2 Major Tips for how a Sales Enablement Manager can Influence Business Outcomes

How Sales Enablement Leaders can Impact Business Outcomes

If the results of sales enablement programs are sometimes difficult to detect in business outcomes, it’s not hard to see why.

Sales enablement leaders

struggle to push change forward and make it stick. They rarely have the ability to propel change directly, by their own authority. And “executive buy-in” can be hard to define, let alone secure. So, the big question for many sales enablement pros is: “How can I

influence business outcomes

?”

The mandates for

sales enablement leaders

can be pretty vague as well. Too often, here’s what happens: the CEO turns to the sales lead and says, “Make sure that our sales organization hits our number.” Then the head of sales turns to sales enablement and says, “We need to hit plan. Go figure it out and make that happen.”

Or the goal may be somewhat more specific: “Do something about our onboarding process.” But again – what exactly does that entail, and how is it supposed to happen? The natural impulse is to jump into immediate action – maybe buy some new tools, revamp initial training processes, pull together a few individuals who can help you tap into “tribal” knowledge. What’s missing is a

strategy

that aligns with the objectives of the C-suite or line-of-business, long before any program roll-out.

Here are two ways that sales enablement leaders can build that alignment and bring the full force of pragmatic, informed influence to bear on sales activities:

Start with the why – and clarify.

The C-suite mandates the sales goals, and it’s sales enablement’s job to achieve them. But when the goals are unclear or overly broad, there’s a simple remedy that busy, action-oriented

sales enablement leaders

tend to overlook: Ask! Find out

why

the executive sponsor or line of business leader thinks a

sales process

change is needed. What specific KPIs is the C-suite looking to influence? What concerns do they have?

Once you’ve built that broader strategic understanding, it’s easier to do a deep dive into the specific challenges to appropriately change the

sales process

. You can conduct an internal assessment to probe into what’s working best, and what isn’t working at all. If it’s an onboarding revamp, for example, that may mean asking questions like:

  • At the end of the process, do new reps really know how to engage a prospect in the right ways, whether in person or over the phone?
  • Are we teaching reps to sell value

    , or just to sell features and functionality?

  • Is the onboarding process having a measurable impact onbusiness outcomes

    ?

And while you’re asking leadership about strategic goals, don’t forget to seek input from the field teams, too. Part of the value of the

sales enablement leader

is their position as a liaison – a bridge if you will – between the sales organization and the lines of business.

Sales enablement is often tasked with filling in the gaps that lie between what sales needs, versus what they want. For example, let’s say your salespeople want a better communication tool that simplifies and consolidates e-mail, text, and voice. But what they need, according to management, is a learning process that reinforces sales training and helps reps sell more services. If you can find a way to provide both, you’ve taken a big step towards increasing sales effectiveness while also building your influence for the next project.

Keep an eye open for things that reps

don’t

want, too. One of the fastest ways sales enablement leaders can endear themselves to salespeople is by removing an ineffective or irrelevant sales process and content that inhibits their ability to hit their numbers.

Be a data curator.

In the words of legendary productivity sage W. Edwards Deming, “Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” Successful sales enablement organizations adopt a data-driven mindset when working to drive change that matters.

Data can show you how sales reps are interacting with content. It can help you tie learning success to outcomes, which in turn reveals areas that require ongoing training.

When data girds the process, it allows sales enablement to set reachable goals, assign metrics, and keep leadership up-to-date on progress. It’s worth spending some time investigating data-driven enablement platforms that move beyond the traditional training programs that L&D and HR teams have been relying on for years.

Business strategy theorist Michael Porter once remarked that

“the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” Maybe so, but the essence of execution – or at least, a big part of it – is knowing exactly what the objective is and being able to track progress towards a business outcome.

Equipped with the big picture and the right metrics,

sales enablement leaders

can harness the power of influence to drive lasting and transformative change.

The Glaring Omission in Most Companies’ Sales Reporting

Get the most out of your sales reporting

 

In Salesforce’s comprehensive and informative sales reporting blog last year, titled

“7 Steps to Creating a Sales Report Your Bosses Will Enjoy Reading”,

the usual metrics from daily call reporting to productivity reporting to the pipeline and sales forecasting are covered.

In a world where competitive and fast-moving markets require that companies’ sales teams be effective at consistently engaging customers and working towards winning deals from day one, there’s a glaring omission in their sales reporting: the ability to explicitly evaluate and identify productivity – and its gaps.

