An extrovert is “an outgoing, gregarious person who thrives in dynamic environments and seeks to maximize social engagement.” That sounds like what you’d expect a typical sales rep to be like.
But modern buyers don’t want to be “sold to” anymore. Gartner found that 33% of buyers want a “seller-free sales experience,” while LinkedIn found that 88% of consumers will only make a purchase when they see a salesperson as a “trusted advisor.” Today, buyers want to learn about your product, find solutions to their problems, and be confident that they’re making the best decision. They want to be front and center in any sales conversation, with your sales rep in a supporting role.
The days of pushy salespeople who talk non-stop and never let you get a word in edgewise are long gone. Your most extroverted sales reps may thrive at networking events and in large groups of people, but talking will only get them so far. Buyers are looking to buy from people they can trust, so sellers need to develop skills more closely associated with introverts and master the consultative approach to selling.
Active listening
Active listening involves engaging with your prospects in a meaningful way to show that you understand what they’re asking from you. It’s an essential skill for sales reps to master for building rapport and earning trust.
Stephanie McSwiney, VP of Sales at Frontify, believes that active listening is one of the most challenging sales skills to hire for. She explained, “We want sales reps who really understand the client and can match their needs with our use cases. This can be complex and requires strong active listening skills, which are very hard to find in new sales hires.”
To assess your team’s active listening skills, start by reviewing call recordings to see how much time your reps talk on their calls compared with their prospects. Our State of Sales Readiness 2022 benchmark report found that customers talk for 57% of the call in top-performing reps’ discovery calls. In contrast, the average customer talk time across all the analyzed calls was just 44%.
Then look at how that talk time is divided up. Is there a healthy dialogue with customers asking lots of questions and sharing their challenges with your rep? Or is your rep talking in one solid block with minimal engagement from the prospect? Our report found that the average longest monologue by sales reps on calls (where they spoke uninterrupted) was 1 minute 37 seconds. So if your reps are talking for more than 90 seconds in a single block, they may need a reminder to give the prospect space to talk and ask questions.
Finally, you can look at whether your reps ask clarifying questions on their calls, such as, “Did I understand that correctly?” or “Have I got that right?” These questions demonstrate that a rep actively listens to their prospect and engages with what they say.
Understanding buyer needs
Understanding buyer needs is the ability to take what a prospect says and, from there, determine what they need from your product or service. This includes the challenges they’re experiencing and the problems they need to solve. It’s an essential sales skill rooted in a rep’s capacity to empathize with their prospect. If they can master this skill, they’ll be able to successfully align their product demos and discussions with what the buyer is looking for.
Freya Ward, global sales director at Headley Media, explained, “A good salesperson needs to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch.”
“A good salesperson needs to be able to listen to clients and understand their needs rather than just jumping in with a sales pitch.”
For your extroverted sales reps, this may require a change in how they would naturally approach early sales calls. Train all your reps to focus on the discovery process first before they start pitching your solution.
For example, our benchmark report found that sales reps ask an average of 11 questions during the discovery process, which is a lot to fit into a 30-minute call. This shows that reps are keen to understand their buyers and are trying to dig into their challenges and motivations. For McSwiney of Frontify, understanding buyer needs is a must-have skill for her sellers. “Our AEs [account executives] really need to understand the process and drivers of our customers and match them with the different use cases for our product,” she explained. “It’s often a very educational sales process.”
Call planning is preparing for every call with prospects by researching the company and the person you’re speaking to and reviewing sales notes and CRM records from previous interactions. Reps need to appear professional and trustworthy to buyers, so they must ensure they’re ready for every sales conversation.
According to Crunchbase, top sellers spend “an average of six hours every week researching their prospects.” That’s 15% of a 40-hour workweek, which may feel like a big-time drain. However, Oracle found that 11% of prospects “ghost” sellers because the seller wasn’t properly prepared for their conversation. It’s worth investing a few hours to plan and prep for calls if the alternative is losing 11% of your prospects.
Many extroverted sales reps have learned to rely on their conversational skills and ability to think on their feet. They may feel confident they can run their calls on the fly and be hesitant to invest much time preparing for individual calls. Sales managers should help their reps understand the benefits of effective call planning and provide training materials to make it as easy as possible for your sellers.
For example, you could share pre-call checklists or run practice calls for product demos, discovery calls, or closing calls. These will allow your sellers complete role-play scenarios that match their upcoming calls, so they can prepare fully and make the best impression on their prospects.
We’ve also developed a sales readiness framework that includes five core steps to help sellers achieve a continuous state of excellence:
This framework is designed to help reps develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors they need to be fully prepared for any sales scenario. A sales readiness program ensures reps have the product and industry knowledge they need, plus access to relevant content when they need it, to provide a first-class sales experience for your prospects.
Create an ideal rep profile to document the skills your reps really need to be successful
The skills that actually help close deals and generate revenue for your organization aren’t the traditional sales skills anymore. So when you’re hiring new sales talent, don’t rely on outdated stereotypes and only hire reps who can deliver a killer sales pitch. Instead, prioritize “soft” sales skills like relationship-building and communication over more traditional skills.
Analyze the skillsets of your top-performing reps to identify the competencies that most closely correlate with sales success in your team. Then, create an ideal rep profile to document those skills. This provides an empirical way to assess new hires and identify the people who will actually help your company close more deals — rather than falling into the trap of only hiring new reps who fit the traditional stereotype of an extroverted salesperson.
This summer, Mindtickle is hitting the road for our 2022 Road to Readiness Roadshow. After more than two years of virtual operations, we couldn’t be more excited to catch up with our customers face-to-face.
Each half-day session, held in cities across the US and UK, will give attendees the opportunity to connect with peers, gain insights into making sales readiness a reality, and hear what’s new at Mindtickle.
Read on to learn where the roadshow is headed, what you can expect, and why you should register today.
Coming soon to a city near you
Think you need to travel across the country to connect with peers and access actionable insights? Think again! The Mindtickle Road to Readiness Roadshow is coming to you.
We have three planned stops on our US leg of the roadshow.
The Bay Area
Tuesday, June 7
The Marker Hotel
Chicago
Wednesday, June 15
Convene Willis Tower
New York
Wednesday, June 22
Convene 75 Rock
We’re also making a stop in London in the early fall. We’re finalizing the exact data and venue and will share those details as soon as they’re available.
Who is the roadshow for?
Just about everyone on your revenue team will benefit from attending the Road to Readiness Roadshow.
Here’s what’s in it for some of your key team members.
Sales and revenue leaders: Hear from top revenue leaders about how they’re transforming their organizations, and leave with actionable insights from new research and case studies.
Sales enablement leaders: Create your own ideal rep profile and learn how to work with cross-functional stakeholders to align around transforming seller performance
Front line managers: Learn how to transform your coaching into an engine of quota attainment and seller retention, and find out how to use your tech stack to streamline your processes so you can spend more time helping on deals.
Sales and revenue ops: Unravel sales performance data from 350+ companies and learn how science is transforming how top revenue organizations approach selling.
Walk away with actionable insights to drive your sales readiness program
We’re confident that Road to Readiness Roadshow attendees will leave the event feeling energized and full of insights and ideas that can be applied right away to optimize their readiness strategy.
Here’s a sneak peek at some of the sessions that are in store for you.
New Industry Insights: The State of Sales Readiness
Have you ever found yourself wondering what top sales organizations are doing to ensure their reps are always ready to sell? Here’s your chance to find out.
During this panel discussion, we’ll discuss key insights from our 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report. You’ll also have the opportunity to hear how brands are applying strategies to unlock better sales performance and revenue results.
Interactive Workshop: What’s Your Ideal Rep Profile?
You’ve probably already identified your ideal customer profiles (ICP). But what about the other half of the revenue equation?
During this hands-on workshop, the experts at Mindtickle will help you create an Ideal Rep Profile (IRP) for your organization. We’ll also share examples of how Mindtickle customers are using IRPs to benchmark, track progress, and map sellers’ competency improvement to sales results.
Level Up: Creating a Coaching Culture
Everyone knows sales coaching is important. And when it’s done well, it can have a big impact on sales outcomes. But oftentimes, coaching becomes just another box to check.
In this session, we’ll discuss how you can establish processes and leverage technology to make coaching more actionable, personalized, and seamlessly integrated into your full readiness approach.
For a business to be effective, all teams need to work synergistically together and avoid operating in silos, especially sales and marketing. Optimizing outcomes for both teams means they need to prioritize constant communication and strong alignment on their end goals.
In this episode, Hannah and Tony chat with Chris Lynch, the CMO of Mindtickle. During the episode, they discuss how sales and marketing teams can come together in pursuit of a company’s mission and vision to work more effectively, how to tell your brand story, the importance of being truthful as marketers and salespeople, and finding success through remaining adaptable to change.
Tony: for a business to be effective. All teams need to work synergistically together and avoid operating in silos.
Hannah: But there are two specific teams that need to work together now more than ever. Sales and marketing? Absolutely.
Tony: And I think to optimize outcomes and meet or exceed sales targets, sales and marketing teams need to be in constant communication and strongly aligned on their end goals.
Hannah: Aligning on desired outcomes, strategies and tactics is key to success in today’s constantly shifting landscape.
Who is Chris Lynch?
Tony: Today’s guest has an intimate awareness of the need for alignment between sales and marketing teams. Chris, welcome to the show.
Hannah: Chris Lynch is the CMO of Mindtickle, and he’s here today to discuss how sales and marketing teams can come together to reach targets and optimize outcomes. We want to start by understanding a bit more about your career background and, more specifically, the things that have happened in your career that really helped you level up and were catalysts for change.
Chris: I’ve been a CMO for about six years now, and I still like to call myself a product marketer in a CMO’s shoes. But that was really never part of the plan. I wanted to be a journalist way before I got into sales and marketing, so if you had asked me back when I was 22 if this is what I’d be doing, I’m not sure I would have said, “Oh, you’re going to be an executive of a high-growth tech company.” I got my start in journalism and was working for a company called IDG (International Data Group). It was a really great experience because I started covering tech companies and asking lots of questions from, at the time, a kid who had never really worked in business. A lot of what I was doing was just sort of learning by observation. IDG let me move out to San Francisco because at the time there were novel companies coming out there — like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn — and I ended up sort of falling into business through happenstance.
Actually, I remember that I wanted to do PR and I was really sure I wanted to work at Google. I interviewed with eight people there and I found out that seven out of the eight liked me and one was a hard no. But it ended up being this really serendipitous moment because I was driving around in the valley that day and I met up with a guy named Ross Mayfield and he said, “Hey, I think you’d really have a bright future here.” And what was cool about it wasn’t necessarily great for the company, but it was great for me. Socialtext was one of those cautionary tales of being super early to a market. Your funding is kind of starting to draw down as everyone else is sort of ramping up, even though you had the idea a few years earlier. But for a kid who was then 24, it was an incredible opportunity because I got to work in sort of all facets of marketing. We were a lean team where you had to do a lot.
Most important, and what set the pace for my career moving forward, was that there were two groups that I really enjoyed sitting in the middle of. The cube I was sitting at was right next to the bullpen for sales. I was listening to them pitch companies every single day and some of them would loop pretty much the same narrative as their cold calling and doing outreach. And I could tell, even without being able to hear other people on the other side of the phone, what was going to be successful and what wasn’t.
So I talked a lot with them, and then I also spent this other part of my day with the product designers and engineers, and I applied my journalism skills at it, saying, “Hey, explain to me what you’re working on, what are you doing?” And then I would put that into plain English in our marketing materials. And lo and behold, that got my career off on a track of product marketing that ended up being in the marketing function.
Hannah: I love the fact that you had so many conversations that you could start to tell what was actually happening.
Tony: Can you tell us a little bit more about what brought you here?
Chris: There are two answers to that. The more pragmatic one is I was probably just going to go broke living in San Francisco as a journalist. I still ended up having a ton of fun during that time, but then life becomes complicated for different reasons.
But it really was about looking at sales and marketing as another opportunity for storytelling but doing so in a way where the challenge of persuading people is even harder because they know you’re trying to sell them something.
There was an inherent challenge in the idea of walking into a room and convincing someone that I could fundamentally shift their business and push them into a different stratosphere.
Moreover, working on a product you believe in and seeing that come to fruition is a really cool sensation —especially having that early on in my career. I also thought it was great being at that cross-section where you have the product and engineering on one side and then you have all the external go-to-market functions on the other, getting that context to understand both audiences and help triangulate some of the different types of considerations that people have in a growing business. That was really fun for me. I started to enjoy it. So, I think originally it started out of some basic Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And then, as I started climbing up the pyramid a little bit, some of the work just became more intellectually interesting to me.
Hannah: I’d love you to go into some detail about how you landed the role at Mindtickle. And I’m wondering what drew you to the company. And did you have a giggle when you first heard the name?
Chris: I didn’t have a giggle when I first heard the name because, at this point with tech companies, I feel like I’ve seen everything. My progression to Mindtickle started back when I was at Oracle. I ran global product marketing for the cloud business unit. They were pulling in all these different players in the marketing space. There my job was really to be the chief storyteller. It was figuring out being able to integrate all those products together into one offering. How do you at least make it sound like a cohesive thing?
