The Missing Link in B2B Selling: Prescriptive Selling

Shankar Ganapathy on October 15, 2017

B2B-sales-prescriptive-sellingWhile buyers have access to more information, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re equipped to make better decisions. In fact, all this information has the potential to overwhelm them, making it even harder to make a decision about a big purchase. The result is a prolonged decision making process and an elongated sales cycle.

Research by Corporate Executive Board has found that more information just means customers have more questions, with 65% spending as much time getting ready to speak to a sales rep as they’d anticipated the entire purchase process would take. When coupled with an increase in the number of decision makers – up from 5.4 to 6.8 people in the past two years – it’s even harder to get a decision.

This brings current selling techniques into question. While reps have been focused on responding to customers by giving them more information to help them make decisions, this reduces the ease of purchase by 18%. Whereas reps who are more prescriptive in their approach actually increase the purchase ease for their customers by 86%.

What is prescriptive selling?

Prescriptive selling involves making a recommendation to customers backed with reasons why it’s the best solution for them. This approach involves the rep demonstrating their understanding of the customer’s pain points and needs while offering a valuable solution. It’s proactive and makes it easier for the customer to purchase. It may even reduce the chances that the customer will regret the purchase later on.

And here’s the clincher – a supplier is 62% more likely to win a high-quality sale if they make purchasing easier for their buyers.

The key to prescriptive selling isn’t just about giving the customer a clear recommendation – it’s actually in the organization’s approach to selling. Sales organizations need to be more prescriptive in how their reps can convey these messages in their customer conversations.

So how do you start?

The starting point for any prescriptive selling approach is the customer’s journey. This journey must start before the customer is even aware of your organization or product. Because it’s at this early stage when they’re first bombarded with information and need a prescriptive approach to help guide them through their decision. This means each piece of content across all channels should have a prescriptive lens.

This approach then flows onto all aspects of the sales process. How reps approach conversations, how they articulate the value proposition, and how they deal with objections, should all be more prescriptive. They should all focus on how to help customers make a decision, rather than why they should purchase your product.

This approach also requires a more prescriptive approach to how your reps sell. While formal scripts are rarely appropriate in many complex sales situations, sales organizations should be more prescriptive about how their salespeople should approach different sales situations.

Don’t worry, consultative selling still has its place

While it may seem like prescriptive selling is moving away from the consultative approach to selling, and towards a more rigid sales process, it actually brings together the best of both approaches. Customers won’t respond to well something that feels like a hard sell. Rather they want a solution that meets their specific needs.

But salespeople can rely on more prescriptive content and diagnostic exercises that help customers pinpoint their needs. By providing reps with access to information and real-time training that helps them respond to a customer’s questions they can be more prescriptive and more consultative in how they sell.

The end result is a consistent sales approach. All reps sing from the same songbook, and the way they guide customers along their purchasing journey is similar. With everything tied to the customer’s own purchasing journey, it should also make the process easier for the customer. And as the research shows, the easier the purchasing journey the more chance of a positive decision.

While marketing content is one important part of this process, sales reps also need to be enabled with the tools and information they need to be prescriptive. That may include role plays to practice their messaging, on-demand feedback and coaching from their managers, success stories and examples from their peers, and up-to-date information that they can apply in their customer conversations.

This is a fundamental shift away from the traditional sales approach. No longer can reps just focus on how to get a customer to buy their product. Their role now is to help customers make a decision, full stop. Their customers will thank them for it, and so will their leaders.


Sales Disrupted: Preparing your Sales Organization to IPO

Shankar Ganapathy on July 24, 2017

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

Ensure your messaging is consistent

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

Build capacity for growth

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

Button down your processes

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

Continue to invest in capability

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

Measurement is imperative

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

Build a sales stack that supports growth

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

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

Shankar Ganapathy on July 24, 2017


In this 20 minute podcast, Brazier outlines:

