7 Habits of Effective Sales Enablement: Continuous Improvement

Shankar Ganapathy on January 27, 2016

You’ve spent painstaking hours, weeks, and months designing and implementing a sales enablement plan and the results are in. You’ve reduced the time it takes to ramp-up new sales hires and make them productive by nearly a month and the sales managers are sitting up and taking notice. It’s finally time to sit back and take a break, right. Wrong!

Sales enablement isn’t something you can design once, and then set and forget. Things are changing every day; new features, new customers, new competitors, new strategies. Before you’ve even seen the results from your new design it’s already out of date. This is why effective sales enablement managers always enable continuous process improvement. They aim to strive higher, set new benchmarks, and improve on their design

This doesn’t mean that you have to redesign your entire process every other week, but making time to continuously question, analyze and improve, can make all the difference to your sales performance.

Owning the sales enablement process

It’s important to first understand the key players in the process that you want to evaluate and improve, in particular, the process owner and the outcome owner.

The process owner in sales enablement is almost invariably you, the sales enablement leader. You have an overriding responsibility to ensure that the process fits within your company’s policies, existing processes, and meets its objectives. Looking at the entire end-to-end sales enablement process across a rep’s lifeline (from onboarding, ensuring consistent messaging, field communication, etc.), you understand what capabilities and tools are available and required to enable reps at each stage. Essentially you are the process champion.

However, the process owner doesn’t always own the outcomes of their process. For example, sales managers may be responsible for win rates, but it’s you who helps them achieve this. To an outcome owner, the process is just a means to an end.

This distinction is important when considering continuous improvement. While identifying the required outcomes for the process is part of the process owner’s role, you are merely facilitators to achieve the end of an objective. your evaluation process needs to look at a broad range of factors that may impact that outcome, focusing on improving the actual process, not just zeroing in on the outcomes.

Making time for evaluation

With the specific roles clarified, the real work starts. The key to continuous process improvement is leveraging data to measure and identify what’s working and what’s not.

Now you know it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, that’s why you need to schedule a time to evaluate your process. One effective way I’ve seen this done is by having a quarterly review process. For 11 weeks you run your sales enablement initiatives and then for one week a quarter you step back, review data, and business information, and identify ways to improve the process.

So in that one week a quarter, what should you be looking for? Here are some things that you could evaluate to identify improvements to your sales enablement process:

  • Undertake a cohort analysis to see what trends are evolving. For example, if your business is hiring a lot of new sales reps, look at how one month’s recruits compare to the next, in terms of ramp-up speed, readiness levels, etc. If it’s improving, what has been working and how can that be improved upon?
  • Take a look at whether there have been any changes to your organization’s sales and product strategy. Has the business started pursuing enterprise prospects more aggressively, when they previously focused on the SMB segment? What changes are needed to enable sales reps to meet these customers’ needs?
  • Review your competitors and identify if there have been any changes that may have shifted your relative strengths and weaknesses. These then need to be communicated to reps, and their readiness tested to ensure they understand this competitive intelligence and how it may impact how they talk to buyers.
  • If there have been major product releases this quarter, are reps up to speed with how these are positioned and the messaging that should be communicated to buyers? Can the product update process be improved so that reps are up to speed quicker?

By monitoring and analyzing this data you may find the areas where your sales enablement can be improved or even changed. Even if you only make small changes, over time it will make a significant improvement to your reps’ results and the bottom line of your business.

Encouraging continuous improvement

While you may be the process owner, that doesn’t mean others can’t be involved in improving the process with you. Effective sales enablement leaders find ways to share relevant data and analysis with other stakeholders, like sales managers, and obtain their input into the improvement process. After all, those who use different parts of the process each day will no doubt have ideas on how it can be improved upon. It’s particularly important for sales managers to be consulted as they have day-to-day communication with their reps and can provide insights on the coaching required to improve weaknesses.

Surveys, polls, and even one on ones, where you request feedback, can all be helpful ways to encourage others to share their ideas.

Process improvement is always a work in progress. What works today may not fit the organization tomorrow, or some new tool or technology could transform a part of your process overnight. The trick to effective sales enablement is to never stop looking for those little gems, that all add up to a transformational sales process.

4 Sales Enablement Performance Metrics You Must Measure (And How to Improve Them)

Smriti Chawla on January 27, 2016

As the director or manager for sales enablement, you’ve probably been more focused on tracking participation metrics, like a number of training sessions completed, amount of content produced, and so on (a whopping 48% of enablement managers track only that). And it’s understandable. These metrics give you an idea about the engagement level of learners and the effectiveness of the content produced by your team. Fair enough!

While these participation metrics are important to you when measuring the success of your sales enablement strategy, the positive impact of your efforts on revenue may not be as readily apparent to senior management. And expecting them to calculate the impact on revenue themselves may be wishful at best.

You have to make them see the revenue impact of your enablement initiatives by spelling it out for them — clearly and logically. This will frame their perception of the value your function is contributing to the organization.