So I did that, and then I became CMO of a company called Cision, which is in the PR software market. Similar deal They had been acquiring companies like PR Newswire, a slew of different software providers that focus on PR professionals. And again, it was, “How do you pull all of these things together into a cohesive story?” With Mindtickle, there were really two things that drew me.
One was that we have a very comprehensive product that spans a number of different submarkets in the tech space. But really, what drew me to the company was that I’ve lived the problems before that Mindtickle is trying to solve,
Tony: You obviously have a very diverse background and you’ve said some great things about the companies that you’ve worked at. What would you say, though, are some of the qualities that you have that have really contributed to bringing you to where you are right now. I think I have some ideas but it’s always interesting to hear how someone thinks about themselves.
Chris: That’s always a tough one. But if I were to sum it up, I think it would be in a few key areas. One is that I’m honest and direct. I think marketers spend too much time using their positioning and messaging skills internally. And what I would say is that save that for when you’re out in the market competing, leave it all out in the field when you’re in the market, and do the best job you can to position effectively.
I think that, particularly when you’re dealing with sales, it’s really important to be honest and direct. Be truthful about where you are with your performance, where you’re still gapped, and where you’re seeing challenges.
Another key quality for me is that, although I consider myself a humble person, I do feel like I’m on top of my game. I’m probably peaking at my ability to tell great stories and make compelling messaging. I feel like, if you gave me any of our competitor products, I could probably, in a very short period of time, build a really compelling pitch from it. Even more effective than what they might be doing. And that’s with all respect to my competitors — some of them have skills I could never dream of having. But I think that I’m very good at that.
The third thing I’d say is I’m always in it for the team and the company, and I feel like that’s a little bit unusual in this data-driven modern world. For me, the biggest satisfaction is just seeing the company be successful.
Hannah: Going back to when you were talking about your core skillset and your superpowers, you were talking a little bit about positioning and working on the brand. What things do you have in the pipeline from a marketing perspective? And what overarching goals are these things helping to drive towards?
Chris: There are a few things that we have going right now. I’m really thinking through what the next version of our digital experience looks like for our prospects and making that as compelling as possible. Tony’s probably heard me mention this internally at one of the town halls, but like I feel like selling went through this phase of the relationship sale, then there was the value sell — and you can really date yourself in the sales community based on what you say. The relationship sell worked its way even through the 90s where you had the three-martini lunch things… and then the early 2000s were all about the value sell. Like how much value are you demonstrating to your customer? I feel like we’ve moved into the era of the insight sell, where it’s actually not enough to say, “Oh, I can provide value for you.”
The odds are, in a lot of these more mature markets, there are multiple companies that can provide, more or less, a similar value. I think it’s more like, can you tell a prospect something interesting or something they haven’t thought of? As I think about our marketing, for me, it comes down to can we provide experiences that help our prospect deliver more insight inside of their companies.
We’ve been really advocating for this ideal profile concept, right? All marketers have ideal customer profiles. Sales leaders should have an ideal rep profile. We’re working through a digital experience where people can come to our site, get some interesting information about their organization, and then kind of turn back at least an introductory perspective on what their ideal profile could be. So we’re really looking to make compelling content experiences that help prospects have that insight. That’s one key thing we’re really focused on right now.
The other thing is, like a lot of marketing shops in B2B right now, we’re working hard to rationalize what an ideal funnel looks like. I think the emergence of account-based marketing has really created a fervor within the B2B marketing community because, for a lot of folks, particularly those who had worked in the demand side of the house for a while, it ended up being this interesting change of the goalpost. If you had been working in the demand realm and found the grind of just generating leads to be a bear. It’s nice to just flip the script and change the narrative and say, “Oh, well, actually there’s an addressable market of accounts here that we should go after.”
For me, intent models and some of that stuff that the ABM providers have are very interesting and they’re nice guidelines as to where you want to go in market. But I also think that staying very true to the persona you’re trying to reach and through market understanding have people come to your site who you can really solve a problem for. And I want to make sure that our system is flexible enough to accommodate those different people as they funnel through. When I worked at Oracle, I would use the term adaptive. I want our marketing to be very adaptive. I want it to be able to cater to different types of people in the revenue function and make sure they’re getting the experience that they want.
Hannah: Tony, the world of sales and marketing actually have a lot more in common than you might think.
Tony: Yes. As Chris mentioned, both sales and marketing rely on excellent storytelling skills, but even more so in sales because you’re really trying to convince someone to invest in something when they know it’s your job to do so.
Hannah: I think that really underscores the importance of believing in whatever it is that you’re selling because if your passion and enthusiasm for the product isn’t genuine, people might sense that and be less inclined to go through the buyer journey with you.
Tony: Yeah. And Chris is living proof of this relationship as he’s been on both sides of the equation,
Hannah: I think it’s so interesting that he started his career as a journalist and writer. He’s put his skills to good use as a marketer, learning to really tell the story of a brand and the products or services he’s selling.
Tony: So let’s hear more of Chris’s insights from his unique CMO perspective. What are some of the current challenges that you’re facing with your team and your day-to-day role starting from being brand new in the middle of this pandemic and changing roles and a lot of it was not in person. You’re doing a lot of things remotely. So how have you really tried to work through the challenges?
Chris: I’d say the biggest challenge in a company like ours, that is probably growing at a rate that is well above industry standards, is that you have to run this parallel workstream in your day which, on one hand, is very similar to our partners in sales. It’s like, on one end, we’re being asked to hit our numbers, our pipeline goals, all the things that we need to do to contribute to the business. And then in parallel, it’s like we need to build this nice, beautiful house that we want to be our dream home for years into the future. This means things like building a new website, elevating the brand, updating some of the infrastructure, and more glossy initiatives. That itself is a massive list.
And then on top of that, you’re trying to manage the daily grind of the business. And so, for me, the biggest challenge as a CMO is, frankly, that a lot of my day is looking through the prism of should I be telling this person to focus a little bit more on the immediate thing? Or do I have them kind of focus more on this where-we-want-to-be type of project? And there are consequences in both directions. It’s like if you pull them off that, it may have a little bit of impact on some of your day-to-day metrics, but then when you don’t start building the other thing, you’re also creating debt for yourself in a different capacity. So I’d say, at a high level, that’s our biggest challenge: making sure that we’re able to balance where we want to go with meeting the daily demands of the business.
What I’ve observed with marketing so far is that, like with a lot of functions, the pandemic laid bare some things that we don’t need to do in-person — things around budgeting and even media mix planning and some other stuff that we do. It’s worked perfectly fine over Zoom.
There are two areas of my function that I think have been more constrained remotely. One is the creative aspect. There is always going to be a part of marketing that depends on the energy of being in a room with other people while you’re brainstorming a campaign and whiteboarding and putting your computers and iPads and phones down and really all giving all your attention to each other to an idea. I miss that and I’m looking forward to that coming back.
And the second part I would say is the PDR or, in some companies they call it SDR, function that rolls up through marketing. I do think that’s been a tougher function for remote work in certain cases. Not to say that it can’t be done effectively, but I think there’s a real energy to that role when you have a number of bidders sitting in proximity to each other. They’re getting a little bit of that verbal camaraderie and feedback, getting that direct kind of hands-on coaching. I think that, like every company, we’ve done our best to try to use the virtual tools available to us to make that a thing. But I think that’s another area where in-person interaction is super important, particularly if you look at the hiring profile of those types of apps, like where they are in their career — I think in-person matters a lot there.
Hannah: Chris had an interesting point about trying to balance everything that’s happening and the overarching things that you’re working towards, but also trying to meet the demands of the business and sales in a very demanding business unit. It’s an immediate need for a customer who, if you just give me this one thing, it’s going to be millions, right? So there’s always that kind of dollar value that adds to the urgency. What does that alignment look like for you? What does that sales and marketing alignment look like? What are the parameters when you go in? What are the two or three go-to things that you typically look at or try to work at fixing to create better alignment?
Chris: So, I think number one, I like to look at the full spectrum of resources that are made available to sales. So they’re sort of the all-boats-rise stuff — that would be like you’re branding just generally some of your demand programs that you’re running and things you’re doing to drive revenue — to drive pipeline for the business. I like to look at the full spectrum of those things because if I do that, it helps me deal with the case-by-case stuff in a more thoughtful way. And I think that one of the things that will probably always be the hallmark of any B2B marketing that I run is that we go heavy on product marketing investment out of the gate.
Once I joined Mindtickle, not only did we build out new messaging because we have all these innovations in the sales readiness platform, we then built out discrete messaging as well. We wanted to provide a toolset with which customers could scale up or down appropriately. But first, I looked at the whole spectrum. It’s like, OK, what have we provided? And is that getting us 80 percent of what the sellers need in a lot of their deals and pretty much just working tirelessly till we get there? Because then, relative to some of the one-off requests, it makes it a little easier because there’s more back and forth that can happen in that conversation. “Well. Have you used X, Y and Z?” “Yes, I have, and I’ve used that and I still am now at this point” or “Well, by the way, the morale on my team is a lot better.”
Once they’ve already been told that stuff they’ve worked really hard on already got utilized, and they’re still at a point where extra help is required, I manage my team to index heavily on supporting sales. And what I do in my role is I look for patterns. If there’s stuff where I feel like it’s a pattern of this really was available and you just don’t want to employ it. That’s a different problem to software than there being a meaningful gap.
Secondly, in terms of sales and marketing alignment. I feel like it’s actually having a shared sense of failure. In other words, everyone likes to say that sales and marketing alignment is like a shared success, and it’s all about closing revenue — that would be the more popular answer.
But I like seeing shared sense of failure because, in my experience, way more transformational business decisions get made between marketing and sales by looking at your losses and things that didn’t go so well.
Everywhere I’ve worked, there are win notices sent out over email or Slack. We don’t spend as much time sending out the loss notices and talking about everything that went badly. We do win-loss analyses as an example, a mindset. But that’s less of a public thing for all the different reasons, because some of the stuff you get in those interviews is very candid and you’ve got to be thoughtful about making sure you’re not accidentally dressing down someone for something they did or didn’t do. But I do think that having a shared sense of failure and looking at very reflectively across the board at what could have been done better in all aspects of the value chain between marketing and sales is super important.
And in the third place, I would say it’s important that stakeholders manage their teams toward walking a mile in the other person’s shoes. I don’t feel like that happens enough. I think it’s important for marketing to empathize with sales that it is the ultimate what have you done for me lately? And there’s an incredible pressure to deliver, particularly in an environment like we’re in, which is a high-growth business. And I think, you know, marketers get prickly with everyone… it’s a marketer syndrome.
I always joke that like everyone thinks they’re good at marketing. You know, you always hear these different ideas around like, “Oh, if you just did this” or another big one for marketers is all the competitor stuff like, “Well, so-and-so did this.” It’s super important to realize that you know what the other person is going through and that really can be just an automatic compass going into any kind of interaction that you have.
I think sales needs to remember that marketing usually has some spectrum of resources it’s working with, and it’s doing its best to deliver with that resource. And I think marketing also needs to remember that sales is dealing with the cold, hard, brutal realities of the market, which are always going to have some slight misalignment.
Then there’s the academic work that people like me do on addressable market exercises and personas and all of this stuff, and I think marketers, in particular, don’t want to hear it sometimes, but I think that’s just like the way they get irritated with people saying they know all about what should be good marketing. I think they need to be careful about not presupposing that they know exactly always what great selling looks like. Sometimes it’s unnerving for them to know that I feel that way, but that is how I feel.
Tony: You know, being someone on the sales side, it’s refreshing to hear that right, especially the alignment parts. If you really do want to have a well-oiled machine, you do have to have that alignment between sales and marketing. What do you think really are the key responsibilities for marketing in the sales process versus what sales might think they might need to do?
Chris: I think the primary responsibility of marketing is to identify the addressable market, have a really cohesive strategy from a targeting perspective, from a content perspective, from an experience perspective of how to go and reach that target in market. And frankly, place some bets on what you think the majority of those people are missing in their current roles and actually need to see addressed in what they’re doing. I think that’s very much in marketing’s purview. There’s all the classical stuff that has been written about to death, which is all true, right? That more of the buying decision happens before anyone ever talks to a salesperson. I think that’s all true.
But I also feel that it’s important for marketing to bring some point of view to those interactions. It’s not just enough to say, “Well, we think this target will be interested in sales coaching, so we’ll develop a white paper and a webinar around sales coaching and generate keywords and get the machines to notice us in some way.”
But I think that it is on marketing to also come with a unique point of view that they are seeding in the mind of the prospect. So that way, sales peoples’ goal really is to get in there and take that seed that’s been planted and start getting really prescriptive about the strategy and what would be involved in bringing that to life at a company.
For me, that’s where the division of labor is. If we’re talking about B2B, which we are, I think that one thing that is important for sales to remember that, when marketing is building these strategies, there is a point where they have to plan for the what works most of the time as our conversation here, because they’re trying to reach a more mass audience, even with all the data tools and the targeting and personalization and all this stuff. If people are being completely honest with you, there’s still some level of malleability that you have to have in some of your messaging if you want to reach some of these audiences. Then it’s really on sales to take it that level deeper. That is really going to make the value and the insight.
Hannah: So, Chris, now, I’d really love to get your perspective on some of the things that you’re excited about when it comes to technology: the things that are happening in the world that are going to drive and revolutionize marketing and sales over the next two to five years.