Before companies can make any kind of progress and enjoy elevated sales productivity, they first need to know if their reps are ready to sell. They need to understand, through hard data analysis, if their teams have learned the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that are required to not only be productive but also effective.
Sporadic reporting is not enough

The days are gone where a company can train their sales teams, and with a once-a-year sales meeting, update them with what they need to know about any new product or service offerings. Now sales teams need to continually stay on top of the ever-evolving product, service and competitive information, messaging, and updates. Thus, sales reporting which includes sales readiness needs to not only be added but then continuously monitored in any modern sales report alongside productivity and pipeline reports.
Shifting activity to productivity

Swaying your reps’ focus from demonstrating activity to productivity can be tricky, but it’s an important step when it comes to evaluating and understanding their progress and process. Your reps should not only be able to provide you with their short and long-term goals, but also with specific details on the logistics of their first appointments.

It’s important for you, as a manager, to see how many first appointments are being made throughout the weekly sales cycles – this allows you to predict potential deals and gauge turnaround times. First appointments are a surefire indicator of progress – both for outstanding members of your team and for those who need that extra push towards productivity.
Adding sales preparedness to traditional sales reports

Imagine if you could provide a sales report to leadership that showed how ready-to-sell the overall team was, and also demonstrated individual progress on skill development and critical information acquisition. Imagine how much more meaningful it would be to understand the teams’ progress on their ability to confidently objection handle, discuss the company’s differentiators or the competition or providing the latest, important product update.

Sales reports can, in fact, give you an opportunity to see how your reps are performing outside of specific sales conversations. For example, you can have a much broader overview of their progress if you encourage them to include:

  • Specific proposals delivered to clients for their unique pain points
  • Customer inquiries and product questions most received that week
  • Any networking or industry events they’ve attended or have brought up in conversation

Minding the metrics

Finally, no sales reporting strategy – regardless of how thorough – is complete without a strategic, established way of sharing your team’s metrics. Between measuring, presenting, and digesting information, your team should be able to look to their sales reporting solution as a comprehensive and accessible space and tool.

Standardized metrics and reporting procedures will allow you to maintain structure across the board, and ultimately keep a better pulse on how your sales team is doing regardless of cycle, time, or quarter.

From Forbes: How to Improve Sales Performance for Your Team: Start With The Problem, Not Solution

Now more than ever, salespeople are working twice as hard to achieve the same or even diminished results despite access to innovative sales tools, mobile accessibility, and social media capabilities, among other technological advances.

And while it might seem that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks when it comes to your sales team management, it’s actually the perfect time to make a change to a tried and true system.

In a recent article featured in Forbes Magazine

, Mindtickle’s Patrick Lynch shares some insights. He writes that when it comes to improving sales team performance:

 

“Your risks are mitigated by following a simple and thorough process of diagnosing the problem and then prescribing a solution. Are there risks involved? Of course. Then again, you can always ask yourself: Without a prescription, will we ever get better?” – Pat Lynch, Mindtickle

If you’ve noticed your sales team’s performance starting to feel a little under the weather, it’s a smart move to pause and take the time to figure out the root of the problem.

Read on to learn about the key takeaways for when it comes to addressing and re-strategizing the way your sales team management tackles its goals.

Knowledge Transfer: The Achilles Heel of Sales Enablement

“The biggest challenge for sales reps to meet their quota is difficulty in differentiating offerings from competition or buyer status quo.”

At the SiriusDecisions Summit this year one of the best sessions I attended was the one on “Sales Knowledge Transfer Framework.” It laid out the case for changing how companies are transferring knowledge to their sales teams.

However, despite all the advancements made in educating companies on the value of sales enablement, it’s surprising that many salespeople are still lagging behind.

Why is this is happening? SiriusDecisions shed some light on the problem:

  • 36% of high-performing reps feel they need more coaching from their managers.
  • High-performing reps are 3X more likely to use role-play when learning.
  • 26% of low-performing managers lack guidance, resources, or support to coach new hires.
  • Low performers are 8X more likely to

    not

    to use role-play in their training programs.

When creating great onboarding or ongoing enablement programs, it’s important to understand how your sales team learns, practices, and receives feedback. Without incorporating these elements, adoption will be low and, you won’t see results.