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

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

In Conversation with Nancy Maluso

Shankar Ganapathy on July 24, 2017

This post is based on a webinar with Nancy Maluso, Research Director for SiriusDecisions. You can listen to the entire webinar here.
SiriusDecisions empowers marketing, sales, and product professionals to make better decisions, execute with precision and accelerate growth. Nancy Maluso has built and managed successful teams in the technology industry and now brings her passion for improving sales productivity to her research at SiriusDecision.
“Coaching is something that I love. It’s something that actually moves the needle and helps people perform better,” exclaims Maluso. “According to Wikipedia, the know it all of all things Internet, coaching is a form of development in which a person called the coach supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training, advice, and guidance.”
Coaching has been proven to work and sales reps find it valuable. “When we asked high performers where they see value in coaching they said, for example, that on deal collaboration and navigating internal resources coaching was extremely important to their job performance,” says Maluso. “Yet, overall, 22% of reps don’t receive any coaching and only 36% of sales reps actually made quota. The average turnover of B2B sales professionals is about 32% annually, meaning 3 out of 10 territories are left uncovered. And when we surveyed top sales leaders we found that 7 out of the 10 inhibitors to growth have to do with sales skills.”
There is clearly a disconnect. If sales coaching is so valuable to reps’ performance, why aren’t more reps being coached? According to Maluso, for a coaching program to be successful, it must include four critical factors. “First, coaching is an individual game. It’s based on the needs of the individual. We have to have some way of knowing what someone needs in terms of coaching.
The second is a competency map. What skills, knowledge, process, expertise, and tools does an individual sales rep have to have to be good at their job? Thirdly, we need insight, both data, and observations, that allow us to know what the individual needs to be coached on. Effective coaching programs are prescriptive, proactive and persistent. We found that if we don’t provide sales managers and sales leaders with a process and a program combined with some tools to help augment the coaching effort, it typically doesn’t happen.
Finally, there need to be actions that the individual is going to take to make a difference.” When all of these factors are in place sales coaching will be most effective. But successful coaching requires more than just a process.
“From a cultural perspective, we want the program to be constructive, not punitive. Part of that is asking reps to identify and self-correct wherever possible. To have the coach support their sales effort persistently through every stage. It’s not just at the end of a win/loss review for example. It’s before they go to have a conversation with the client; it’s not punitive, it’s supportive,” explains Maluso.
Coaching is also a continuous process, it has no defined endpoint. “If a rep has mastered what they need to do with their job, coaching should continue to help develop them for the thing they want to achieve next. Whether it’s leadership roles or specialization, coaching should continue to support that rep,” suggests Maluso.
Persistence is another important quality in an effective sales coaching program according to Maluso.
“We’ve had clients say to us, “Well I do coaching every quarter. I do it at the quarterly business review.” That’s not coaching. it’s persistent and it’s proactive, and it’s always on,” she explains. To create a program that is persistent and proactive you have to have insights. That’s where the competency map comes in.
“It defines what reps need to be able to do. Then it’s looking at metrics that say, “Are they doing that?” Hopefully, your tools track activities that reps undertake so you can see if they are they making the right number of calls. Are they having the right number of customer engagements? Doing the right number of demos?” she suggests.
Useful information can be gleaned from lagging indicators like your sales funnel or win/loss ratios.
“For example, if the funnel is fat in the middle, but narrow at the top and narrow at the bottom, it might indicate a few things,” she says. “Metrics don’t tell you precisely what’s wrong, they give you indicators. Just like if you hit a golf shot and it goes to the right, a good golf coach will have a sense of why that might be. But until they inspect your actual swing, they’re not going to know specifically what’s wrong with your particular mechanics. The same is true with the sales rep. The dashboard gives indicators, things to probe on. If the funnel’s fat, we might look at, well, are they having trouble with solution design? Maybe they’re not engaging their sales engineer properly. Perhaps they don’t know how to use the CPQ tool. Only by observing them in their work will you know or sure.”
To really understand what’s going on insights have to meet with reality. Data provides one view, but it’s not until you observe what a rep is doing on a regular basis that you can identify how to effectively make a difference. “Managers aren’t observing reps to be Big Brother. It’s about understanding what the rep needs,” she explains.
Observing reps so that you can coach them and make a real difference to their performance requires cadence. That’s where the right tools are so crucial. “Processes and tools can help us make coaching a regular part of weekly one-on-one calls, a regular part of prep before customer calls. Coaching can also be done in groups, talking about individual needs so others can learn. It can be done in a lot of different ways, and processes and tools help us automate some of that process. Bring forward the insights and link them to potential tools that can help us support the rep,” suggests Maluso.
“In my example of the fat funnel, let’s say on observation the manager realizes that they don’t really do enough qualifying questions up front so they’re not able to design a solution effectively, and so things get stuck in the middle. Well by observing that the coaching tool can provide a discovery list of questions that can help in solution design, or a video of a rep who’s showing and demonstrating how to do this well or a role play that they can practice to help them get better. Those are the kinds of tools you can provide to managers so that they can coach more effectively,” she continues.
Good coaching programs are also prescriptive and link actions to outcomes.“They are very specific about what needs to be done. What the rep needs to do is understand what actions they need to take that are different. They need to practice those actions and establish a pattern where the action results in impact. Linking what they’re doing or practicing with the outcome you’re looking for is absolutely critical. You want to record in your tool or within your process exactly what coaching is going on and what we’ve asked of the reps or we’ve asked of ourselves as coaches to help them,” she explains.
One final tip from Maluso is to look at data holistically.“Look for patterns. We might see that all reps are having trouble with discovery; not just yours. We can then go back to product marketing and work with them to develop the right tools and maybe a training webinar on how to do effective discovery,” she suggests. By creating a coaching program that is prescriptive, proactive and persistent you can create a culture of support. This puts the development of your reps front and center, where it should be.