Chris: I think one of the greatest things that is going to revolutionize the B2B marketing industry is the revenue technology and the sales technology stack catching up and chief revenue officers, chief sales officers, whatever senior sales titles you can imagine are going to start leaning harder into a more digitally focused way of doing business.
I feel that revenue technology is in a similar space right now where you have sort of this smattering of different providers that are solving the sales productivity and performance challenge from different angles. But we’re going to see more consolidation of that functionality coming together. I also think that that’s going to be an extraordinary thing for marketing as more of the sales process comes out of the shadows and gets brought into the digital realm. I think that’s going to put more context behind the data that we’ve sorely been missing for a long time.
And the last point I want to make is about CMOs coming into the 2000s. You know, they always wanted to just hang their hat on the next brand campaign, the next tagline, that’s going to be my thing. And then they realized “ Oh, actually, I potentially have to be the most digitally first organization.” And what did we see? We saw all this spend that was going toward CEOs start to move over to CMOs. I think the same thing is happening with the chief revenue officers. I think what’s happening is they’re realizing that relying on sales ops or IT to manage all the technology is probably not good enough. I think that is going to be a massive change in leadership role and that they’re going to have to start leaning into this stuff in a way that CMOs did 10 years ago.
Tony: So, Chris, it’s been a great conversation. We learned a lot. I think what we want to do is we’re going to put your CMO superpowers to work one last time. We’re going to go through a very quick, rapid fire round of questions.
Hannah: Okay, so what’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given in your career?
Chris: I worked with a gentleman named Chandar Pattabhiram. He’s now CMO for Coupa Software. Before that, he was CMO of Marketo, so not exactly a lightweight. And he said, “We are always going to perceive ourselves in a slightly different way than everyone else perceives us. The best you can do is minimize the number of clicks you are away.”
Tony: What would you say is your top productivity hack?
Chris: You’ve got to wake up early. I can certainly say that, as the CMO, f you don’t utilize the hours of 6:30 to 9:30 a.m. effectively, I don’t see how you get through your day.
Tony: Top prediction for the sales industry this year?
Chris: I think more noise and more consolidation. Hmm.
Hannah: If you could share a piece of advice to all marketers, what would that be?
Chris: My advice would be make sure to remember that your ideas matter. It’s not simply enough to message value. You need to message sight.
Tony: Where do you go to get your industry news?
Chris: A little bit of everywhere? Maybe just because I’m a little bit of a sentimentalist, I still read TechCrunch quite a bit. And I also read a lot of the digital stuff on The Wall Street Journal. And then generally just sort of a smattering like I set up the feeds where I’m watching specific companies and then I’m sort of kind of plugging through and looking at the different news outlets that are covering them. So those are primary for me, and then I get all my regular news, primarily from the New York Times.
Hannah: What book has inspired you the most in your career?
Chris: Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” has still stuck with me all these years later. I’m sure there’s a lot in that book that has probably been refuted as pseudoscience in a number of different constructs. But I think through so much in my life around initial impressions and reactions to things and how much that shapes you and how much it shapes a lot of your business relationships. And, I mean, that book is probably 20 years old now, but that one has stuck with me this whole time,
Tony: I’m going to throw one last question in. We’re going to go from books to movies since you brought movies up earlier. And this is a question we had asked the previous guest on the podcast. But which term would you use? Always be closing or sell me this pen.
Chris: Sell me this pen.
Tony: That is the correct answer. Chris, thanks so much for your time here on the podcast today. It was a pleasure for Hannah and I to have you on, and we’re looking forward to seeing what you do at Mindtickle.
Chris: Thank you. Thank you both.
Tony: Oh, so had I’ve had more positions than I care to reveal over the course of my career, but I’ve worked with a number of different marketing people… some good, some not as good, but I think there have been a bunch that I’ve worked with that have done an excellent job in setting up and driving awareness. I’ve been at some companies that were very early in the beginning of their fields where you were doing a lot of evangelizing, having to go out and really make sure that people got a first understanding of what the product or solution was that we were delivering. I think the best marketers that I’ve worked with have really done a phenomenal job of getting the name out there and the brand out there and making sure that the customers had a good sense of what it is that we could do. But more importantly, the value that we could provide does that. Does that ring true to what you’ve experienced with any of the marketing teams you’ve worked with?
Hannah: Yeah, I’m with you completely. I’ve had many roles in my own career, and I have definitely been part of organizations where I haven’t known what marketing is doing. I just don’t know. I’m thinking “Are you here? Do you still work here? What are you working on?” And that has worried me, and I’ve been in situations as a salesperson where I’ve been like, “If I say something, am I going to get in trouble because I haven’t heard from marketing? I don’t know what they’re doing. I’m confused.” So I just started developing.
Tony: What they’re doing is getting nice pens and shirts and things like that.
Hannah: I’ve also been in environments in both small and large organizations where marketing are all over you. They’re like, “Here’s a campaign. This is what we’re doing. Here’s the script. Here’s a value prop presented to us. Walk us through a demonstration. Here’s what you should be talking about. Here’s the campaign that’s going out. Here’s the date we’re going to send you a list of people who have opened the email, clicked on the email. We’re going to show you all of their web activity.” So I think there are two distinctions when it comes to marketing people. I’m definitely going to lose followers talking about this, but you’re going to have some marketers who are like, “My job is to make money for the company.” That’s it. And you’re going to have other marketers who are saying, “I am here to drive bleeds,” and I think that’s just a really fine line. And when that revenue org isn’t thinking about numbers, that’s where I see things start to break down because you’re thinking of doing a great job, but there’re no numbers. So that’s my two cents.
Tony: Yeah. And the thing is, you don’t need a huge marketing team in order to have success. I’ve been at some smaller organizations that just have phenomenal people that were very crisp in their messaging and very precise and knew how to target the right people at the right time with the right information. And that’s why sales and marketing are so intertwined, right? Because the outcomes and goals that they’re looking for aren’t really that dissimilar. It’s just really a slightly different approach and what they’re looking to do.
So to me, the best people I’ve really worked with were the ones that were really smart in the way they thought about things and could execute at a higher level to really drive that retention, that information level that people are looking for. You know, I’m a movie guy, as you know, so telling a good story is always very important. But in sales, telling a good story about your brand relies on having a strong belief in the company’s overall vision and mission. I agree with Chris that to optimize sales outcomes and effectiveness, sales and marketing each need to build a team full of passionate people who can really get behind the product.
Hannah: I mean, Chris even emphasized the importance of being truthful and direct, especially when working with the sales team.
Tony: Exactly. And we all appreciate honesty when working with others. But if you really want to get in a salesperson’s good books, it’s important to be upfront about overall performance and any challenges you may be dealing with.
Hannah: Honestly, remaining adaptable and flexible to change is really essential, especially in today’s rapidly evolving world.
Tony: Exactly. Being able to help your customers solve problems as they crop up will help you build relationships founded on trust and credibility and a problem-solving attitude.
Hannah: Thank you for listening to this episode of Ready Set Sell.
Tony: We hope you took away some valuable lessons and insights that inspire you to reevaluate your approach to sales readiness.
Hannah: Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show when you get a minute.
Tony: And stay tuned for the next episode of Ready Set Sell.
You can’t improve rep performance without a baseline. And all too often, even sales organizations that regularly analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) aren’t even tracking the right metrics.
Having clear goals and expectations allows you to gauge everyone’s performance and adjust your training and coaching approach as needed. Continue reading to discover the most important metrics for sales success.
Setting your sales goals
First, you must consider what your goals are — for individual reps, teams, and even leadership. Have a new product you’re trying to push? Want to reduce the average length of your sales cycle or drive better content engagement? Make sure these goals are SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based) to better measure success.
It is more effective to set these goals and then work backward to establish KPIs that will progress reps toward these outcomes, rather than determining metrics prior to goal setting.
Vanity metrics
You’ve developed objectives for where you want sales reps to be — now you must set a plan to help them get there. Many sales organizations simply measure everything available even when these measurements don’t provide relevant insights.
The metrics below aren’t reliable indicators of seller success:
Conversions: The number of new leads who turn into customers
Email engagement: The number of opens, reads, and link clicks within an email
Sales activities: The number of cold calls made, number of demos performed, number of emails sent, training completion, etc.
Total appointments booked: The number of prospect meetings scheduled
Total pipeline value: The potential revenue generated if all deals in the pipeline close
What do these metrics actually tell you? Do they give you any insight to act upon?
Use these actionable metrics instead
Numbers don’t have much meaning without context. Trade vanity metrics like the ones above for indicators that directly correlate to performance and provide insights that allow for improvement.
Conversion rates put the number of conversions into context. For instance, when analyzing sales performance, seeing that 15 customers converted within a quarter doesn’t mean much when you don’t know how many leads you started with. Knowing that 50% of leads converted, on the other hand, allows you to compare against your benchmark and understand whether you need to reevaluate your approach.
Engagement rates are similar to conversion rates in that, rather than providing an arbitrary number, they demonstrate how many people opened an email or clicked a link within that email out of the total number of people who opened it. The standalone number may seem low, but the percentage allows you to take more effective action. If you have a great open rate but your clickthrough rates are low, you need to work on content and calls to action.
Average time to close indicates just that: the average length of a sales cycle across your team. This is a far greater way to gauge performance than whether reps completed training and how they scored. However, looking at these training metrics next to time to close gives insight into how your learning materials contribute to elevated (or lowered) performance.
Deal losses are not necessarily a fun metric to view but are still significant barometers of performance. By understanding why a deal was lost, where the deal was in the sales cycle when it was lost, and other details of the process, you can identify areas for improvement.
Win/loss ratio goes beyond losses to measure how many appointments are actually closing. One of your reps may be setting a high number of meetings, but if a small percentage of those close, it’s a strong signal that something in your process needs to change.
Don’t completely count out vanity metrics
All of this isn’t to say that vanity metrics aren’t important. You should continue capturing them to measure growth over time and to put other performance indicators into context. For example, by looking at which sellers are closing the most deals and identifying any trends in their activities (they make more calls, schedule more appointments, complete more training modules), you can replicate those behaviors and incorporate them into your coaching or training materials.
To set sellers on a path to sales readiness, start by building an ideal rep profile (IRP), which sets a benchmark for these performance indicators. Learn more about what an IRP is here and get started building yours today with Mindtickle’s new IRP generator.
You’re likely familiar with the “80/20” selling philosophy, or the belief that 20% of reps make 80% of total sales for your organization. In other words, sales leaders pin their hopes on the top-performing salespeople to drive the most revenue.
This has led to these all-too-common refrains:
Sellers are born, they’re not made.
Excellence is not a skill. It’s an attitude.
Selling is an art, not a science.
But the fact that selling actually is a science.
There’s a formula for the perfect sales rep that’s a combination of knowledge, skill, and behaviors. While the formula for each organization or role is different, there’s a method for defining what makes sellers successful.
That’s why we created and today unveiled an IRP Generator, a quick, interactive, intuitive way to create and customize your ideal rep profile. You can build multiple profiles for roles like account executives and sales development representatives in minutes and share those results with your team.
What is an IRP and why do I need one?
An IRP defines and benchmarks top competencies – a combination of knowledge, skills, and behaviors – that reps must possess to be successful in the field. It is important to document and encode your IRP where you can measure skill development and its impact on business outcomes.
As you make your own IRP, keep these things in mind:
Knowledge is the information and data a rep must possess
Skills help you evaluate how your rep should behave on the field
Behaviors track how a rep is actually performing on the ground
With Mindtickle’s ideal rep profile generator, you can quickly determine and weigh the importance of the necessary skills and behaviors required of your sales reps. This generator helps you figure out how your reps stack up.
How to build your IRP
The Mindtickle IRP Generator makes creating your ideal rep profile easy. Here’s how to do it:
Choose a name. Giving your rep a name helps you better visualize your IRP. You can even give your rep a fun name like Rockstar Rachel or Moneyball Mike.
Select a role. Each role does not place the same weight on skills and strengths. Depending on the role, reps have different characteristics and benchmarks that are vital for success in their particular field. Here are the ones currently included in our generator: Account Executive, Solutions Engineer, Customer Success, Sales Development Representative, and Channel Sales.
Identify goals. Depending on the role you’ve selected in step 2, we’ll serve up common goals for this role. You can select as many or few as make sense for your team. It’s important to be clear about the characteristics someone must possess to be successful in the role. This allows you to understand the competencies needed to find the right candidate and help your team become successful through training and coaching.
Customize your scorecard. We’ll serve you up a scorecard with the key knowledge, skills, and behaviors for the role and goals you identified in steps 1 and 2. You can adjust the importance of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors of your ideal rep and even remove some entirely.
Download and share. Once you download your scorecard, we’ll also serve up some action items for each of the knowledge, skills, and behaviors identified in your IRP. You can also save your profile, download or share it with your team, and create more IRPs for other roles on your team.
How to get the most of your IRP
You should encode your IRP where you can measure skill development and its impact on business outcomes. With an established ideal rep profile, the 80/20 myth is busted. You can follow a “100/100” rule instead and build a sales team full of reps with the knowledge, skills, and behaviors to be successful.