Competitive updates, objection handling, new messaging, market information and all the knowledge and information you need to transfer to the minds of your sales reps require a considerate plan. Technology now enables you to leverage virtual role-play to complement in-person exercises. Electronic coaching forms can assist managers in following a prescribed approach to observe and help reps in the field. And mobile-enabled micro-learning modules can reach your field team wherever they are without taking time away from selling activities. But technology alone is not enough.

If you are thinking about deploying an enablement solution, first stop to make a list of everyone involved including sales, marketing, and product marketing. Ensure you have buy-in as any new technology deployment is only as good as the people using it. Then, those who create content and want to transfer their knowledge to the sales reps will have new guidelines.

If you’d like to see how other companies have done this successfully, contact [email protected] and we’ll put you in touch with someone that has transformed their sales enablement and can share what they’ve learned. You can also read some of our

customer stories here

.

A Sr. Sales Enablement Leader at MuleSoft Explains Effective Best Practices [A Podcast]

As

Senior Manager of Sales Enablement, Ali Jones is responsible for MuleSoft’s early stage opportunity strategy and executive briefing program. Her experience brings together Ali’s experience in direct selling and consulting.

“We have a relatively small enablement team at MuleSoft. One person is focused on sales analytics, then three enablement managers each have ownership over part of the sales process. Each of us also has ownership over specific programs and regional alignment as well. We’re generalists yet we also have the opportunity to go deep and really maximize how we engage with our customers and generate revenue,”

explains Ali.

Each function also has their own enablement team, but they each leverage the content and assets that are built by the central team. This flexible structure has enabled MuleSoft to grow and scale up very quickly.

Two crucial parts of their central enablement program are MuleSoft’s onboarding KickStart program and its certification process.

“We take our certification process very seriously,” says Ali. “Salespeople go through multiple rounds and the bar is really high. People take weeks to prepare for their certification. The nice thing is that when they come out of it we are 100% positive that they will nail it in front of a customer.”

So far, over 500 people have been through MuleSoft’s certification program, and they aspire to do so much more with it.

As Ali says, “

sales enablement is such an interesting place to be in the software world. It’s exciting and there are so many interesting things to do.”

In this 20 minute

podcast Ali explains:

  • How MuleSoft has structured its enablement team and compensation to drive sales results
  • What makes MuleSoft’s Kickstart onboarding experience so unique and impactful
  • The tools that have helped MuleSoft enable and scale its sales team
  • The advice she would give to herself if she could do it again

How to Change from Feature-Based Selling to Value-Based Selling

When making changes to your sales approach or processes, you want to be sure you achieve your desired outcomes. With a plan in place, you increase the likelihood that you will. Below are the steps you need to take to change from feature-based selling to value-based selling.

To make this transition you’ll want to follow these steps:

  •         Revise your sales process
  •         Update your competency framework
  •         Identify and create the required content
  •         Identify individual knowledge and skill gaps
  •         Guide and coach your reps through personalized training
  •         Provide ongoing updates

Revise your sales process

There are several reasons to revise your sales process. They include changes to your company, team, product, customer base, customer behaviors, and decreased results from your existing process. Changing your sales methodology is often the outcome of one of these reasons. To revise your sales process consider what changes will be necessary to accommodate your value-selling approach. When, in the buyer’s journey, will your reps be initially engaging with prospects? What steps will need to take place, using a value focus, to convert the prospect to a customer? Map this out very carefully so your sales team always knows what’s next to advance through the process successfully. Once the process is implemented, be sure to use metrics and rep feedback to fine-tune and adjust it as needed.

Update your competency frameworks

Before you can make the change from feature-based to value-based selling, you need to update your sales competency frameworks. These plans provide detailed information about behaviors, skills, and knowledge requirements for each sales position. They simplify benchmarking and help you easily recognize successful training outcomes. To update your frameworks, consider what knowledge, skills, and attributes should be removed from your current ones for each sales position. Next, add any new competencies that will be required for effective value selling. Depending on your particular product or service, these will vary. In our discussion about value-selling, we included several categories of skills and knowledge your team must have for success. They include product, case studies, marketplace, industry information, and buyer personas. Compare these to your current competencies to identify the updates needed. If you’d like more information relating to sales competency frameworks, we discuss this topic in more detail in

this article

.