In Conversation with MuleSoft on Sales Coaching

Shrimithran R on May 16, 2017

 

This post is based on a webinar where Stephen Hallowell, VP of Sales Enablement at MuleSoft discusses why companies should invest in sales coaching.

MuleSoft is a leading high-growth technology company that focuses on application integration under one platform. With over 800 employees and over 1000 enterprise customers across 60 countries, MuleSoft has had astounding growth.
“We have been evolving quite a bit as a company over the years. We have gone from what was a fairly tactical engagement to selling business value associated with what otherwise can be a pretty technical concept. We are enabling change on a broad scale inside some very large companies,” explains Hallowell.

Why sales coaching matters

A significant part of MuleSoft’s success can be credited to their investment in sales coaching. “To improve the outcome and win more deals, the sales rep has to start doing things in a fundamentally different way than they were previously. Natural behavior is to put one foot in front of the other and keep marching straight. We need our sales reps to stop and take a left turn at some point. The only way that we’ve been able to drive that behavior change is through coaching, ” says Hallowell

Two main aspects of the coaching program 

Sales leadership at MuleSoft decided that their sales coaching initiative should answer two questions:

  1. Are

    their reps doing what is important?

  2. How can their managers help their reps sell the right way?

Most sales teams get their approach to the second question right by coaching their sales reps. But the first question is often under-recognized yet it’s vital to ‘accountability’.
“If the manager doesn’t actually know and doesn’t have the ability to know, whether somebody’s doing the right thing, and the individual contributor also doesn’t know, you can never get that self-diagnosis. The more you can make it very apparent to people what they’re doing well and what they’re not doing well, you create the need for change,” explains Hallowell.
“If somebody comes in and coaches me and says, “Ah, well, hey, here’s a better way of doing things,” and I haven’t seen that reason yet for doing things differently, I’m not going to get the results out of it,” he continues.

Building a competency map

The first step was to identify what knowledge gaps their managers had. This was done through effective benchmarking.
“To kick this off, we did some benchmarking with our managers by assessing them against some third party statistics. That helped us realize some are exceptional and some are not. That helped create that need for change across all levels of the organization,” explains Hallowell.
Once the gaps were identified, the next step in the process was to train them effectively on their skill gaps. “The next thing we did was build the competency maps. We did that probably 9 to 12 months into the process. In my experience, for a competency map to be effective it’s got to be somewhat detailed, just because you’ve got to be precise about what you want people to do. That level of detail delivered too early can be a bit overwhelming. Trying to find that right balance of really defining for the managers, these are the specific behaviors and skills you need to coach, to giving them enough detail to be actionable, but not so much detail that you overwhelm them,” explains Hallowell.

Designing the certification program

“One important thing we drove was a significant relaunch of our messaging. A pool of leaders and individual contributors locked themselves in a room for a couple of days and came out with something that everybody felt really good about. Once it reached the field, there was no question of “Is this the right message?” Our leaders bought into it,” says Hallowell. The primary element in the coaching program at MuleSoft was message calibration, which was done by the leadership team.
“We had the core team record themselves in the Mindtickle platform to provide examples and best practices. Then we formed a group of best performing reps and managers who we call black belts. This group of black belts then certified the full team. We had over 500 people go through this program,” explained Hallowell.

Coaching is not a checkbox exercise 

The importance of this program is well understood given that over 500 employees went through the coaching program. The program was well received across the organization. What exactly worked for MuleSoft?
There were multiple factors including support from their leadership, setting high benchmarks for their sales reps and providing personalized feedback for each rep.
“One of the things that were really important for us is that this wasn’t just a check the box exercise. If it had been simply a box-checking exercise, there wouldn’t have been a lot of opportunity for coaching. I can’t overstate the importance of really broad management support and solving a pain point that everybody recognizes. The next thing is holding that performance bar very high. We did not pass people who were not completely 100%. Yeah, it might take a little longer than we want, but we’re going to make sure we get everybody’s attention on,” says Hallowell.

Finally, make it awesome

The success of a coaching program is measured on how well it is adopted.
“

The last thing I’ll leave you with is we have a set of core values at MuleSoft. One of them is to make it awesome. It’s one that I love. I use it with my team all the time, and I think it’s so important in our role. You’re going to ask a lot of people going through this program. If they detect anything that’s not awesome, they’re not going to invest, ”

says Hallowell.

Did Hallowell and his team make it awesome? Given their success, it sure looks like they did. The coaching program helped MuleSoft scale their sales team without compromising on the performance of any individual. Their average selling price went up from $ 77K to $169K. And feedback about the coaching program was really positive across all levels of the organization.

“A number of people that came up to me and just said, “Thanks for making me go through that.” I think this quote is verbatim from half a dozen people, said, “You know, I was pretty skeptical about this thing when we first started, but I’m so glad you made me do it. I’m so much more confident with my customers,” says Hallowell proudly.