Strong communication skills will serve you well in any industry, but they’re especially crucial in the sales world. Today companies are moving away from the traditional corporate structure of working in silos to adopt a more streamlined approach.
And establishing synergy among teams is really essential if you’re hoping to optimize sales outcomes and meet or exceed all of your sales targets.
On the most recent episode of Ready, Set, Sell, our guest Reid Oliver shared his tips on finding cross-functional alignment to achieve excellence in enterprise sales.
As the enterprise sales director at Splunk, Reid has found a few different leadership strategies that work for him and his team. He’s here today to let us in on all his secrets.
Who is Reid Oliver?
Hannah: Tony and I usually start by being a little bit nosy. What I’d love to do is get you to share a little bit about your career background so far — more specifically, the points that really made a difference in contributing to where you are today.
Reid Sure. I have been in software sales for seven years now. So, I’m certainly not a grizzled veteran and I still have plenty to learn. I’ve been at two companies. My first foray into sales was with a Series C company called Vidyard. We were doing B2B video hosting, data analytics, internal communications. I started there about as entry level as you can get, as a sales development representative, managing inbound leads. We had a phenomenal manager at the time and I also took advantage of a good growth curve, so I was able to move into a business development representative role as an account executive (AE). And then my final role there was with our enterprise team, selling into some of the biggest customers that we had at the time.
Addressing your question around getting to where I am today, I would recommend to anyone joining a startup early on in their sales career. You just get so much good exposure to wearing a lot of hats. Since then, I decided to move over to where I am right now, which is Splunk. I wanted to get to more large-enterprise complex-platform selling, with much larger deal sizes. And again, I’m really fortunate around timing and leadership and growth. I started as a commercial regional sales manager (RSM), an AE role, and today I’ve gone through a few different roles at Splunk because they are managing a strategic Canadian business. I’m now working with the largest customers and companies in Canada.
Tony: Excellent. I actually know Vidyard very well because I was a customer for a while. Sounds like you’ve done a great job climbing the ladder, but what drew you to sales in the first place?
Reid: A few factors. I think one of the biggest would be my parents and, in particular, my mom. She was always involved in our school and kind of thinking about careers and what would set us up for success. And part of that, we did some career kind of testing my brother and me, and one thing that always shone was that I always tended to score higher on EQ than IQ. So I wasn’t necessarily going to try to go for a surgeon or an investment banker. But pairing that with kind of playing a lot of sports, being competitive, maybe even just a general business interest, I thought that salesman made a ton of sense. And so that ended up where I ended up being, where I put a lot of my focus.
Hannah: Splunk is an awesome company. I’m actually working with a few people at Splunk over the last year. Yeah, I’d love to know a bit more about how you landed your role at Splunk.
Reid: Yeah. So it was, like a lot of roles these days, just networking. I was, as I mentioned, trying to figure out where my next step would be from Vidyard. I knew that cybersecurity and big data was a huge market still continues to be. And so I looked at who was a leader in that space, and Splunk was certainly top of the list (and continues to be), but at the time was really the key player. And so I ended up just looking up where I had connections and reaching out and having a cup of coffee with those individual sellers and one of the managers. And I ended up getting put into the interview process through that.
Tony: Well, it sounds like you’ve kind of been climbing the ladder. You started at Vidyard, you made your way to commercial accounts, and now enterprise. What would you say you like most about enterprise sales and what you’re doing right now?
Reid: I think the best part about enterprise sales is just the strategy behind it and the relationships that you build and the impact that you’re having on a customer account. I mean, enterprise deals are generally quite complex there. You need change agents across a company using multiple layers of champions across technical and key stakeholders. And so that’s certainly something that’s probably more absent in the more traditional kind of transactional selling model. I think it’s good to experience both, but the former certainly appeals to me from an enterprise perspective, and just getting the chance to be a part of a much larger deal cycle and impact from a revenue perspective to the company that you’re at is fun.
Tony: Yeah, the checks are always bigger, too, which helps. So that’s good.
Reid: This is true.
Hannah: When it goes right, that is.
Reid: Correct.
What is Splunk?
Hannah: Reid, I’m going to I’m going to try and remember what one of your company’s straplines are: is it data to anywhere? Is it something like that right for Splunk?
Reid: Data to everything.
Hannah: There we go. I was close! I’d love you to share an overview for those listening who don’t know what Splunk specializes in because I saw some material beneath the surface and I thought it was really cool. I’d love for you to help us understand how you help businesses grow and improve their outcomes.
Reid: Sure. In an analogy that I heard early on — and we’ve certainly grown from this — but we used to be kind of Google for IT. We were the de-facto platform to help IT professionals and security professionals dig through massive amounts of data and get to their answers quickly.
And from there, we’ve certainly developed into still being that critical query and big data ingest platform but we’re now turning also into visualizations, alerting orchestration and automation, and obviously applying layers of machine learning across these massive complex datasets. So ultimately, we’re helping security professionals ensure that their products and their companies are secure and identify when issues happen and where they are really quickly.
On the IT and DevOps side, we’re helping folks ensure that their websites are up and running and we’re ensuring that if bugs and issues are happening, they’re finding the root cause very, very quickly and, oftentimes, doing that through a predictive model rather than reactive. So it sounds like it’s a really sophisticated process there that you guys have to go through. And I’m curious about the different teams that you have to engage with on the sales side. So, you know, as you’re going through your process, what are the different teams that you typically engage with? How do you do that? And you know, how do you make sure that everything is working cohesively together?
Yeah, it’s not uncommon for our win notes on big deals to span multiple pages, and then you have to scroll through all the different teams and specialists that we have because it certainly takes a village. I would say core to our go-to-market function.
We obviously have our direct sellers. We work very closely with our sales or solution engineers. So they are the technical prowess and strategy behind a lot of the projects we’re working on that we then have specialist teams that are verticalized. We have financial services, we have oil and gas energy, we have e-commerce and we’ll often pull in those folks to get multiple layers into a conversation, to ensure that we’re helping build out a broader business case. And then I would say marketing partners are huge components that we work really closely with — Google and AWS in particular. And on the marketing side, we’re always trying to do different events and workshops and things to keep our customers engaged and successful.
Tony: Oh. You know, at this point in the pandemic, I think it’s safe to say we’re all a little bit Zoomed out.
Hannah: Well, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I love Reid’s approach to ensuring teams are communicating effectively without booking too many unnecessary meetings and touch-bases.
Tony: Exactly. I can’t stand having too many unnecessary meetings. But I think cross-functional collaboration is all about striking the right balance between working effectively as an individual and keeping communication channels open with your entire team.
Hannah: But I also love what Reid said about celebrating small wins to stay motivated. I think celebrating together as a team is a really great way to strengthen those bonds and form authentic connections.
Tony: Absolutely. And if celebrating those wins together includes a cocktail or two, then we’ll do what we have to do. But I think finding cross-functional alignment is more important than ever today as the landscape becomes increasingly competitive. So going the extra mile is always worth it.
Achieving excellence in enterprise sales
Hannah: Agreed. Let’s hear what Reid has to say next about achieving excellence in enterprise sales.
Tony: With all that in mind, do you have a specific focus for this year or is there a specific goal that you’re targeting… or how are you thinking about the upcoming fiscal year?
Reid: I guess if my manager were listening, he’d want to hear my aim is to hit our team number for the year, which certainly is a goal. But the way that I look at it, and I’m obviously newer on leadership, I try to think about it as a bit of a framework or kind of trickle-down effect to our end goal, be hitting our number. What are some of the other kinds of leading indicator goals that we need in order to get there? A big one for me is ensuring that I understand what my team’s goals are for the year. Some of them are going to be purely numbers/financially based. Others want to get into leadership or get exposure to other teams.
Making sure that I have a full understanding of what success means to them and then building that up into how we get there as a team to hit our number, that’s probably my overarching goal for the year.
Hannah: And Reid just kind of expanding on what you were saying regarding enterprise selling: one of the key differences you mentioned is there’s the inherent strategic nature of an enterprise setting, right and also the multiple stakeholders that are typically involved. What’s bringing all that together? What are some of the recent sales wins — of course, those that you’re allowed to talk about — that you are proud of? And what do you think are some of the factors that resulted in these wins? So, think of a salesperson listening, who’s thinking: What do I need to do on my next call to be like, Reid?
Reid: That’s a good question. A good win that we had that I could share happened prior to the holiday break. We were working with another data SaaS company, actually local here in Canada. They put a significant premium on security and, in turn, uptime. It wasn’t the largest from a dollar perspective but, from a complexity standpoint, it was pretty significant. So they have contracts in the US where they require steady ramp capabilities. We had unique compliance and legal components to it.
I think one of the things I’m most proud of and what’s important on the enterprise side is it was a nine to 10-month sales cycle, but we did a really good job at the beginning, building a strong relationship with multiple stakeholders — leaders at the business, technical owners — and we tried to have some of the tough conversations early on to get those out of the way. We knew it was competitive and we were going to go to an RFQ, so we tried to get ahead of where we were strong and where we may be weaker or at least what our competitor was going to be meeting on, what did our license model look like and what would the cost look like. That way, when we got towards the end, we had had a lot of those challenging conversations — the ones that maybe come with a little bit more back and forth — and it ended up being much smoother. There were still negotiations to be had, but we had built a lot of rapport early on so that we could have those conversations easily and ultimately partner. I think it’s a big reason we won the deal.
Tony: It sounds like you did a great job and, like you said, establishing those relationships was a big part of that. And touching back a little bit to something you said earlier about getting to understand a little bit more about your internal teams: what their goals are, what sort of things they’re looking to do. As you’ve collected all this data, have you found that there are certain challenges that are bigger ones that you want to make sure that you can work through with your team? Are there any challenges that stand out to you right now?
How to build natural urgency
Reid: I think one of the biggest challenges that we come up against is just building natural urgency. I always try to get my team away from just selling to the end of a quarter or picking our own timeline or deadline, because that’s often when I find deals slip and forecasts get impacted. I also know that, as sellers, we can’t make our own agenda. To get a deal done, we have to work with our customers and understand what’s a compelling event for them. And that’s much easier said than done.
Sometimes you have to do it around product launches or sprints, and the engineering team is running around dealing with other major projects that don’t even affect you, but they open up resources for your project. I try to get my team to do a far better job of just leaning in and identifying upfront, “Hey, we want to work with your team’s timelines, but we want to pick a date and work backward from it.” That inherently is a challenge, but it’s also something we’re trying to get better at because if we can build natural urgency, then we ultimately have a time and a date that we’re working towards. And we also have a bit more leverage when it comes to getting into final contract negotiations.
How to be easy to work with
Hannah: You were speaking briefly about the challenges that you’re working on for your team. And urgency in deals… it’s a hot topic, right? It always has been. But I’m just thinking about the wider ecosystem that you work in at Splunk. You’ve been there a few years now. You went from an RSM to it to a sales director. What were some of the key differences you noticed as you made that transition? What are some of the things that stand out with how you’ve had to work with the team as an RSM compared to how you need to work with the wider ecosystem as a sales director?
Reid: As an RSM, one of your biggest focus areas needs to be ensuring that you’re working collaboratively with your sales engineer or solution engineer. Especially with a complex sale like Splunk, they’re so critical. And I think that, just like sellers, you get a wide range of personalities when it comes to sales engineers.
And so, as I always tell my team, when I was an RSM, I was going out of my way to make their lives easier. So I didn’t expect them to do meetings, follow-ups. I didn’t. If I needed a technical document that I could Google just as easily as they could, I’d go out of my way to do some of those tasks so that when I really needed to lean on them — if we needed to go after hours and really close in on a project — they were willing to do that. I find that if a rep takes the easy way out or goes lazy, they’ll get the same in return from their SE. I made a very conscious effort to make working with me as easy and enjoyable as possible. And I now try to ensure my team is doing that so that when we need help, folks are willing and open to come and work with us.
Tony: Digging into that a little bit, how do you align with your teams? Do you see it as, “Hey, this is just something I need to do one time?” Or is this part of you? It sounds like it’s part of your overall methodology with your teams but tell us a little bit more about that.
Reid: Alignment is certainly always fluid and continuous, and it changes depending on the project and customer that we’re working with. But I always try to have consistent communication and alignment across all of our cross-functional teams.
I am cautious of having too many meetings. I try not to have just meetings for the sake of them. I try to be as efficient as possible, but I count on my team to be ensuring we have that active alignment and that folks understand their roles and responsibilities from the early stages.
So, when we’re doing our first-half kickoffs, for instance, or our quarterly business reviews, if we have accountability early on around, those folks know that they’re going to be counted on, and that generally breeds a good, healthy level of alignment and responsibility.
Hannah: I’m a big believer in motivation and positive thinking and affirmations and things like that. And I think you need a lot of that in sales, right? This is the step: that one moment where something needs to help, right? Or the universal powers. But what is motivation like for you? How do you connect with and motivate the people around you, particularly the people in your team?
Reid: Yeah, that’s a good point, Hannah. One thing I learned early on and I actually was not great at was managing the highs and lows in sales. A mentor of mine talked about just not getting too high and not getting too low either. And that was a learning curve for me. I was always more of an emotional seller and I think you’re right. You need you need to have positivity in the good times and the bad. With my team, we always try to celebrate the wins, even if they’re smaller wins. So maybe we haven’t yet closed the deal but we got through a huge milestone. Or maybe we broke into just booking meetings with an account that we know is a high priority but haven’t had much work with before.