Identify and create the required content

Once you’ve updated your sales process and your competency frameworks, you’ll be able to identify content gaps. Develop updated content that incorporates your new messaging for both internal and external use. Be sure that you have content for every stage of the sales process, prospect industries, and each persona involved in the buying process. Content will include training materials such as buyer personas and corresponding value propositions for each product, industry, and persona. Plus sales playbooks and training materials like audio, video, and written training snippets, assessment quizzes, games, and certification exercises. Client-facing content tools might include case studies, white papers, e-books, and the like. As this content is used, don’t forget to gather feedback on it from your sales team. Track which pieces are used and which are most effective. This will simplify future content planning.

Identify individual knowledge and skill gaps

If you training your entire sales team on the same material, you risk boring more experienced reps while confusing less experienced ones. You should allow reps to fulfill their individual training requirements. To do so, you must identify each team member’s specific knowledge and skill gaps. There are several ways to do this. These include observation of demonstrated skills and behaviors, assessments through task simulations, self-assessments, quizzes, and performance data. To learn more, you can read

this article

about identifying knowledge and skill gaps.

 

Personalized training with coaching

Armed with your reps’ knowledge and skill gap information, you can start guiding and coaching your reps through the personalized training they need. Prioritize their training needs to help them get started. Utilize short bite-sized written and video training modules. At the end of each module, include short quizzes and games designed to measure their understanding while reinforcing what they’ve learned. Simulation missions allow sales reps to practice and apply what they have learned. For minimal impact on their schedules, these are completed via mobile video and coach feedback is provided. This will reinforce correct practices and prevent the development of bad practices. It’s an excellent way to incorporate another layer of coaching.

Leverage gamification

to motivate them to advance through their training. Leaderboards and rewards will activate their competitive nature too while keeping the process fun and engaging. Incorporate certifications at the end of each course to ensure that reps are properly prepared to effectively apply their newly-learned knowledge and skills.

Provide ongoing refreshers and updates

It’s been shown that training, without ongoing reinforcement, is very quickly forgotten. This is why it is important that you provide your salesforce with refreshers and updates. Refreshers can include bite-sized pieces of supplemental information relating to what they’ve already learned. Share cheat sheets, best practice examples, and reminders. Send out pop quizzes from time to time also. This will allow them to recall knowledge they’ve been taught and apply it. Coaching and simulations exercises are also excellent ways to help your team remain effective by using their skills in different scenarios so they’re always prepared. Updates should include information about new content, new success stories, changes in the marketplace, and changes internally. With these, they’ll always have the latest information at their disposal and never be caught off guard by unexpected questions from prospects pertaining to the latest changes.

Now you have a roadmap to help you change from feature-based to value-based selling. Once you’ve completed this process your team members will be prepared to provide more valuable solutions to their prospects. The end result will be consistently elevated rep performance and more closed deals. And isn’t that the goal? Now it’s time for you to get started with this process so you receive the benefits of value-based selling in your organization!

Improve Sales’ Performance By Transitioning to Away from Feature-based Selling

Organizations are always looking for ways to improve sales’ performance. It used to be sufficient to sell the with pointing out features and benefits. Today’s buyers expect salespeople to understand their business and guide them to solutions that target their specific challenges. The best way to do this is by focusing on value. Research by the Rain Group found that companies that drive value have 9% higher win rates than all others. That results in a dramatic impact on revenue and profitability. So, it’s time to elevate sales performance by transitioning from feature-based to value-based selling.

What is value-based selling?

Value-based selling is a process that leads to tailor-made solutions based on the needs, challenges, and goals of the prospect. These solutions result in the prospect’s desired business outcomes. This undertaking involves carefully considering the opportunity from the buyer’s perspective. To do so, sales reps must understand several things before formulating a solution. They need to know the prospect’s business and how it runs. This helps them identify their goals and challenges. Knowledge of competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are important here, along with an understanding of marketplace trends.

Once reps have a feeling for the buyer’s business, they can refocus the conversation on proving the value your solution will bring to the prospect’s unique situation. This should include detailed cost and benefit information that is both tangible and intangible. Other considerations are Total Cost of Ownership, training, cost of changing, opportunity costs, and time to market. Reps need to gain a deep understanding of which of these costs are important for the buyer to be able to better position the solution’s overall value. Taking the time to understand the customer more deeply helps build the necessary trust and relationship.