Coaching Millennial Salespeople

Shankar Ganapathy on April 26, 2017

Coaching-millennial-salespeopleMillennials are set to represent 75% of the global population by 2025. While they might be the youngest people in your business, they are by no means the most junior. Millennial managers and CEOs are now commonplace, the latter particularly in startups and technology. It’s well established that Gen X and Baby Boomer’s value career development and job satisfaction.

Similarly, millennials have distinct behaviors and work preferences, which is why they need specific training and coaching to help them perform better on the field.

To develop a coaching program that addresses the unique preferences of millennials, it’s important to understand how their behavior differs from other generations. This then impacts how to coach them, and even their propensity to be coached.

We’ve identified seven imperatives to take into account when structuring a coaching program for your millennial salespeople.
coaching millennial salespeople_post

Let’s dive deeper into each of these and outline how they impact your sales coaching program.

Tie coaching to technology

By far the most distinguishing feature of millennials is the ease with which they understand and prefer to use technology. They’ll reject clunky antiquated systems in favor of convenient and intuitive technology. For millennials, being connected at all times is essential, in fact, 83% sleep with their smartphone by their bed.
millennial-attitude-to-technology

While many millennials are comfortable socializing in person, they’re adept at using online mediums to enhance relationships and broaden their reach. So don’t be surprised if your millennial sales rep prefers to email customers rather than calling them.

How does this impact coaching?

  • Leveraging sales readiness technology is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s essential. Your millennial reps will demand that it be easy to use, accessible and helpful to perform their job. Without each of these factors, your reps may simply choose not to use your tools, and some may even find new ones to use. Keeping your millennial reps well-connected can pay dividends, in fact, our customers have found that 36% of their millennial reps choose to engage with information voluntarily outside of work hours.
  • Millennials preference to leverage technology may impact their ability to communicate with customers in other ways. This means they may require some back-to-basics coaching on how to develop relationships in person, from maintaining eye contact to opening a conversation. If some of your buyer personas are not millennials then this could also include coaching them on how to address generational preferences in customer conversations, and in particular when it’s appropriate to use technology and when it’s not. For example, baby boomer customers may prefer speaking to someone in person over email communication.

Keep content brief

Millennials are often depicted as having short attention spans when really they prefer consuming bite-sized information in short intervals. So when it comes to training, rather than sitting for hours in a classroom, your reps are more likely to consume bite-sized information. This addresses both a preference for crisp communication and accessing information on their mobile device.
Bite-size content

Millennials are also expert multi-taskers, they’re often listening to podcasts while answering emails. Their proficiency in managing multiple tasks makes them experts at consuming information in different ways than previous generations.

How does this impact coaching?

  • Keep coaching sessions short but regular. Rather than conducting one-on-one coaching marathons just once in awhile, coach your reps regularly but in shorter intervals.

Engage them and not just manage them

Collaboration is one of the best ways to engage a millennial salesperson. They value learning from others and working as part of a team. They like to learn and solve problems by hearing success stories and working in teams. Millennials believe in sharing their wisdom and experiences as well, which provides a great opportunity for other teammates to learn from them.

Another way to engage them is by using gamification to encourage some healthy competition. In fact, 79% of learners believe their learning is more productive when introduced in a gamified environment. As self-starters, don’t be surprised if your millennial salespeople demand access to data so that they can gauge their own performance and plug their own knowledge gaps.

How does this impact coaching?

  • Leverage success stories and other tools to help reps learn from their peers. Practically understanding how others have approached a problem and then practicing it in a role play may even be more effective than being verbally trained by their manager.
  • Make coaching a team effort by providing online collaboration tools that allow your “A players” and seasoned reps to share their experiences. This can be facilitated through a sales enablement platform so it doesn’t matter where your experts and reps are based. After all, millennials are comfortable conversing with people online, regardless of their location.
  • Gamify the experience wherever possible so that reps can compete against each other, and even themselves.
  • Be transparent with your data. By giving your reps access to their data you enable them to identify their own gaps and allow them to suggest areas they would like to be coached on. When reps buy into their own coaching plan they’ll put their heart and should into it refining their own knowledge and skills.

Ensure coaching is driven by their values

Millennials have grown up in an era where political correctness and social awareness is high. This permeates into their personal values, seeking out opportunities that add real value and have a social impact. They expect a lot from their life and their employers and like to see their work reflected in the bigger picture. They have opinions and aren’t afraid of expressing them, but are also open to hearing other perspectives and taking onboard feedback.

How does this impact coaching?

  • When coaching millennial sales reps be sure to explain the value in what you’re doing. They need to see where they are going and how it will make an impact on their performance and the broader business.
  • Take a values-driven approach by asking your reps what they value. This will help them incorporate this view into their feedback and long-term coaching plan.

Consider their expectations at all times

Millennials aren’t used to waiting for anything. They’ve always been able to access everything at the touch of a button, so don’t expect them to wait patiently for career progression either.

