach hires, not penalize them through the use of what Mindtickle refers to as ‘tickles’. So those would be matching true-false to multiple choice questions. There are 16 different tickles within Mindtickle and we try to utilize all of that. We also do continual learning in terms of providing a quick update and courses. We try to push those out on a weekly basis so the new hires are not just getting onboarding information they’re also getting just in time information that’s related to their role,”
outlines Meersman. Milestones help drive consistency
“It’s imperative for our growth and success that the program is standard and consistent,”
explains Meersman.
“Therefore there are key milestones within the onboarding program at weeks one to four as well as at 60 and 90 days. CrowdStrikes’ Sales Academy provides the structure through workflows, with key milestones to be successfully completed at each interval. The sales rep needs to complete the activities before moving forward to the next onboarding phase. When we’re looking at the components of the onboarding program we’re looking at five distinct areas; one is, understanding the buyer, understanding CrowdStrike’s offerings, beating the competition, CrowdStrike’s differentiation, including our unique business value, use cases and success metrics and all the sales tools and resources.” Personalization helps each new hire learn what they need to
When you’re onboarding tens or hundreds of new sales reps at a time personalization is a huge challenge. So how does CrowdStrike achieve this?
“First the process and programs need to be personalized for each role. As with many sales organizations, there are various target markets and associated roles and responsibilities. The program needs to be role-based. So our onboarding guide, though applicable for the entire sales team, has call outs for specific roles,”
explains Meersman. This is easily achieved thanks to Mindtickle’s deep integration with
salesforce.com
that enables the onboarding program administrators to allocate aspects of the course to specific roles, markets or responsibilities. Scalability is achieved by leveraging mobile technology
“The other key component of sales onboarding at CrowdStrike is that it had to be scalable. Utilizing CrowdStrike Sales Academy ensures that the sale onboarding program is scalable through the app based Mindtickle platform. From day 1 forward the program is available 24/7 to new hires. And soon the platform will have the capability for managers to be able to run their own report to track progress,”
comments Meersman. Experiential learning aligns to real-world selling
“When we looked at our program we also wanted to be able to blend learning and activity. Within our approach and utilizing the Mindtickle platform, we’re able to provide a blend of self-paced knowledge combined with activities that are reviewed by the rep’s manager, which provides a virtual coaching opportunity. This is really key for the manager to be involved in the new hire’s onboarding,”
explains Meersman.
“
This is accomplished by having the reps complete what is known in the Mindtickle platform as missions, that are activities that your rep completes. These include elevator pitches and value proposition as well as email and voicemail pamphlets And respond to specific situations including objection-handling, competitive scenarios etc. So rather than spend time and resources having the new rep deliver the poor pitch during our boot camp, they have to complete this within the CrowdStrike Sales Academy after boot camp. Again this is reviewed by their manager and provides an additional coaching opportunity.”
Experiential learning is also applied to peer-to-peer learning.
“From the experiential learning standpoint it is very key we get this all the time from reps. I’d like to see how one of my peers and how they pitch, how they handle the objection. In the real world they’re often presenting to executives, so they want to be able to build up that knowledge and see how their other peers are doing it as well.”
Utilizing Mindtickle’s app, CrowdStrike is also able to share peer examples so the reps can learn from each other in their own time as well.
“And we talk a lot about sales rep but there’s also the capability for a day technical salespeople to be able to do a demo as well through the platform. So it’s not just the pitches for the field sales rep but also applicable for the technical sales people as well,”
adds Meersman Communication between reps and management enhances coaching opportunities
Communication should go two ways. Leveraging the Mindtickle app CrowdStrike is able to facilitate this kind of communication.