Moving from feature-based to value-based selling

To prepare your sales force to engage in value-based selling you must educate them on several topics. These include the following:

  • Product:Make your reps experts in your product. Have them use it so they intimately understand it. They should be able to easily discuss its uses and applications in depth. This will increase their confidence and their credibility.

 

  • Case Studies:Share customer success stories, and use cases with your salesforce. Continually document an assortment of case studies. Make this content available for reps to share with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey. Be sure to include ones from various industries and with diverse outcomes.  Have ones that will resonate with each of the personas most commonly involved in your prospect’s buying committees. This ensures your reps are always armed with the appropriate content to share with everyone engaged in the purchasing decision.

 

  • Marketplace:Keep reps current on competitor changes and new offerings. This will allow them to more effectively differentiate their solutions and build value. Awareness of marketplace trends is important as well. With this precious information, your salesforce will be better prepared to act as trusted advisors to their prospects.

 

  • Industry Information:Provide reps with an ongoing education about key industries that your customers inhabit. This will allow them to more fully understand the challenges and issues prospects are facing. With this knowledge, your reps will become strategic consultants. They’ll be able to tell prospects

    why

    they are experiencing pain instead of simply identifying their pain. Demonstrating understanding, by offering the best solution, enables reps to provide value to prospects and increases success.

 

  • Buyer Personas:It’s become more common for a group of people to make business buying decisions. Arm your sales force with an understanding of the buyer personas most often included in a buying committee. They’ll know how to communicate with each of them. Plus, addressing their concerns and building value will be simplified. This will allow them to build trust and credibility while accelerating the sales process.

It’s clear that feature-based selling is no longer effective. For your reps to produce better sales results, you must prepare them for value-based selling. That involves educating them on many topics such as product, case studies, marketplace, industry information, and buyer personas. Armed with this knowledge, your team members will be ready to successfully engage customers. Plus they’ll be able to formulate customized solutions that win more deals. By now, you’re probably ready to get started.

How to Create a Sales Competency Framework That Aligns with Organizational Goals

Sales organizations today are being challenged to do more with less. With ever-rising quotas and a continuously changing marketplace, it’s important to communicate clear expectations. A sales competency framework facilitates this. It states what skills, knowledge, and behaviors are expected for each position. This simplifies hiring, training, and performance measurement. Such a useful asset is unique to each organization, since it’s aligned with corporate goals and priorities. When created properly, a sales competency framework has been found to improve hiring, increase training focus, and elevate performance outcomes.

Understanding sales competencies

So many organizations have historically conducted training and failed to measure their results. The challenge has been, how to go about actually measuring progress and recognizing results. An effective sales competency framework not only makes it possible to know when training and coaching are having a positive impact, it makes measurement easier too because it identifies desired end results.

These frameworks spell out specific profiles of ideal sales people too. This minimizes hiring errors because there’s clarity around what characteristics and abilities the best candidates should possess.

They detail the end goal of behaviors, skills, and knowledge so benchmarking of teams and individuals is simplified. Plus, they establish measurement criteria to utilize during development.

Overall, a sales competency framework lets you deliver a development program with the potential to change behavior for the better. It results in improved performance and a measurable return on investment.

How to create a sales competency framework

Now that you know what a sales competency framework is, let’s look at how to create one for your organization. Keep in mind that this is an evolutionary process that may take some time. Once you work through it, you’ll want to refine and update it periodically so it changes as your organization and marketplace do.

Start by identifying the competencies for each of your difference sales roles. They should define the knowledge, skills, and attributes needed to perform the jobs effectively. Be sure that these are all measurable and determine how they will be measured.

As you determine which competencies best represent each role, involve various people in the process. These should include top performers in your sales force as well as sales management. This will increase acceptance and use of competencies once they are implemented, plus it prevents inclusion of irrelevant competencies.

To ensure that the most important competencies are included in the framework, information should be collected for each role. It can be collected in several ways:

  • Observing of individuals while performing their roles.
  • Interviews of people in each role either in small groups or individually.
  • Questionnaires may be used to gather data relating to roles.

When putting it all together, define each of the key characteristics across a range of performance levels for easy measurement and benchmarking. These competencies need to be aligned with sales force strategies, processes, and goals so they drive the desired results of your organization.

As you implement the competency framework, remember to communicate the end goal clearly. This will increase acceptance and utilization as well as results. The framework should be a handy tool and reference for all who use it. Don’t forget to enlist feedback to facilitate adjustments and updates on a routine basis.