As self-starters, they’ll happily take responsibility for their own development if they know what to expect and how to achieve it.. In fact, research has found that people between 25 and 34 are more likely to express gratitude for “being satisfied with an existing job” then they are about “spending quality time with family and friends.” So harness their desire to enjoy their work and perform it well.

How does this impact coaching?

  • Rather than coaching a specific issue in isolation, use a structured approach to providing millennials with a clear roadmap for their development. This not only helps you structure a coaching program but also gives your reps transparency about what they need to achieve in order to progress.

Give them agility and freedom

Millennials have been quick to embrace, and in many instances have driven, the death of the standard workday. But just because your reps may not begin and end their working day in normal office hours doesn’t mean they don’t work just as hard. In fact, our customer data shows that 27% of millennial users access and engage with the Mindtickle platform between the hours of 8 pm and midnight, and 4% even access it on Sundays.

Other research indicates that millennials stress and worry about their work more than other age groups. But thankfully they are also driven to find ways to overcome these issues. The flexibility to work when it suits them can be challenging to manage, but it shouldn’t impact your ability to coach your millennial sales reps when they need it, whatever the time.

How does this impact coaching?

  • Leverage online coaching tools that are accessible whenever and wherever. This gives your reps the flexibility to manage their time as they please, and still receive feedback from you without having to be physically present for a one-on-one coaching session.
  • If you would like to have some oversight into your reps activities, sales readiness software like Mindtickle allows you to see when and how your reps are accessing coaching tools and content. This can even be used as an additional coaching point when this data is overlaid with sales information.

Leverage their willingness to receive feedback and recognition

The millennial generation was raised in an era where praise and reward are valued, so naturally, they value recognition in the workplace. But along with the need to be recognized is the understanding that feedback is part of the process. This makes them more open to giving and receiving feedback, and willing to apply it so that they can achieve further rewards.
How does this impact coaching?

  • As coaching often provides immediate feedback it may be more readily embraced by your millennial reps. When the feedback gives them visibility into their own progress and is linked to things they value, your millennial reps are more likely to take on board coaching and use it to succeed quicker.
  • To make your feedback easier to digest, it’s important to ensure that it’s directly relevant to your reps performance. It’s also helpful to deliver it in bite-sized pieces, so that specific issues can be readily addressed.

By reviewing and tailoring your approach to coach, you’ll not only help your millennial reps become better salespeople but also ensure that you retain them.

It’s also worth noting, that just because many of these techniques are directed towards the behaviors and values of your millennial reps, it doesn’t mean that your entire multi-generational workforce won’t benefit from them. It may take some time for some of your staff to get used to technology, but these modern coaching methods improve engagement, foster collaboration and enable remote workers to have the same level of development as their head office counterparts. While some may long for the good old classroom days g and in-person feedback, most will appreciate the benefits and flexibility that technology provides them.

5 Ways Technology Can Help Coach Sales Reps

Shankar Ganapathy on March 9, 2017

Technology_help_coach_sales_repsYour high performing sales reps have a tremendous impact on revenue growth. If you’re lucky you’ll have a handful of them, but the reality is the majority of your reps will be performing at average or worse. What if you could identify the capabilities that your top sales reps have (and what makes them win) and replicate these across your sales team?

After all, building capability is a

top priority for CXOs

, and

according to McKinsey

coaching sales reps has the biggest impact on capability development. This means that coaching is no longer a nice-to-have but a business imperative. But for coaching to be effective it needs to be targeted. Targeted coaching (using a scientific approach) ensures your reps develop the capabilities to become successful.

The first step in creating a sales coaching process is to identify objectively what specific areas your individual reps need to be coached on. Then you need to determine the best way to coach your reps, rather than just telling them their gaps.

Create a culture of coaching

High-performance sales teams and sales coaching best practices go hand in hand. But sales coaching is often driven by managers who don’t have the time, tools, skills or data to coach effectively. And in most cases, it’s implemented in a haphazard manner that reflects the sales manager’s own personal whims and biases.

By putting in place a central system with predefined coaching workflows you can ensure that your sales managers receive the guidance they need to coach effectively and stay on plan. Technology gives you a highly scalable approach to rapidly identify, build, and sustain the targeted coaching needed to continuously improve performance and deliver impact. This will ultimately lead to more predictable sales behaviors and revenue.

1. Provide a structure

Sales coaching isn’t an ad-hoc or one size fits all activity. That’s why it’s important to have a plan that outlines which capabilities need to be developed and what role different stakeholders will play in the process to ensure their sales coaching is effective.

The first step towards structuring your sales coaching is to have a

sales coaching plan

. Typically there are three parts to a sales coaching plan – knowledge, skill, and process. Depending on what your businesses are, you’ll weight each of these attributes differently and may assign coaching accountability to different stakeholders.

A sales enablement platform like Mindtickle helps you define rules and automate processes a

round coaching – triggering a coaching event, facilitating manager and salesperson interaction, and driving visibility to different stakeholders through analytics.