As part of our team meetings, I try to get my team to share and open up about what’s working for them. While selling can be an individual sport, at times we try to make it like an overall open landscape where people can celebrate and also where people can identify, “Hey, I’m having challenges here. Have you folks tried to do something different?”
Also, sales folks are generally pretty competitive. So if you are the top performer on your team is continuously sharing wins, it tends to bubble up to other folks.
Hannah: It really does.
Tony: Well you said, you were a hockey player earlier, so I think you got to share the wins, right? That’s all part of the team mentality with hockey. So.
Reid: Exactly.
Tony: So it’s funny. We were talking about hockey offline before, but everybody consistently says about hockey players that they go above and beyond, right? They’re not like the guys who go down with the fake injury like in other sports. So how do you how would you relate that to sales?
Reid: Yeah, I’d say there are two components of that that I’ve noticed. Number one is just if you’re willing to put in the work and work harder than the other 90 percent, you’re going to be largely successful in sales. It’s not the only telltale sign but I have found that, for the most part, if you really are hungry, you’re passionate about what you’re selling and you’re interested in what your customer’s goals are, that’s a way to stand out in itself.
One of the big things I see is just the level of preparation. So with top sellers, there’s this framework.
It’s like the principle agent framework where you want more and more of your team to think like an owner. I think the best reps treat their territories as they own that territory, right. They’re the GM or the CEO or whatever you want to call it, of that territory. And that means slowing down. Every single action is value add and putting themselves in the framework of their customers for the largest strategic deals, thinking like they’re a part of that team. Where does our solution have to fit? What challenges does it have to meet? That’s the top sellers that I see. They’re willing to go out of their way and above and beyond and to really think like an owner, and I think that’s a huge component of being successful in sales.
Hannah: So Reid, you’ve mentioned quite a few things about what you can do to improve your ability to deliver sales outcomes for your business and your customers. You mentioned things about collaborating well internally. You mentioned acting like an owner and finding positivity during the highs and lows. But what about some of the recommendations that you’d make to somebody who’s getting started in their sales career? You’ve already mentioned working at a startup, so you can’t say that one again!
Reid: Yeah, sure. That is a big one. I will say I was going to default back to that, but I’ll follow your guidance. I think finding a space that you’re passionate about is important. I think you really have to care about what you’re selling. You’re going to be doing it every single day and it can be a grind, so if you don’t necessarily believe in the space or you’re not genuinely interested in it, I think that would show on long calls, right? And in today’s world, you have to be much more of an advocate and customers just have so many different options. If you’re going to be successful, you’ve got to care about what you’re going into. And then also just picking strong, strong products in markets with lots of upside. I’ve always loved that the reason I went to Splunk was I looked at the size of the data market, data monitoring, and cyber, and I just felt that there’s so much growth opportunity. So finding markets with plenty of upside and tailwinds is important.
Hannah: I think people often overlook that. It’s a really good point. Thanks for that.
Tony: I’m sure Splunk is changing quickly. How do you go about refining your skillset right and making sure that you’re where you need to be, not only for your personal growth, but for the organization?
Reid: One of the first things I do is try to identify people who are smarter than me or have been more successful than I have, and I just ask them for guidance and to spend time. I try to be as respectful as I can about it and I come prepared, but I don’t really shy away from it.
At Splunk, one of the first things I did and I continue to do is have mentors who I try to keep up with, learning, taking their brain, kind of being a sponge, if you will, to pick up different tactics that they’re using and make them my own.
So that’s a huge component of it. And then I also am fairly active. I use tools like Twitter and a number of different blogs from other sales leaders and go-to-market groups and just try to make sure that I’m staying up to date and relevant on a lot of the trends because I find that, once something is reaching kind of LinkedIn blog velocity, it’s already being used by a lot of sellers. Trying to remain consistent and sharp on new ways and strategies folks are using has typically yielded good results so far.
Tony: Well, you’ve kind of defined my whole career: being smart enough to know I’m not the smartest person in the room. I think that we’re very much on the same page with that.
Hannah: It takes a while to be comfortable with that and realize the benefits of that actually. I know this is definitely a valid point. We’ve spoken quite a bit, indirectly, about communication when it comes to working with internal teams and when it comes to working with your sales team. What are some of the tips you have for ensuring smooth and effective communication? Because there’s a lot of ways to communicate now, like informal, formal, etc. Tell me more about some of the tips that you would recommend when it comes to comms.
Reid: Yeah, there is no shortage of communication channels these days. I really like the concept of radical candor: the idea of being openly transparent and also very direct. I find that that’s the feedback that I always hope to get and I try to embody that in my communication with my team. I find that it’s best to be very, very open and honest about performance. And if that’s to the negative side, obviously, it’s coming with constructive ways to improve on what we’re doing. And if it’s to the positive, we need to ensure we can replicate that and make it more of a playbook going forward. I guess to your point around channels, Hannah, I find that still just picking up the phone and calling is one of the best ways to really have a conversation, particularly if it’s more of a difficult one. I think Slack and email messages can sometimes be misconstrued, but there’s a time and a place for them. I also found that shift has been really different, moving from when I was in a full office. In a setting that’s been fully virtual the last two years, it’s been even more challenging at times to really connect with folks. I find there’s always a little bit of that barrier on Zoom calls and such. And so, again, meet for a coffee or get in person if you can, but if not, phone calls generally the best.
Hannah: Yeah, but Reid, emoji or no emoji?
Reid: I’m not much of an emoji guy. I’m a I “Iike” guy.
Tony: Actually, thinking about the challenges you were just mentioning. Can you think of a time when there was a communication breakdown that had a direct impact on something you were doing? Can you think of anything and how did you solve it?
Reid: I mean, there are communication breakdowns — they happen all the time. I’m even thinking how we work with customers. Sometimes emails can be misconstrued or just missed in general. And so the best way, in my view, to solve it is, if we feel like we’re going down a path or maybe there’s a disconnect, it’s just kind of hitting pause, with me putting my own hand up and saying, “Look, I think I’m missing the point or maybe I was I was unclear. Can we do like a hard reset on this and just kind of try to figure out if there is a better path forward?” And I think identifying that early, early on and not trying to pretend like we know everything or go down a path that’s not the right one. It’s probably best to nip it in the bud when you when you have risk of a miscommunication.
Hannah: I’m just thinking about something you mentioned earlier. You said you’re relatively new to leadership. I think I was doing a little bit nosing around on your LinkedIn. It’s about a year, right, since you transitioned into a sales director?
Reid: Yes. Yeah, I’m starting. We just kicked out at this level at the end of January. So this is the start of my second year.
Hannah: What are you hoping to improve? You’ve had a year of learning and probably some shocks along the way, but how are you hoping to up level your leadership skills for 2022?
Reid: There’s a long list. I’m actively trying to find ways to get better, and I’m pretty open with my team about that too. I’m in a unique situation where I joke that some of my team members have been selling since I was in high school. So they’re all far more senior than me. One thing I try to do is just take the approach of not knowing everything and being very open about, “Hey, here’s where I can help, and here’s where I where I want to get feedback.” Something I think I can do more of is press for more critical feedback. I find sometimes asking for feedback can be really difficult, and sometimes folks, particularly if you have a friendly relationship, will take the easy way out. They’ll say, “You’re doing a great job, thanks so much.” But that’s rarely the case. There are always going to be areas that I can improve on a one-on-one basis, but I also want feedback about how I manage teams. And I’m not going to let them off the hook when I do ask for feedback because it’s really the only way I’ll improve. So that’s the main focus of mine, among others.
Tony: You said you’re about two weeks into your new fiscal, right? What’s next for you and for Splunk over the next year?
Reid: So Splunk’s going through a pretty big transformation. I think we’re one of the largest companies, aside from Adobe and Autodesk, to move from a more traditional on-prem software to being fully cloud native and SaaS. And so that’s come with some growing pains over the past two years, but it’s also been really unique to be a part of. What’s next for us is just really ensuring that we’re laser tight on just what being a SaaS company means. What are the critical metrics I mentioned that touched on whether we have organic growth? How do we land new deals? How do we ensure we have retention and renewal? So that’s a huge focus area: best practices around being SaaS company now. And for my team, it’s a matter of ensuring that we are educating our customers about those changes and ensuring that they’re aware of all the different things that Splunk can do. We’ve always said it’s a blessing and a curse, where we are very good at a lot of different areas, but we often will get stuck in one segment. So jumping over to other buying centers, whether you’re in security or moving into IT, can be challenging because the folks that own Splunk tend to hug it and keep it very close. Having the opportunity to build and grow and expand teams can be tricky, but it’s needed if we’re going to kind of continue growing at the rate we are.
Tony: Oh, that’s great. Well, Reid, this has been fantastic, but we’re not done with you yet. We have just a couple more questions that we’re going to do in our rapid-fire round. Hannah’s going to kick it off. Give really quick answers: the first thing that comes to mind.
Hannah: All right. Let’s get into it. So, OK, what is your sales philosophy in just three words?
Reid: Always be interested.
Hannah: I like it. What’s the best advice you’ve been given in your career so far?
Reid: Find good mentors.
Tony: I like that one. Your top productivity hack?
Reid: Own your calendar. I’m a huge fan of blocking anything and everything I need to get done throughout my days.
Tony: Very smart. Top prediction for the sales industry in the upcoming year?
Reid: Product-led growth is going to continue to flourish so reps need to find ways to be effective and change their models in some cases.
Hannah: What’s one thing that you believe is revolutionizing the sales industry?
Reid: It’s probably the amount of tools and resources and, in some cases, cutting through the noise of what are effective tools and how to help reps work as efficiently as possible. I think the efficiency and productivity metric is just going to become more and more important, particularly for teams, when they’re justifying raising new rounds or where they’re allocating dollars for headcount. It’s a huge component and probably will be more and more.
Hannah: I think I’m with you on that one. But on rep productivity, if you could share just one piece of advice to salespeople, what would it be?
Reid: Always be authentic and transparent. Be as open as you possibly can and then try to be somebody that a buyer likes to do business with. There are so many tools and options out there. People still like doing business with folks who they find enjoyable and whom they see they get value from.
Tony: There are a lot of voices out there nowadays with blogs and posts and everything. So where do you go to for your best sales industry news?
Reid: I’m a huge Twitter fan. I try to use Twitter and be selective of my followers, but also make sure that I’m staying up to speed. I like a few different podcasts, and then I also try to read more books. There are a lot of good books out there.
Hannah: OK, so are leaders made or born?
Reid: Both. I don’t know. I don’t think one versus the other.
Hannah: You’re allowed.
Tony: You can. You can.
Hannah: You’re allowed.
Tony: Well, this is our last question. I’m actually a big movie fan myself, so we’re going to tie this to movie quotes. But would you go with always be closing or sell me this pen?
Reid: Always be closing.
Tony: I knew you were going to say that because you gave us a couple of these already, so I had a good feeling that you are going to go that direction. But, Reid, this was a fantastic time today. We really appreciate you joining us on Ready Set Sell and we wish you the best of luck at Splunk. Thanks again for your time.
Reid: Awesome. Thank you so much, Hannah and Tony. I really appreciate it.
What we learned
Tony: You know, I thought it was really interesting with all of the different roles that Reid has had over the years, because that’s pretty consistent with what I’ve seen from a number of top sales leaders: they’ve done different things and they have unique perspectives because they’ve really been able to see things from different lenses within the sales verticals. I think that gives him a great way of being able to really visualize from a different perspective.
Hannah: I definitely agree with that. I think it even goes beyond having experience at various levels in sales. I think the sales leaders that really exceed expectations are the ones who have actually had the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of sales experience. So they’ve had incredible years but maybe they’ve had a quarter where they haven’t done so great. And the reason I mention that is that they are able to really think about, you know, how will my team be feeling right now when they’re doing great? Or how will my team be feeling when right in this instance when they haven’t hit a target? And I think when you’ve got leaders who have gone through various different roles in sales, full stop, they they’re much more relatable when they can relate to the different situations that salespeople find themselves in.
Tony: Yeah, I think it really gives you a lot of credibility as you start rising the chain. I mean, I look at my background. My first job out of college, I was selling sneakers. You know, I was the top sneaker salesman in northern New Jersey, which brought me to where I am today, I suppose. But it really gives you an idea of how to think about things differently, because even though I was selling sneakers, I learned a lot about how to deal with people and different dynamics with the people I was working with. I think every job that you go through or every stop on your way really helps define who you’re going to be and how you’re going to work with colleagues within different structures.
Hannah: Yeah, I love the sneakers. This is great. When you think about the roles that all of us had and you think about the importance of coaching now, as a sales leader, how can you coach if you haven’t done the job yourself? Or how can you really effectively coach if you just haven’t been in the trenches, the multiple roles that you play and the experience that you gather from that? I just think it sets you up to be a much stronger coach, which, in my opinion, is a key part of being in sales leadership.
Tony: Yeah, absolutely. I think that all adds to credibility, right? And we’ve all had managers over the years that, you know, get put into positions of leadership and have not done the job that they’re asking you to do. And they don’t really get the credibility because they haven’t done it and they’re asking you to do things that either they don’t know how to do or just haven’t had any experience doing. I totally agree. I think it’s very important to have someone in that role that can not only talk the talk but walk the walk. Reid’s clear and articulate understanding of his role in the team really impressed me.