Having an established sales competency framework improves communication by proving a common language for describing effectiveness across your organization. It provides a vocabulary and examples for use by management when discussing performance with employees. Plus, it creates greater consistency and objectivity when assessing performance. This model reduces mistakes in recruitment and new hire selection. And, most importantly, individual employees can see a clear path for personal development and progress in their current and future roles. This simplifies the entire training and development planning and implementation process. If this is what you want for your organization, it’s time to get started developing your sales competency framework.

Managing Change when Implementing Sales Readiness Tools: a Four-Step Approach

Any form of change is challenging for organizations to manage, but sales teams are particularly sensitive to change. They don’t want anything to take them out of the field or negatively affect their results even for one day. This can make introducing new sales readiness tools particularly difficult.

Mendix, a platform-as-a-service company that helps organizations make web and mobile applications, knew this was an issue but their onboarding and ongoing sales training program needed to change. They were growing rapidly, hiring 15 new sales hires a quarter in a team to a base team of only 68. At the same time, the company was tasked with improving their time to sale, the number of opportunities they generated and their win rate. They wanted to reduce the time and expense of face-to-face training so they chose to implement Mindtickle, a sales readiness platform.

To ensure the new tool didn’t distract their salespeople and actually helped them to sell better sooner, they implemented a four-step approach to address the change.

1. Top-performers engaged with the tool first

Mindtickle was only rolled out to top-performing reps and engaged managers first. These people had all been identified as high performers across a range of metrics. They were called Mendix’s Champions and held up as role models in the organization.

The Champions completed missions on Mindtickle – they practiced their selling skills on the platform and were measured on how they learned and what they had learned. The results were very positive, and they were shown to the entire sales team at their next sales kickoff. By showing top performers visibly embracing change and improving their performance as well, other reps were eager to get onboard.

It was at this kickoff that the leaders of Mendix outlined what they expected of their sales organization in the coming year and explained how Mindtickle would help them achieve that. The sales readiness platform was positioned as critical to the company’s success.

2. Roll it out to the rest of the sales force

With the value of the platform clear and the sales’ objectives linked to Mindtickle, the tool was rolled out to the rest of their sales force. To help in this process Mendix’s Champions were given the responsibility of supporting members of the sales team on their missions. The champions would look at the video role plays in their missions, give them feedback and grade them. These grades were put on a leaderboard to create some healthy competition amongst the team.

This approach worked well, particularly with the younger reps who were keen to learn and improve their selling skills. Seasoned reps were reluctant to try the new tool.

3. Get CEO endorsement and incentive

As they rolled out the tool, the CEO publicly endorsed the platform. This was targeted specifically at bringing the reluctant reps onboard. At the same time, the CEO also introduced a new compensation model where reps could earn a quarterly bonus if they scored well on their missions in Mindtickle. This additional sweetener started to encourage more reps to use the platform.

4. Leaders publicly acknowledge those who have changed

The final step was for the leaders of the sales organization to start publicly acknowledging the people who had embraced the change. This began with the first salespeople to complete their missions being recognized and their scores shared. This process of communication continued every week, where the highest performers in each region were held up as role models. This helped inspire all the other sales reps to adopt and use the platform.

Within a month of rolling out Mindtickle people from each level of the sales organization were using the platform. Two months later 87% of their reps had done a mission on Mindtickle, with seven missions per seller on average. To check on how salespeople were really feeling, Mendix also collected feedback and found that even some of their strongest skeptics were seeing real value in the process. They were learning how to improve their own roles and improve how they communicate.

To keep the momentum going, the company started releasing reports every quarter to the sales organization. These reports disclosed who used the platform most and showed how it was improving sales performance. Some of the successes include:

  • New business development reps were consistently meeting quota after just three months – this had previously taken six months.
  • Their prospecting success rates doubled
  • Top performers had reduced the amount of time it took them to qualify and progress opportunities from 30 days to just seven days
  • The entire sales team was performing at 105% of its targets

Mindtickle is now an integral part of the culture of the sales organization at Mendix. It’s part of their day-to-day work, incentives, and reporting.