2. Makes collaboration easier

While it’s always great to collaborate in person, that’s near impossible when you’ve got salespeople all over the country. Rather than wait months until your next sales kickoff you can use technology so your

subject matter experts can to coach your reps

. For example, our Product Manager Daniel sits in San Francisco and provides coaching to our rep Beverlie in Boston directly through our sales enablement platform. Workflows are set up to remind our experts to provide their feedback promptly and our sales rep receives it directly to her mobile device.
This process also works at a large scale as one of our customers has found. With over 700 sales reps distributed across the world, they’re able to provide specialist coaching to each rep on three capabilities they’ve identified – selling skills, demo and account based demand generation. For each capability, they’ve identified specific areas that reps need to excel at. They also have subject matter experts to coach reps on each scenario through role plays and on the job coaching.

Another example is ForeScout who uses technology

to help managers and SMEs collaborate during their sales onboarding process. In a process they call the “Pitch Back” they leverage Mindtickle by having reps record practice pitches so their experts can hear how they’re using their onboarding knowledge in sales calls. The experts and managers can then provide feedback and coaching to the rep in real time through the app.

3. Makes stakeholder accountable

Workflows not only make it easier to collaborate, but they also hold everyone in the process accountable. For example, by allocating coaching modules to each sales rep you can ensure that everyone’s needs are covered. Managers typically focus on lagging indicators and tactical coaching but do not focus much time on strategic skill development. The middle 60% can really benefit by getting coaching on core capabilities.

In fact, research has found

that it’s in the middle 60% where sales coaching can have its biggest impact on performance.

Technology can provide a simple way to check that all reps are being given the attention they require and that coaching is having the maximum effect possible.

A technology platform like Mindtickle provides relevant stakeholders with contextual notifications, coaching tasks and visibility over the progress that is being made by reps and managers in the coaching process.

Transparency is key to the process and technology facilitates this.

4. Enable peer to peer learning

Coaching isn’t just about learning from your manager, it’s also about developing sales skills by finding out how the best do it. That’s why sharing best practices across your organization is important. This is easier if you have a small sales team and everyone is located in the same office.

But what do you do if you have a distributed field sales team or a large inside sales team?

The best way to facilitate (and automate) peer to peer learning is by leveraging technology.

A technology platform like Mindtickle makes identifying expert knowledge and sharing it with a large sales team seamless and automated.

5. Share success stories

Watching role plays and pitches is just one way the reps can learn from each other.

Success stories

are another effective way to motivate and inspire your reps.

There are several advantages to reps sharing how they won that big deal or closed a challenging sale.

  • It cross-pollinates proven techniques across geographical boundaries
  • Builds a sales culture that encourages sharing and learning
  • Gives a pretty great ego boost to the successful rep

By leveraging technology, you can ensure that your sales reps are given the best opportunity to be successful. Technology provides not only structure and accountability but also enables your sales managers to make decisions about what their reps need to be coached on and even facilitates how they are coached. This increases your reps confidence so they’re ready to have those difficult conversations with customers.

Practical guide to coaching new hires

Effective Sales Managers aren’t Born: They’re Created

Shankar Ganapathy on February 20, 2017

help_sales-managers-coachSuperheroes aren’t born, they’re made. Clarke Kent walked in the light of the yellow sun. Diana Prince was granted her Amazonian strength by the Greek Gods, and Peter Parker was bitten by an irradiated spider. But all of them had to learn how to channel their powers and hone their skills before they could fly or scale walls.

When it comes to sales one of the most potent superpowers a sales manager can have is the ability to coach effectively. But why do we still think sales managers should be able to coach without any training or practice? Just like any skill coaching is something that requires training and development. But before we get into the details on how to achieve that, let’s take a look at why sales coaching is so important to your organization.

Effective sales coaching changes topline revenue

 

CSO Insights

found that there is a direct relationship between the quality of coaching and the amount of reps who made quota.
why-sales-coaching

That’s because coaching isn’t about auditing what your reps are (or aren’t) doing or a quick fix. It’s about helping them improve how they sell in both the short and long-term, making them better sales reps for life. This could be in terms of specific sales skills, from prospecting to closing, or how effective their negotiating techniques are to get more prospects over the line.

By improving the skills of your reps, coaching can also increase their engagement with their role and your business. This means you’re more likely to retain high performing people who perform even better thanks to coaching. As your reps improve how they sell, coaching can move onto more complex issues, giving your reps (and your managers) new sales challenges.

So how do you learn to leap tall buildings in a single bound?