Hannah: I know, right? Like, it became quite clear early on in the interview why he’s moved up the ladder to a leadership position.
Tony: I know he really had some great suggestions to share about finding cross-functional alignment internally, managing teams effectively and really going above and beyond to achieve excellence in sales.
Hannah: I think one point he made that really stood out to me was the value of finding someone who’s more successful or experienced than you and learning as much as you can from them.
Tony: You know what they say? It’s funny. I use this too. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. I think Reid also emphasized the importance of following your passion in sales. You know, I couldn’t agree more with this point because if you’re not passionate about what you’re selling, people will be able to sense that and you’ll see it reflected in your results.
Hannah: It’s true. And finally, Reid’s comments about accountability and responsibility were so on point. Getting clear on everyone’s roles and responsibilities from the very beginning will help set everyone up for success and lead to stronger alignment overall.
Tony: You know, absolutely. I think, all in all, I learned a lot from today’s episode, and we hope that you did, too. Thanks again to our guest Reid for joining us today.
Hannah: Thank you for listening to this episode of Ready Set Sell.
Tony: We hope you took away some valuable lessons and insights that inspire you to reevaluate your approach to sales readiness.
Hannah: Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review the show when you get a minute.
Tony: And stay tuned for the next episode of Ready Set Sell.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way: across all industries, only 43% of sellers now meet their quota. That means nearly six out of every 10 sellers fail to meet their goals.
Here’s the good news: a comprehensive, data-driven sales readiness approach can help you overcome your key challenges — and empower more sellers to meet (and even exceed) quota.
But not all readiness strategies are the same.
So, what do the best sales organizations do differently to ensure their reps are ready to sell? To find out, we analyzed activity from more than one million users at 350 companies for our 2022 State of Sales Readiness Report.
Based on our key findings, we’ve put together five proven hacks that’ll help you optimize your own sales readiness program and start crushing your sales goals.
Hack #1: Don’t reinvent the sales enablement wheel
Sales enablement is an essential component of an effective sales readiness strategy. And because key aspects of selling are always changing, enablement teams must go beyond onboarding (in favor of what we at Mindtickle refer to as sales everboarding) to deliver ongoing training and just-in-time content to ensure sellers understand these changes and internalize them.
But preparing new onboarding or ongoing training content requires a big investment of time. On average, it takes six weeks to launch a new program from scratch.
However, winning organizations launch sales enablement programs a whole lot faster — without compromising quality. What’s their secret? They focus on efficiency by leveraging templates.
Think of program templates as out-of-the-box yet customizable blueprints developed for common sales enablement use cases and based on industry best practices. Some of the most commonly used templates in Mindtickle are for:
Sales onboarding
Product training
Sales processes
Templates eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel each time you launch a new program, which means you can launch programs a whole lot faster. On average, using a template, enablement managers can launch a new program within seven days. That means sellers can consume the learning much earlier — and start applying what they’ve learned to close more deals.
Hack #2: Update key sales content on a quarterly basis
More than 25 years ago, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled, “Content is King.” In 2022, the sentiment is still very true — especially for B2B sellers. Having access to the right content ensures sellers are always ready to close more deals.
Most organizations invest significant time and resources into developing content that helps prepare reps for every selling situation. But, all too often, those same organizations release new content and then don’t give it much thought for months on end. As a piece of content gets stale, seller engagement drops.
However, top sales organizations are making it a priority to regularly update their key content. And our analysis found that new or recently updated content is correlated with better overall engagement.
Don’t mistake content development as a one-time event. Instead, commit to updating your key content on a regular basis to keep seller engagement high.
How often are the best sales organizations updating sales content?
The 10% of organizations that get the highest amount of seller engagement make content updates once every 3.25 months, on average. And they see 4.58 content engagements per seller week. In comparison, organizations that update key content once every 4.5 months see an average of 3.43 content interactions per seller per week.
That means the top 10% of sales orgs are seeing a 33% increase in overall use of sales content. Clearly, regular updates pay off in terms of seller engagement.
Hack #3: Expect resistance from prospects on sales calls — and equip reps to handle it
It’s a simple fact that if a seller isn’t making enough calls, they’re not going to close enough business to meet quota. So it’s probably not surprising that the best sales reps spend a good amount of their time on the phone.
In an ideal world, each of those sales calls would be largely positive, with prospects feeling confident and excited. But that’s not reality.
We analyzed more than 100,000 sales calls and found that negative sentiment outweighs positive sentiment — by a lot. Just over a third (37%) of calls contained positive sentiments (think confidence, analytical discussion, and excitement, among others) than negative sentiments (think anger, uncertainty, disappointment, or tentativeness). The remaining 63% of calls had more negative sentiment than positive.
Sales calls often contain more negative sentiment than positive.
But make no mistake: a negative call isn’t necessarily a lost cause — especially when it’s handled the right way. The best sales organizations train their reps to expect resistance from prospects and equip these sellers to handle it.
Ensuring reps know your messaging and can lead a proper demo is important. But it’s not enough. Be sure you’re also focusing on enablement topics such as objection handling and competitive knowledge. The right enablement can help reps build confidence and turn largely negative calls around to close more deals.
Hack #4: Support sales coaching with follow-up and reinforcement
Sales coaching, when done well, can have a big impact on the success of a seller (and the entire organization). In fact, the power of coaching is proven. Recent research found that eight out of 10 teams with effective coaching practices hit greater than 75% of their sales quotas.
But coaching can’t be a case of one-and-done. A single coaching session, on its own, probably isn’t going to have much of an impact.
The best sales organizations understand that ongoing follow-up and reinforcement is essential to ensure that skills coaching sticks — and those skills are applied when it matters: in the field. In fact, top managers are three times more likely to assign content, training, or a role-play exercise as a follow-up to a coaching session.
The good news is that coaching follow-up and reinforcement are proven to improve a rep’s readiness. On average, there’s an improvement of 13 percentage points in Sales Readiness Index scores for reps who are assigned follow-up actions after a coaching session.
The average improvement in Sales Readiness Index scores for reps who are assigned follow-up actions after a coaching session.
Talking the talk is not enough. After a coaching session, assign self-paced enablement, content to read, role-plays, or other existing resources to reinforce skills and give reps opportunities to practice what they’ve learned. By doing so, you’re sure to boost reps’ overall readiness, as well as their on-call performance.
Hack #5: Document your ideal rep profile
Hiring for fit is a great start. But even the most seasoned sellers need ongoing skill development, reinforcement, and manager-led coaching for long-term success. However, before creating these programs, sales leaders must take a step back to identify exactly what skills reps need to succeed. In other words, they need to develop an ideal rep profile (IRP).
But, more often than not, they don’t take the time to do so. While 93% of companies have documented their ideal customer profile, fewer than 1% have identified and documented a corresponding IRP.
Few organizations document their IRP.
93% of companies have documented their ideal customer profile
Fewer than 1% have identified and documented a corresponding ideal rep profile
This is a big misstep. After all, how can you achieve excellence if you haven’t even defined what it looks like?
The best organizations understand that an IRP is the essential foundation of any winning sales enablement program, and they put in the time to define theirs.
Take a page from their book, and document the skills and competencies needed for sales success at your organization. Then, consistently measure teams and individual reps against the IRP. By doing so, you can shed light on the learning gaps of each rep and be better equipped to deliver learning and coaching that closes those gaps and creates more peak performers.
Benchmark your sales readiness to optimize your strategy
Sales organizations that expect to achieve quota can no longer rely on the Pareto principle — the notion that 20% of sellers generate 80% of sales. Instead, they must work to ensure every seller is ready to close any deal.
But sales enablement alone isn’t enough to prepare sellers. The best sales organizations know they must take a more holistic, data-driven approach to sales readiness.
By benchmarking your sales readiness against that of best-in-class organizations, you’ll shed light on opportunities to improve your own readiness strategy.
Effective sales coaching and skills development usually come down to one thing: time.
In an in-person office setting, you can observe some rep behaviors firsthand. You know when sellers make calls, meet with customers, and practice pitches.
But even though you were physically there, sales managers still couldn’t sit in on every meeting or call with each rep. Our State of Sales Readiness Report 2022 shows that, on average, managers oversee eight sales reps. With time stretched across the entire team, skill coaching often falls to the wayside. Our research also found that manager-led coaching sessions with each rep happens just once a month.
Now that hybrid working is the norm, effective coaching can’t rely on in-person time with sellers. More than ever, sales managers now need to rely on data to drive and support business decisions—including training and coaching reps to boost performance.
What metrics do you need to measure performance and effectively coach? We break analytics down into three categories: knowledge, skills, and behaviors. Keep reading to learn more.
Knowledge
Knowledge informs mastery of skills as well as behaviors practiced. To effectively communicate your product’s benefits, a seller must know the features and capabilities of that product. To engage a buyer, a seller needs to know the buyer’s industry and pain points. And the best way to disseminate this information is through onboarding, training, and ongoing enablement.
Onboarding is an introduction to your organization and a new sales hire’s role—presenting the perfect opportunity to educate them on product, processes, competitors, and much more. And likewise, training beyond onboarding is particularly useful to reinforce learnings and expand knowledge.
But what should you be measuring to ensure sellers are actually learning? Start with these:
Onboarding and training completion
Onboarding and training engagement
Certification achievement
Offering microlearning opportunities with the right enablement tools makes it easier for reps to access and participate in training — and easier for managers to track these knowledge metrics.
Skills
Beyond tracking knowledge, it’s critical to understand how reps are applying what they’ve learned after their training. Skills assessments provide insights into whether the learning sticks and is being used properly.
These assessments can be done through simple quizzes, or as a collaborative effort in role-playing exercises. Reps can practice and record their pitches for you to evaluate. Assign a ranking of certain skills tied to role-plays to get an idea of where each seller is at, and where there are gaps.
Skills metrics can include:
Sales readiness platforms that utilize artificial intelligence (AI) analyze recorded role-plays to do most of the analysis for you. Such tools can provide a snapshot of the skills listed above (and more), which you can then use to inform additional training, personalized for each rep’s unique needs.
Behavior
Lastly—and perhaps most importantly—is how skills and knowledge translate to behaviors in the field. It’s one thing to know the ins and outs of your product, but are your salespeople able to communicate that to buyers in a way that demonstrates true value?
As helpful as it would be, managers can’t be in multiple places at once and have limited time each day. Further, they’ve got daily responsibilities beyond rep performance, like managing relationships with other departments, meeting with other leaders, and ensuring sales goals align with those of the larger business.
Behavior-centric metrics can be divided into three segments: call metrics, performance metrics, and coaching metrics.
Call metrics measure a seller’s behavior as it pertains to customer calls. A conversation intelligence tool records and transcribes calls and uses AI to provide deep analysis. Managers can view the following metrics for individual reps:
Use of filler words
Use of pre-established keywords
Questions asked by reps
Questions asked by buyers
Length of monologues
Performance metrics focus on your sellers’ and team’s overall sales performance. These are the numbers you are likely already tracking:
Coaching metrics focus on specific behaviors discussed in one-on-one coaching sessions between rep and manager, and how those behaviors are trending. An effective coaching platform enables managers to easily schedule sessions and follow-ups, seamlessly integrate training and coaching opportunities, evaluate manager coaching performance, and track improvement on reps’ lagging skills. Related to coaching are two other considerations: rep tenure and turnover. Sellers who feel supported are likely to stay longer, saving your organization significant time and money to bring in new hires. If you aren’t tracking rep retention, and correlating it with training and coaching efforts, start now.
Ensure managers and reps are ready
The Mindtickle Readiness Index is the best way to analyze and improve sales performance. With tools for benchmarking, training, and coaching, you can connect sales readiness with revenue — all in one platform. Our Call AI conversation intelligence solution gives managers a firsthand look at how sellers perform in buyer interactions. Training and virtual role-play opportunities provide ongoing and reinforced learning, solidifying skills that are essential to field success. And the Mindtickle Asset Hub means reps have access to all the latest training and customer-facing content needed to stay on top of their game and engage buyers.
Ready to get started? Request a demo of Mindtickle today.
How sales leaders can level up their teams (Hint: coaching is key)
How sales leaders can evolve their own skillset
What’s a winning sales strategy?
Who is Alice Heiman?
Hannah: I’d love to just start from a place where you can share a little bit about your career background so far, but more specifically the things that have happened that have been like the biggest catalysts over the last few years.
Alice: It’s surprising to some people to find out that my career started as an elementary school teacher. They’re like, “Wow, from kindergarten to CEOs, right?” That was a long, long time ago because I have had my own company since 1997. So working with small children was wonderful. I loved it. As you can imagine, it was engaging and fun. There are a lot of great things about it, but I have this Dad who owned a company called Miller Heiman, and he was always asking me to do projects for him. And so even though I was teaching, I was learning about his business and doing projects for him and learning about sales, sales training, the complexities of strategic selling, and all of those things. Eventually, he talked me into coming to work for him because I never, ever dreamed in a million years that I would be in sales or be a salesperson. This career path never even occurred to me. So I sort of got catapulted into the world of sales from elementary school as a special ed teacher and a reading specialist. I had a master’s degree in education but got catapulted into the world of business through Miller Heiman, and I love it.