In Conversation with Mark Tefakis of Fuze

MARK-TEFAKIS_sales enablement_fuzeThis post is based on a webinar where Mark Tefakis, VP of Global Enablement at Fuze, shares the key pillars of successful sales enablement and how to show its ROI to your leadership.
Fuze is an award-winning “cloud-based unified communication platform that addresses complexities around the modern workforce with the ability to work in a way that drives efficiency and effectiveness for the growth and profitability metrics companies need,” explains Mark. “Founded in 2006, we’re headquartered in Boston and have offices throughout Europe, into Australia, Latin America, and Asia Pacific.”

The evolution and need for sales enablement

“Sales Enablement centered around training and development initially and expanded into how you fully enable the sales organization,” Mark continued. “A lot of CSOs are being challenged with having a constant pulse on the business, to be able to report on where they are today, where they’re going tomorrow, and knowing the lead and lag indicators so they can be responsive to the demands of the business. The discipline of sales enablement is a foundational set of processes and standards that help the CSO address that pressure and scrutiny. This foundation includes time to ramp (TTR) [onboarding], ongoing enablement [to increase productivity], and [preventing] unplanned churn.”

The five pillars of sales enablement

Mark developed the concept of the five pillars of sales enablement through his experience in sales and sales leadership. They are:

  1. Organizational alignment: “Before you get started you have to understand the dynamics around the organizational alignment. Do you have governance and some process in place where everybody understands the vision, strategies, initiatives, scorecards, and metrics that you’re putting in place to drive the success of the program? That’s critically important,” explained Mark.
  2. Role-based certification: Most sales organizations have several different roles that vary by company and industry. Role-based certification involves identifying the competency model tied to the skills and knowledge associated with each role. As you look through the motion of each role, what is the thing reps need to know, say, show, and do as they manage the day-in-a-life of performing against the expectations of the role? Next, turn it into a curriculum and how you want to train, develop, and evaluate the performance of these roles. There are three levels that comprise this certification model:
    1. Lecture and test the retention of knowledge;
    2. Exercise and application, transitioning from understanding a concept into applying and exercising the skill tied to that concept prior to going out into the field; and
    3. Managers evaluateperformance in the field and coach.
  3. Enablement on demand: “Leverage technology to streamline how effectively you execute against the things that are defined in the role-based competency model. There’s no need for heavy dependency on instructor-led training or virtual training when there are technology and applications that allow you to better drive efficiency and effectiveness, plus scale better for the organization within a proper cost model,” explains Mark. “Leverage technology as part of this foundational layer and put the power in the palm of the hand of the individual. Do this within cloud-based applications, with integration into CRM, where you can tie learning and sales supporting assets to a specific sales scenario, prescribing assets and learning based on that scenario. Also building in some gamification to drive contest around how people learn is really compelling. I would encourage you to think about enablement on demand,” he continues.
  4. Predictive analytics: “It’s one thing to look at reports and reference a dashboard of things that happened in the past. It’s another to look through the windshield, at the road ahead, and predictively be able to tell where your business is going. If you establish the right lead and lag metrics, supporting technology can show when individuals in your sales organization are heading for disaster. You can then start to prescribe specific learning to get them over that hurdle so they can start to perform much better,” suggests Mark.
  5. Sales advisory boards (a.k.a. voice of the customer): “If you don’t establish champions and have a feedback loop from the sales organization, you will battle some apprehensive people while you’re pushing programs out. This is a mechanism for you to be able to gather insight and feedback in a structured fashion. Sales can contribute to the design and development of your initiatives through localized champions who can support and help drive adoption,” he explains.

“With the five pillars of successful sales enablement,” Mark explained, “we’re leveraging really interesting technology to help do this so you can scale with the demands of the business. You’re not asking the CFO for a ton of bodies, you’re actually leveraging the power of technology, and better equipping and enabling the field based on the power in the palm of your hand, which ties back to the center pillar of enabling on demand.”

How sales enablement works at Fuze

“First and foremost is sales methodology. Whether you do it internally or you leverage an external partner, you have to start there because that is the foundation that drives the rest of the bubbles to the right,” Mark continued.
“Once you have that in place, you then start to think in terms of how to establish a best practice approach to outreach and engagement to the marketplace. We use Mindtickle for our learning management system and recently launched it to our global sales organization. We use Savo for our content management system and a combination of both Mindtickle and Savo to help us with ‘voice of the customer’ and engagement with the field.  This gives us the pulse of what’s going on,” explains Mark.
“All of these equate to very effective sales productivity based on the pillars and the underlying enablement technology that you can put in place.”