Just like Superman, sales coaches need to learn how to walk before they jump. There are three indicators that sales managers should be aware of:

  1. Lagging indicators: These show them whether their reps are meeting their numbers and include a lot of the traditional metrics like pipeline activity, wins, and losses. These metrics are commonly measured with most CRMs already doing this effectively.
  2. Efficiency indicators: These provide an understanding of why sales reps are meeting or missing their numbers. This can include win rates, sales cycles, and their pipeline size. These are very critical for the success of your business. For example, in a CPG business, your efficiency indicators will consider how well your reps are getting their product placement. Whereas in Technology getting the discovery process right will be an important area to focus your efficiency indicators.
  3. Effectiveness indicators: These metrics look at whether your reps actually “get it” and the behaviors that they are demonstrating that drive your lagging indicators. Managers need to proactively identify capability gaps and fix them. A streamlined process for managers to build capabilities in their team and make them more effective salespeople could be the difference between an average and best-in-class team.

Businesses who not only understand their efficiency and effectiveness indicators but are able to maximize their reps achievement of them will achieve success. In the past sales managers focussed all their efforts on lagging and efficiency indicators to enable their team. But businesses have changed, the way we make our products has changed and the speed at which the industry dynamics alter is radically different. To drive revenue in the new world order managers need to look at the effectiveness of each element of their indicators and identify their importance for sales success. By focussing in on effectiveness, managers can coach their reps better, drive revenue and increase sales productivity.

Find new ways to identify capability indicators

Just like sales managers get regular reporting on lagging indicators, they also need access to information on their teams’ efficiency and effectiveness indicators and their gaps.

One way to do this is to spend time identifying the key capabilities that lead to the success of your top 20%. Then enable your sales managers with information about what team members have gaps in these capabilities.

For reps who are losing deals against their competition, managers can benefit from information like:

  • Are they accessing competitor information before a customer meeting?
  • Is their messaging tailored for each customer?
  • What behaviors are they demonstrating that is helping them move down the buying process and close more deals?

A sales enablement platform like Mindtickle can help identify some of these behaviors along with personal observation.

So what are we waiting for?

Before you start telling your sales managers to get out and coach, you have to help them learn to leap that tall building in a single bound. This is an important step that many businesses struggle with. In fact,

the Harvard Business Review

found that only 12% of international business leaders believed they had invested sufficiently in the development of their frontline managers. That means that 88% of sales managers are trying to coach their team blind.

But this isn’t just about teaching sales managers to coach, it’s about empowering them so they can coach. Sales managers in many organizations are weighed down by a plethora of tasks that don’t necessarily help them contribute to revenue or develop their team.

McKinsey found

that frontline managers spend between 30 and 60% of their time doing administrative tasks or sitting in meetings. A further 10 to 50% of their time is spent doing non-managerial tasks like traveling, special projects or actually selling themselves. This means that only 10 to 40% of their time is spent actually managing, and only a portion of this is spent coaching.

One of the quickest ways to give sales managers more time to coach is to take away the administrative tasks that are not adding any value or revenue. Whether it’s automating sales reporting or leveraging technology to reduce travel time, there are many ways to enable sales managers to perform these tasks more efficiently or remove them completely.

It’s essential to ensure that your managers are making the most of the extra time available to them. The first step is to make sure they have

the basics in place

.
sales_management-training-basics

Also, HBR found that 40%

of international business leaders believed that their frontline managers didn’t have sufficient leadership development, tools or training. Companies with the best sales training programs look at their existing learning programs and identify what gaps there are in sales leadership training so they can start working on the basics.

Joanne Wells of Halogen Software

suggests looking at what your sales leaders know about your business and its goals. By understanding your broader business objectives leaders are better placed to hone in on what’s most important for their sales reps to learn.

Learning is cultural

Holding knee-jerk training sessions that exist in isolation rarely achieve the desired results. So if learning and coaching are to be integral parts of your organization then they must become part of your culture. This means from the top down learning is valued, supported and encouraged.

The first step

is building the basics for your managers by clarifying responsibilities in job descriptions, performance appraisals, and broader communications, so it’s clear that this is an organization-wide initiative.

Then you can create an environment where there is a regular cadence for learning and coaching. An easy place to start is by looking at your best managers and identifying what they’re doing well. There’s no need to recreate the wheel, replicate what works.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and today there are so many tools available that can be used to help your organization build its culture of learning. Think about this way, if managers are given a structured and effective way to coach their reps regularly they’re more likely to use it, right? But if you have to take everyone out of the field for a week, there’s little incentive for anyone to get involved. That’s why super sales training has to fit into the way your sales team works, rather than the other way around.

The key to making the most of a sales manager’s time is to recognize that the managers don’t have to do it all. If learning and coaching are a part of your organization’s culture, then subject matter experts in Product Marketing or Sales Enablement can take on the role of coaching reps in some areas. After all sales

coaching is a team effort

.  Sales Enablement and Product Marketing can take on key roles as subject matter experts, coaching reps on knowledge and messaging, like how to pitch that new product feature for example. This frees sales managers up further to focus on where they can add the most value like improving sales skills in a deal by deal coaching and on the finer aspects of process and execution.