Tony: So, Alice, that’s that’s a great background. Obviously, the connection with Miller Heiman is huge. Having that diverse background, what really drew you to the world of sales specifically?
Alice: I think that I had an epiphany. I’m not sure exactly where it was because at first I was not really thinking of it as, “Oh, I’m going into a career in sales.” I went into the business to help grow the business. And actually, my Dad hired me to work on the curriculum, which is something I knew because I was a teacher, right? So I wasn’t really thinking of myself in sales still. And I probably had the same idea about salespeople as most people who don’t understand sales do – they’re pushy, manipulative, they try to trick you, they guilt you. You know, all the things we hate about sales, right?
Tony: We’ve never heard that before.
Alice Never, never. So I think that when I started to understand that the Miller Heiman processes are so customer-focused, there’s so much about helping, I was like, “Wow, this is just like teaching.” To me, sales is a helping profession, and that is what drives me every day. I wake up and I get to help my customers solve complex problems. So my brain is busy all the time and I get to do something different every day. I feel like I’m making a difference and you know, when companies do well because their sales are good, everybody benefits from that. All the people internally in the organization benefit, the customers benefit, the whole economy around them benefits. So I feel like I’m making a huge impact.
Compare that to teaching little kids, I love both, but I love this more and I’ve stayed in it a lot longer. I was teaching for 13 years and now I’m not going to tell you how many years I’ve been in sales, but 20 plus years, right? Doing what I do now, I wake up every day and I cannot wait because selling is helping, guiding, and solving – and those are things that I love to do.
On starting her own business
Hannah: That just led me to think about your consulting business. You’re taking what you love and you’ve now transformed that into an incredible consulting business. Your website speaks directly to CEOs saying, maybe you’re stopping sales. I love it. So just share a bit more about why you decided to take that leap and start your own business.
Alice: The reason I took the leap is because I found out my father wanted to sell the company. He and Bob Miller started the company, my Dad bought Bob Miller out and it eventually got to a point where it was a bigger company than he wanted to run so he decided he wanted to sell. I helped them get the company ready to sell and then I went off on my own.
Now, when I first left Miller Heiman, I still had a lot of my big clients; Fidelity Investments, Dow Chemical, Hewlett Packard, AT&T, some real giants. But a funny thing happened––the dot-coms. Remember those? If you’re old enough, you remember the dot-coms. We now call them the dot bombs. People were just throwing money at these dot-coms and the people from companies like Fidelity, GE Capital, and my other clients, the Senior Executives were leaving and going to those companies – and they were some of the founders of those companies! Then, they would call me to help and I’d say, “Miller Heiman doesn’t do that. We do sales training for Fortune 500 companies,” and they’d respond by saying, “Can you help us start up a sales team from scratch?”
So we did. I started working with CEOs and the senior leaders who had led these big, big companies to set up their sales from scratch. I’ve always really focused on the CEO, but I had positioned myself in the market more as a sales generalist because I think I didn’t understand, I was growing and learning, and that’s what I did. I did do some other things back then that I don’t do now, but it became clearer and clearer to me that sales is changing so much and the buyer has shifted. Our brain still works the same way when we make a decision, but the way we’re buying things has changed so much because of the internet. We’re digital beings.
It’s more than just sales and the sales leaders, it’s more than just customer success, it’s more than just the marketing, the operations. Each of them in their own silos is not giving the customer an exceptional experience.
Only the CEO can orchestrate all departments so that they are focused on the customer, the way the customer wants to buy, and that exceptional customer experience.
So I decided to turn away everything but my focus on the CEO and helping them understand their role in sales and how they can support sales. But when I say sales, I don’t just mean sellers, right? I mean the way the customer wants to buy from you and that includes a much larger group of people than just our sellers and a larger group of processes because we have to put things out there on the internet to draw the customer in and engage them that have nothing to do with sellers. So it’s so much bigger, and that’s why I focus on the CEO.
Re-framing sales for modern customers
Tony: You’ve worked with so many diverse companies. Is there an overarching mission or aim that you really focus on when you’re talking with folks? Is there anything you really like to focus on from an overall perspective?
Alice: I think that my main focus is, What are you doing to help your customer buy? Let’s look at things differently. One of the things that people hear me say often is, “What have you done today to make it easier to be your customer and harder to be your competitor?” If you stop, pause and ask yourself that question, some interesting things are going to come up. And if you walk out of your company and look back from the buyer’s point of view, from every point of contact, did you make it easy or did you make it hard? And so I want to focus on the customer experience and have the CEO understand what that is. So here’s a really good example. So how often do you take a cold call?
Hannah: Maybe twice a week.
Alice: OK, and you picked it up by accident or you intended to do that?
Hannah: It’s always an accident.
Alice: Gotcha. Tony, how often do you take a cold call from someone who wants to set an appointment with you for their ae?
Tony: I think the last time I took a cold call was in 1997.
Alice: You and me both. And so when I asked CEOs that question, they say, I never take your call unless it’s by accident. Right? So why do you, the CEO, have people dialing the CEO or any senior executive’s phone numbers? You don’t answer those calls, so why would they?
Think about the wasted time, effort, and money they could have spent doing something that would actually intrigue and engage the proper people to want to have a conversation with someone at your company? It might not even be a salesperson that they want to have a conversation with. Could be a sales engineer, could be customer success, could be somebody else. But what we’re doing is saying, OK, we’re going to go out and sell the way we don’t want to buy. What? I’m confused.
How many emails come into your box every day trying to sell you something and how many of them do you delete? Most of them, right? So here we go filling up the internet with, thousands and thousands of emails being sent out that are being deleted. So if we regroup and think, what does the customer want? Well, they certainly don’t want another spam email and they don’t want your cold call. So what are we going to do? The CEOs have to have to get their mind wrapped around it first so it can trickle down through the entire organization. It’s great if it bubbles up from the bottom too, but salespeople are going to do what you tell them to do for the most part. And so if you’re telling them to send more emails or make more calls – that’s what they’re going to do.
Give them something better to do, have marketing start creating demand, and allow the buyers to buy the way they want to buy by meeting them where they are – which is on the internet. They’re Googling you, they’re on your LinkedIn or they’re on your website trying to find out what you actually do, which is why most websites suck. They’re terrible. You cannot figure out what a company actually does. So if you think about some of the things that we do and make it so difficult for people to buy, it’s unbelievable.
So really, I just want to get everybody’s mind wrapped around, what does your buyer do? And that may be different for everyone. I’m just a human being trying to do my job the best I can every day. And I’m trying to buy something from you and it happens to be 10 o’clock at night because now my day is over, I’ve put my kids to bed and I can go look at your product and have some time to think about it but if I can’t even find how it works, I’m off to the competitor. Sorry, you’re done. I need to go where I can get the information I need. You don’t even have a chat that works and your website doesn’t have a good explainer video or a demo. It has nothing for me. I have the only choices. Book a demo. I get why you want me to book a demo because you want to talk to me. Got it! But that’s not the way I buy anymore.
What makes a world-class sales organization
Hannah: So you’ve mentioned a lot about making it easier for your customer to buy from you. You mentioned a couple of examples about explainer videos, chatbots, and the need to do research at 10pm. Can you highlight a few things that really make a world-class sales organization today?
Alice: We have to flip our mindset to think sales equals the way the customer wants to buy. Sales is not just about the sellers. It’s much, much bigger and when we’re trying to sell something to somebody, it encompasses a lot of things, right? Marketing! Marketing is from hello to I’m your loyal customer. Marketing should be threaded through the entire lifecycle of a customer. I’ve had some companies that I work with that start with customer success, not with sales because they’re a find/try/buy model because they’re a software of some type. So they find try, buy, and then customers success is who converts it, not a salesperson because they’re more concerned about the user adoption.
So you have to map that customer journey to be able to understand how to build a world-class organization because a world-class organization meets the customer where they are. They use sales, marketing, customer success, and whatever else they need to do that.
They make sure that their sellers can sell in any situation; at a trade show, at a one-to-one, in a large group, via camera, on the phone – whatever it may be. Your salespeople have to be prepared to sell in any situation. And so that’s the kind of thing that you want to ask yourself, “Are we world-class?”
How CEOs can affect change from the top down
Tony: You’ve mentioned CEOS several times throughout the conversation so far. I think a lot of people in sales aren’t really thinking about the CEO specifically. They think more about director or VP level. So was there anything specific that made you really focus in particular on the CEO role?
Alice: In a lot of organizations I would see what I call blaming and shaming. “What are they doing over there in sales? All they ever do is golf and go to dinners.” What we hear is a lot of kind of sales bashing and what I realized is sales can’t do it without the support of the rest of the organization. And when you really start to look and diagnose where the buck stops, it’s the CEO. And so I guess that’s why I’m so focused on them. There’s no other single person in an organization who can orchestrate the whole thing. So if sales aren’t going well and you go ahead and say to the sales leader, “Do this and this and this,” but no one else in the organization is helping them, they can’t do it. Sales needs support from the entire organization, and that’s the CEO’s responsibility. The role changes as the company matures, and the CEO has to understand that role and take that role and make it work.
Tony: As the sales world has evolved over the years, Alice really made a smart decision to carve out a niche for herself by focusing specifically on the role of CEO in her consultancy.
Hannah: Yeah, I really like the focus on the CEO because essentially they have the power to bring each of the departments together and create an exceptional customer experience as Alice does.
Tony: Yeah, I think that was really smart by asking the tough questions like, what have you done today to make it easier to be your customer and harder to be your competitor? I think Alice really creates opportunities for those at the CEO level to take an honest look at their methodologies, what sort of things they’re doing, and really zero in on what it takes to make them stand out from the crowd.
Hannah: It’s completely true. You know, creating an exceptional customer experience is essential for sales organizations today, where we know the buyer’s journey has changed immensely over the past few years. So sales leaders need to up their game if they hope to stay competitive.
How sales leaders can level up their teams (Hint: coaching is key)
Tony: Next up, Alice shared more tips for sales leaders and CEOs looking to up their game in 2022. For sales leaders beyond just the CEO, what do you think that they could be doing a little bit more often? Or maybe even more importantly, what are the things that they should be doing a little less often?
Alice: A couple of things and some of these are not necessarily very easy. But sales leaders, I want you to think about your CEO as your customer. And what do customers need today? They need insight. There’s so much going on out there, but you as the sales leader, are in it every day seeing the customer. You know what the customer saying, what they need and want, what’s working, and what isn’t. You need to bring those insights to your CEO. Not just say, we need more this or that. Bring them insights on what’s happening in the market, what’s happening with the customer. Bring them specific examples of success that’s happening with your customers and their failures as well. So if you, as a senior leader, are regularly reviewing your wins and your losses with your team, I think it’s much more important to analyze your wins than it is your losses because we learn so much from our wins. Why did they buy from us? We need to know that right? We did it. Well, let’s be able to do it again.
Focus on the wins and then be able to bring those insights to the CEO so that you can paint a picture for them. Because as humans, we learn from stories and pictures. Paint that picture. Tell that story to the CEO so they understand the context for the asks that you have of them.
We need a tool. We need more people. We need a different type of structure. Whatever it is. That way, your CEO can really understand, and they can take it to investors to get money to do the things that you want to do. So senior leaders need to really learn how to tell a good story. Pull the information together, tell the story that brings insight to the CEO and that will help tremendously. Now in day to day, a senior sales leader should be really focused on making it easy for the customer to buy. So I would like them to ask that question to their peers and to their teams. What have we done today to make it easier to be our customer and harder to be our competitor? And answer it. Every once in a while, ask yourself that, and then when you do it, applaud it. Right? We did it. We made it easier. Fantastic. So I think that that’s something that you can do.
And then coaching is so crucial today. I wish the word “manager” would go away. Yes, people have to be managed, but when we coach them and help them change their behavior, then we don’t have to nag and micromanage them.
So what we want to do is look at the behaviors we want our salespeople to have and figure out what is the best way to get them to have those behaviors and deploy that.
And if it doesn’t work, get rid of them. Just get rid of them. We hang on to salespeople who are not a good fit for way too long. They’re not bad salespeople. They’re not a fit for your organization and they need to go. So stop looking at it as something bad. Set them free to their next adventure. They’ll be successful somewhere else. But you still have to give them a chance.
You have to make sure that you have defined clearly what it is you want them [sellers] to do. You’ve trained them to do it. You’ve repeated that training. You’ve encouraged, you’ve rewarded and you’ve guided, right? And then your job is much easier.
The biggest thing I come into in the organizations I work with is a total lack of accountability. Nobody is held to anything. We tell them, go to your salesforce. But when they don’t do it, we don’t do anything about it. We don’t dock their pay, no tax or commission. We don’t say, “Hey, go home for two days and think about it and come back.” Either update your Salesforce, or you’re gone. Why keep asking them to do something they’re not going to do? It’s crazy behavior and we drive ourselves crazy. And then we hear things like, Oh, that salesperson drives me crazy. Why would you let someone drive you crazy? We make it so hard because we love people and we want to give them lots of chances, and I get that.
If you would coach your people to change to the behavior that works best for the customer and the organization, everybody’s happier and the salesperson is wildly more successful.