“This allows the new rep and manager to effectively communicate progress, areas of improvement and also coaching opportunities. Reports are also available to managers so that they can track that progress. Right now I provide those reports to them but there will be a self-service portal coming soon,”
“Additionally each new hire should buddy with a peer with whom they connect on a regular basis, learn how to be successful in their role and feel comfortable asking questions they don’t want to ask their manager. The buddy reinforces the key learnings and helps the new hire if they require training on utilization of key tools and resources. So think of all of those questions that you don’t want to ask your manager like how to use Salesforce, find specific tools and resources etc.” And make it easy … for reps and for sales enablement
Tools have to be easy to use otherwise they’re not really enabling the rep. “
And that’s really a key component because so many sales reps live in salesforce they have access to the Mindtickle platform through salesforce. So there’s no need to login to an official website. This makes it very very easy and because the Mindtickle app has the mobile capability as well it’s also very easy to access.”
But enablement and collaboration are also important for the administrators of the system as Meersman explains, “
I am a strong party of one. A one-woman show in terms of creating and maintaining the content. I know of many who are probably in the same situation. The good news is that I have a great relationship with our product marketing organization. And we work together to be able to create content. And also others meet within the organization depending on what the topic is.”
“So my commercial for Mindtickle is nobody ever said that it was fun using an LMS. I love the Mindtickle platform and our reps do as well because we have the mobile capability, we have the tickles or the gamification and social aspects, and we can push out bite-size chunks to people as well as perform better missions which are really the scenario-based approaches. And that provides reinforcement.”
Meersman continues “
My philosophy is it does not have to be so hard. In every sales enablement role I’ve had, it’s been a new role and I basically had to onboard myself which in turn led me to create onboarding programs for sale new hires. It was challenging for me, I didn’t have it to be challenging for the new sales hire. It’s my role and responsibility to connect the dots for sales reps to make it easier to learn quickly and attain specific productivity metrics.” CrowdStrike’s onboarding program has been a success for management and reps
CrowdStrike has seen impressive results with their new hire sales onboarding. “
The typical ramp time for an enterprise software sales rep in our industry is six to 12 months. However, we’ve been able to fully ramp reps in half that time. Over 70% of ramped reps achieved or exceeded quota in their first quarter following their ramp.”
Meersman continues,
“We define ramp as the rep’s ability to achieve quota.”
“Our boot camp has received an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5. 99% of reps recommend the program, but in terms of value, our ratings are 100%. And we’re also correlating the training to learning. Out of our top 10 reps, the majority has been onboard for less than one year but are top in completing training. And several of them have been promoted. We also use KPIs and our onboarded reps are achieving or overachieving those KPIs as well,”
Meersman says proudly.
And the feedback from the field speaks for itself.
“Of all my years of various on boarding / new hire trainings I will say that this was the best experience and easiest to grasp.” ~
New sales rep
“You’ve got it down to a science, and I just wanted you to know how valuable it was in helping to get me ramped up.” ~
His formula for creating an effective sales enablement function from scratch;
How sales enablement can earn a seat at the executive table; and
How sales enablement can help businesses adapt to the challenges of managing successful multi-generational sales teams.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud, Stitcher, iTunes or find it here “Sales enablement is the hub that spokes out to every part of the organization. We work with product marketing, product management, marketing, sales, IT etc. So we kind of translate languages if you will, between those groups.”
As Head of Global Enablement at Oracle Marketing Cloud, that makes Roderick Jefferson chief translator. His collaborative approach to sales enablement means that he focuses on deciding what the business requires.
“The one thing we never want to do in enablement is assuming that we know what a stakeholder needs. So we sit down and ask those questions, like how do you define success beyond simply wrap up time? What other components would you like to see added to enablement? What do you see as the deficiencies now?” comments Jefferson.
“Because enablement has to be a sales partner, it cannot be a sales scribe that you just throw things at,” he continues. “You only think about sales training when something is broken. Think about enablement as a fabric that weaves across and through the entire understanding and culture of a company.”
It’s this perspective that Jefferson has followed throughout his career in sales and sales enablement. Listen now to hear how Jefferson has built sales enablement functions from the ground up at blue-chip companies including salesforce.com, eBay, and Oracle.
Sales enablement is more complex for a distributed field sales team. After all, employees don’t have the luxury of wandering across the hall to ask a question. To get you started, here are six points to consider as you’re developing your field enablement strategy.
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