This effectively elevates the role of the sales manager so they can focus on the more complex deals and performance issues, optimizing their time and skills. The more managers coach, the more they learn what works and what doesn’t, developing and strengthening their superpowers.

The Formula for Effective Sales Coaching that Enables Reps and Managers

Shankar Ganapathy on January 27, 2017

formula_effective_sales_coachingWhile every sales manager has their own unique coaching style, the end goal is the same; develop and improve how their sales reps sell and meet quotas. By enabling reps and managers with a structured coaching framework you can have a marked impact on coaching effectiveness and its results. Structured coaching ensures reps have consistent behavior, produce more predictable sales results and follow a sales process.

What is the problem?

Industry dynamics are changing too quickly and competition is fierce, it’s no longer an option to leave coaching up to chance.

Research by the Sales Executive Council

found that coaching the middle 60% can improve performance by up to 19%, and even if you coach those below average to above average you can improve the performance of 50% of your sales force by six to eight percent.

Also, there are so many types of managers and salespeople. Each manager has their own style and sales reps have their own individual needs. Ensuring there is a culture of coaching accountability and sales coaching process ensures managers coach reps on the most important area.

Key to coaching success

The key to effective coaching is to provide specific tools, identify gaps and enable remediation workflow that is readily accessible to both managers and reps every day. By supporting this framework with a process that maps each coaching needs to a subject matter expert will make the stakeholders’ accountable.

It’s no longer enough to coach in one-on-one meetings just a few times a year. Companies are now agile and reps and their managers need to be too. Reps need constant development to help them sell better. They need to be coached on a variety of things. Here are some examples:

  • Identifying what stage their buyers are in;
  • Understanding their sales funnel and how to prioritize prospects;
  • Learning how to tailor value messages to buyers;
  • Preparing for that big meeting;
  • Navigating who their champion is;
  • Trying to find the right angle to close the deal;
  • Understanding how to maximize the opportunity in their territory; and
  • Analyzing a lost deal.

This has to be done in real-time, not just when it’s scheduled into the diary.

Coaching from a manager’s perspective

A coaching framework needs to have enough flexibility to accommodate different managerial styles and the individual needs of sales reps. Managers shouldn’t be left to try and figure it out on their own. In fact, managers may not always be the best people to coach on some things at all. Sales Enablement and Product Marketing may be better equipped to coach reps on product demos while managers are best left to coach on the finer points of specific deals.

That’s why best-in-class sales organizations are moving towards an outcome-oriented approach, where different leaders and subject matter experts (SME) collaborate to make coaching successful.

This structure works best when the responsibilities of each stakeholder are clear and their expectations are aligned. We’ve found a framework that encompasses the needs of most sales organizations:
sales_coaching_formula_matrix

I call this the aX + bY + cZ formula for effective sales coaching.
sales_coaching_formula

Depending on the complexity of sale, a, b and c will change the priority of what a rep requires coaching on. For example, FMCG retail sales Sales Process and Execution Discipline (Z) will have the highest priority so c will be high, with b and a being a smaller percentage. For sellers of complex technology software Knowledge and Messaging (X) and Sales Skills (Y) may have a higher priority, so a and b will be a much higher percentage than c. SDR sales may place more weight on Sales Skills, giving b the highest weight.

The trick to the perfect coaching formula is that it’s tailored for your business. Your magic formula will take into account the specific intricacies of your industry, product and prospects, along with the needs of your reps and managers to create your own aX + bY + cZ.

[Podcast] How Outreach Motivates Reps to Stretch their Sales Skills (Episode 10)

Daniel Kuperman on January 27, 2017

In this 11 minute

interview Turner outlines:

  • Outreach’s model for tapping into the motivational drive of its individual sales reps
  • How Outreach has leveraged technology to motivate and develop sales skills
  • The six areas that were critical to accelerating Outreach’s revenue growth

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

outreach_sales_excellence_podcast“Everybody has different motivational factors. Some people look at pleasure versus pain as being a motivating factor or hope versus fear, acceptance versus rejection, even success versus failure.”

The challenges of motivating individual sales reps were amplified for Outreach as the business grew 20% week on week. As the company’s second employee Jacob Turner has played a pivotal role in developing a framework that has seen the business keep it’s now 40 strong sales team motivated.

“Motivation isn’t just about financial reward. A lot of people, especially millennials, are interested in giving back,” he explains. “Instead of giving people money we’re investing in experiences.” The biggest motivator in Turner’s experience is their weekly sales gym.

“Sales gym is about giving reps access to different concepts of sales and psychological practices. Like what’s the difference between feedback and feed-forward, what types of leaders are out there, how to be a better leader, and things like that.” he continues. What makes the Outreach sales gym unique is that it’s a virtual classroom that relies on Slack and a webcam.

“They’re not really Outreach specifically. It’s more about how to be a better salesperson.” And isn’t that what every salesperson wants? Listen now

to hear how Turner took his sales reps to the gym to stretch their skills.

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