How sales leaders can evolve their own skillset
Hannah: I love that you pivoted to coaching. It’s huge, and there’s so much talk around the enablement of sales leaders, that to be better sellers, sales leaders are trying to transition to coaching. What more could they be doing to improve their own ability?
Alice: So that’s probably the most important thing, right? Look, we’re not very good at hiring salespeople most of the time. We really don’t hire people that are the best fit for our company, and that’s one of the biggest problems. So I would say, learn how to hire salespeople that are a good fit. How do you do that? Well, there’s all kinds of research out there. There are books you can read. One of my favorites is “You’re Not The Person I Hired” by Barry Deutsch. It’s my go-to guide for everything hiring. But there are plenty of others specific to hiring salespeople. Do something to help yourself learn how to hire great salespeople. What we tend to do is hire people like ourselves, that we like or that talk a good game. But we don’t interview them hard enough to really know whether they can do what they say they can do. So I think that sales leaders should learn how to hire and then get the resources and tell their CEO why they need specific resources. Bring the story in and tell that story and then be able to do a better job hiring. So you’ve got to go find that information. Train yourself to do it. One of my favorite books for sales leaders is “The Sales Manager’s Guide to Greatness” by Kevin Davis. It lays out specifically the things that a sales leader can do to help their salespeople be successful. And that’s what every sales leader should be thinking. How do I get a team that all hits quota? You know.
What’s a winning sales strategy?
Tony: So you talked about peak performers. I think that’s a great segue to talk a little bit about sales strategy. So when you think about peak performers and that sort of that top-down approach where you’re hiring the right people, you’re getting the people in place. What do you think are the pillars for instilling a very successful sales strategy within those teams once you’ve got the right people?
Alice: Once again, I go back to the CEO. A CEO with a clear vision and who has done the proper planning with their senior team and knows their vision, their mission, their values, their purpose – they know what they believe, right? When you have that, it’s really easy for the sales team to move forward. I mostly find these teams are struggling because there is no clear strategy. At the top level, some companies go years without doing a strategic plan of any kind or even just having a few values and sticking to them, such as, “We don’t do business with people who treat our people poorly,” and “We don’t do these kinds of things,” you know, like just some basic values, right? But I see companies go four years where I’m like, Well, do you guys have a vision? So that doesn’t work. It’s hard for sales to do their job because they’re just out there selling with no strategy. So it comes back to the top. Leadership has to have a strategy for the growth of the entire company. What does that look like overall? And then we can tuck our whole go-to-market strategy into that.
Salespeople do need to be strategists but at an account level, at a level where they’re positioning themselves to close a deal. Right in the complex sale, they’ve got to get positioned to close that deal and there is some strategy involved there.
If they have a territory, whether that’s verticals, geography, or whatever it may be, they need to have a little bit of strategy around how they’re going to work that territory. But most salespeople don’t need to be highly strategic. They definitely need to be a bit more tactical. So the strategy has to be from the top and then we have to drive the demand based on the strategy. So that demand gen is based on that bigger strategy, and then the salespeople are working their territories based on that strategy so that we are bringing in the types of customers that are ideal for us. We serve them well, which serves us well because we grow. When we just bring in accounts to be closing deals and get new logos – some of those logos won’t stay and some of those logos are a pain, so we don’t want them. But we were so pressured to close business, we took business that wasn’t good business. Now we can’t retain them. So we really have to be careful what we wish for, and we definitely need to have that strategy start at the top and trickle down.
Hannah: So I wanted to segue into our quick-fire rounds. So this is going to be a little bit of fun. We have a timer. No, I’m joking. We have no timer, but we do want to ask you a few questions. And just like without thinking, just give us your answers, right? So the first question is, what is your sales philosophy in just three words?
Alice: Serve the customer.
Hannah: And what is the best piece of advice you’ve been given in your career?
Alice: Listen.
Tony: What would you say is your top productivity hack?
Alice: I don’t have any productivity hacks. Oh, let’s see.., coffee for sure. I would just say block time, that’s the only way I get big projects. Just block time on my calendar.
Tony: What would you say is your top prediction for the sales industry in 2022?
Alice: I think that we’re going to become more human or get back to being human in our approach. I think people are finally hearing that buyers don’t want to be spammed, buyers don’t want robotic messages. They just want a human being to talk to them about their problems and see if they can help. So I predict we are hearing that message and we’re going to be more human.
Hannah: The best bit of career advice you got was “listen” right? So if you need to turn that around, what would be the best career advice you could give to salespeople today?
Alice: Invest in yourself. Don’t sit around waiting for anyone else to give you the training you need, give yourself the coaching you need, the mentoring you need. Go get it.
Tony: There are so many sources of information out there right now, and I’m sure that the Ready, Set, Sell podcast will quickly be climbing that list of sources. But if you could get where do you typically go to get your sales industry news?
Alice: Well, Gartner and Forrester both put out a lot of really great industry news. Corporate Visions is excellent.
Tony: What would you say is your favorite industry conference?
Alice: I love Sales 3.0, but of course, I’m on the EMC, so I should love it, right?
Hannah: What skill or which set of skills should a salesperson be focused on over 2022?
Alice: I think they need a different skill set than they’ve been training for in the past. And people talk about soft skills and hard skills – look, you’ve got to learn how to do these things in order to be a good seller. The skill I think is needed most now is the skill of orchestration. Back to the sales leaders and one of the ways they can have peak performance is to help their salespeople understand how to orchestrate and how to understand a day in the life of the person that they’re selling to.
What we learned
Alice really had some excellent insights to share about the role of the CEO in the sales organization, about staying accountable, and strategizing for success. CEOs have a unique role to play within a sales organization. Not only are they the only key leader with the ability to view the organization as a whole, but they are also the final decision maker when it comes to the overall customer journey. Everyone within a company is a part of the sales team. As Alice noted, sales is about much more than just the sellers. It really encompasses everyone under the company umbrella. But she has reminded us, analyzing your successes and failures will ultimately help to drive your business forward. While it’s essential to take both wins and losses into account, she did stress the importance of gleaning insights from your wins so you can continue replicating your success in the future.
When you think of the future of sales, it might conjure up images of watching product demos in virtual reality or having AI completely take over the sales discovery process. And while it’s fun to imagine these big, dramatic changes, in reality, the market transformation is likely to be much more incremental.
But even slow-moving changes still have a significant impact on your sales team. If you don’t keep your finger on the pulse of changing buyer expectations, technology, and skill sets, you might get left behind as competitors adapt faster and capitalize on new opportunities. Four revenue leaders shared their insights into where the changes are likely to occur and what form they’ll take.
Sales reps will own inbound lead generation
Gone are the days of sales and marketing working in siloes. SDRs and inbound sales reps will start to take over inbound lead generation campaigns from marketing departments.
It’s becoming more common for sales and marketing teams to be brought together into wider revenue departments, both reporting up to a Chief Revenue Officer. Terkel CEO Brett Farmiloe predicts:
“We’ll see a bigger blend between sales and marketing. In particular, we’ll start to see sales functions taking responsibility for inbound campaigns, which means we’ll see more sales resumes coming through with SEO and PPC certifications.”
If sales teams take greater responsibility for the whole sales cycle — from generating the leads right through to closing deals — then sales leaders will need to plan for new, specialist roles on their teams. According to Forrester, today, the average sales rep spends only 23% of their time on core selling activities. Increasing specialized sales roles enables other reps to dedicate more time to activities that move deals forward, rather than splitting their focus across outreach, lead generation, nurturing, closing deals — and anything else that lands on their plate.
Mindtickle Director of Sales, Jason Alumbaugh, says:
“Effective prospecting and generating demand will be essential skills for sales reps. In addition, the ability to effectively qualify leads will be the most impactful skill to help reps make the best use of their selling time.”
The rise of the sales influencer
Sales reps who have strong personal brands will be increasingly in demand with employers. As companies try to differentiate from competitors, reps with a strong social media presence will become more and more sought after. Their activities on social platforms build their reputation as an expert in their field, which helps them build trust more quickly with customers, extends their reach, and makes them a real asset to organizations.
Mindtickle GM and Regional Vice President Anthony Parker explained:
“Sales reps without a voice or personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn will find it more difficult to stand out from the pack.”
But placing greater importance on sellers’ personal brands can become a double-edged sword for businesses. It will make it easier for recruiters to identify and source top talent. Bringing on a social media savvy seller can bring attention to your organization once they join and update their networks. But reps with big personal brands may also be a risk, as they’re likely to be highly sought after by other companies and may be easily lured away by a more lucrative offer.
To prepare for this changing dynamic, sales leaders should encourage their whole team to build out their personal brand — and avoid hiring just one rockstar rep who makes a name for themselves on social media.
Sellers must be trusted advisors
According to Gartner, “33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience.” As millennials take on more decision-maker roles in the sales process in the next few years, that percentage will only increase, as “44% of millennials prefer no sales rep interaction in a B2B purchase setting.” As a result, sellers will need to adapt their behaviors and processes to keep up with changing buyer expectations.
DataRails Account Executive Ed Haft believes that sales reps need to focus on becoming trusted partners and experts rather than the stereotypical pushy salesperson. He explains:
“Relationship building will become an increasingly important skill as we shift toward people wanting to build trust and a relationship to enhance the customer experience.” He added, “Sales activity will become more intensely focused on problem-solving — being able to identify the problem the customer is looking to solve and demonstrate how you can achieve it.”
A 2020 study by LinkedIn found that 88% of consumers only buy when they see a salesperson as a “trusted advisor.” Therefore, if sellers are to remain relevant and continue to play their essential role in the future buying process, they need to prioritize building trust with their prospects. One way to do this is to focus on your customers’ desired outcomes and focus your sales conversations on solutions rather than sales.
AI will deliver crucial insights to help reps excel in any sales scenario
The majority of companies are investing in artificial intelligence and other technology to arm their teams with more customer data and insights to help drive more revenue. Forrester found that 68% of technology decision-makers have already implemented AI or are in the process of doing so. The proliferation of AI tools will mean sales teams can get more detailed insights across all their sales interactions.
Alumbaugh explains, “There will be a consolidation of sales tools so more effective AI-driven insights can be provided across all activities in the sales cycle.” While some reps may still have concerns about being replaced by AI, we believe that high-value sales transactions still need that human touch. So sales reps are perhaps some of the roles least likely to be replaced by AI and automation.
Using AI to analyze customer interactions will help sellers to better personalize their recommendations and follow-up messages based on prospects’ needs. Krittin Kalra, founder at Writecream, explained:
“Some of the most important skills for salespeople will be the ability to understand their customer’s needs and translate them into a solution, and the ability to be able to think on their feet and be able to react to different situations.” He added, “Technology is transforming the way we do business, by giving salespeople the data they need for each scenario.”
But all the AI-driven insights — and the tools themselves — will only help sales reps if they know how to use them and interpret the data. Although not a sales leader, Levi Olmstead, senior content marketing manager at Whatfix, believes that “it will be a challenge for sales leaders to support their sales reps properly. Reps will need the right process documentation and tools to be able to adopt these platforms and use them correctly.”
Competitive knowledge is a non-negotiable selling skill
In the U.S. alone, more than 400,000 new business applications were submitted each month in 2021, totaling over 5.3 million new businesses created over the year. So if you think you’re operating in a crowded market now, chances are it’s going to get even more so over the next few years.
Increasingly crowded markets mean that buyers have more suppliers to choose between. Haft from DataRails predicts, “The most important skill for sales reps will be their competitive knowledge and the ability to clearly and concisely differentiate your product and service against others in the market.”
Sales managers can help their reps build knowledge through ongoing sales enablement and training to prepare for this. Seemingly small improvements, such as achieving messaging consistency across the team, will help to present a more knowledgeable, prepared, and professional face to your prospects and help you stand out against less-prepared competitors.
The future of sales is full of opportunities — for companies that start preparing now
Incremental shifts are a big danger for sales organizations as they can be harder to detect and respond to than huge, sweeping changes. You don’t want to be the proverbial frog in the gradually boiling water, struggling as changes creep up on you and realizing you’re too late to adapt. But if sales leaders can help their teams embrace these changing market conditions and ensure reps develop the necessary tech skills and sales behaviors, they stand to capitalize on these opportunities while competitors get left behind.
“We’ll see a bigger blend between sales and marketing. In particular, we’ll start to see sales functions taking responsibility for inbound campaigns, which means we’ll see more sales resumes coming through with SEO and PPC certifications.”
“Effective prospecting and generating demand will be essential skills for sales reps. In addition, the ability to effectively qualify leads will be the most impactful skill to help reps make the best use of their selling time.”
“Sales reps without a voice or personal brand on platforms like LinkedIn will find it more difficult to stand out from the pack.”
“Relationship building will become an increasingly important skill as we shift toward people wanting to build trust and a relationship to enhance the customer experience.” He added, “Sales activity will become more intensely focused on problem-solving — being able to identify the problem the customer is looking to solve and demonstrate how you can achieve it.”
“Some of the most important skills for salespeople will be the ability to understand their customer’s needs and translate them into a solution, and the ability to be able to think on their feet and be able to react to different situations.” He added, “Technology is transforming the way we do business, by giving salespeople the data they need for each scenario.”