Measuring the impact of sales enablement on business metrics is not straightforward

With marketing, it’s easy – traffic and leads are your go-to metrics. With sales — it is revenue generated and the number of deals closed. But what is it for sales enablement? There’s no one metric that can tell you the business impact of your efforts.

There will most probably be external factors that are influencing the business metrics you need to track. You cannot claim that the improvement in quota attainment is solely because of the efforts of sales enablement, for example. It may have played a crucial role, yes, but maybe reworking the talent acquisition strategy helped the HR department find better candidates this time as well. Possible, right?

Measuring the exact numbers are thus not so straightforward for enablement managers. Many take the approach of showing estimated revenue impact of their efforts — and that’s okay!

Here’s how you should go about it.

Proving the worth of your sales enablement efforts – Metrics to track

Metric 1: New hire ramp-up time

Cutting down the “time to productivity” is one of the primary parameters that can help you prove the effectiveness of your onboarding efforts.

Did you know that the latest inside sales report by The Bridge Group revealed that five months (and growing) was the average ramp-up time for new hires in SaaS companies

That’s a major red flag, especially when the average tenure of a rep is reported to be only 2.5 years.

Now let’s assume you have 20 new reps each with a quota of $1M per year, and you manage to reduce their average ramp-up time by one month. This means your onboarding program contributed $1.6M ($83,333 x 20) additional revenue, every year.

Closely tied with actual business results, interpreting the revenue value of ramp-up time is pretty simple.  How companies measure this metric varies immensely though, and depends on every company’s unique business context.

Tom Levey, the Senior Director for Sales Enablement at AppDynamics, for example, tracks the time to close the first $50K deal as the main metric to report the effectiveness of his onboarding programs. Like Tom, many sales enablement leaders prefer to track reps’ time to the first sale as their criteria to measure ramp-up time.

How you can improve on this metric:

Create a progressive, milestone-based onboarding plan. Map out the objectives according to the ramp up time that is appropriate for your business. A typical onboarding plan may look something like this:

  • First 30 days: Ensure all new reps have a thorough knowledge of processes and basic product knowledge.
  • 30-60 days: Clear articulation of the value proposition, basic objection handling, and how to use best practices.
  • 90-days: First sale worth over $50k made without any hand-holding.

Set the timelines and objectives according to your unique business context. Once you have this structure clearly laid out, it will help your reps focus their energies to accomplish the objectives. This will also push you to create very focused training material.

At the end of every week, you can identify slow learners, who are unable to reach the expected performance benchmark and need more attention.

Provide the right blend of online and in-person training opportunities to get new hires up to speed quickly. Reserve the latter to clear doubts, practice different sales scenarios, and discuss advanced topics, like the competitive landscape.

Assign scenario-based role-plays to help your reps become customer-ready faster. While the online training may build the baseline knowledge of your new reps, role plays help them gain confidence to master common customer conversations with ease.

Metric 2: Win rate

While an aggregate improvement in win rate is a big plus in your enablement report, segmenting this data will help you find useful insights to determine the course of your enablement strategy.

Show win/loss rate against specific competitors in your report. Over a period of time, you can prove how you are influencing your win rate against specific competitors by channelling your efforts.

How you can improve on this metric:

  • Equip your sales team with battle-cards and competitive intelligence that help them frame strong rebuttals and competitive moats.
  • Identify the gaps that are impacting your B players’ ability to close deals. This is the low hanging fruit you can work on first. Your access to data might be limited, which means you may only see the aggregate win rate. But if you can segment the data by geography or cohorts and evaluate win/loss rates of different sales teams and their knowledge levels, you might be able to identify valuable insights (you can do this if you use Mindtickle). You can then create specific training programs for teams that are falling short. Adding some actionable industry insights to the report might also be a good idea. For example, if you notice that reps in a particular cohort group are selling well in a particular industry or territory, you can understand what is working for them and share any relevant knowledge with the other teams. The impact of these insights on the other teams can then be measured and the results shared.

Metric 3: Percentage of reps achieving their quotas

In sales, everything boils down to the metric of quota attainment. Recent research noted that only 61% of reps in SaaS businesses achieve their quota. That means there’s an opportunity for sales enablement managers to improve 39% of the laggards.

Achieving an improvement in quota attainment can help you make a solid case that demonstrates all your training is not just about ‘knowledge addition’ for reps. It is actually bridging relevant, carefully-identified information gaps, to help your reps close more deals.

So if 30% of your reps attained quota last quarter; and this quarter it rose to 45%, you can for example, attribute that to your competitive insights initiatives that helped reps handle objections effectively and win more deals. Multiply this by the number of reps you have, and you can show how this improvement escalated the revenue impact for the business.

How you can improve this metric:

  • Identify the difference between learning patterns of achievers and laggards. Let’s say you find that all reps who achieve their quota have completed their ‘Objection Handling course for competitor A.’ You can make it mandatory for all reps to complete this course and measure its impact.
  • Start off with reasons why your reps are not reaching their quota and then fix them. If, for example, you find out their product knowledge is not up to the mark, you can conduct quizzes around different aspects of product knowledge to identify gaps and create courses to bridge these gaps.
  • Implement a 4-week quiz plan by segregating questions in four knowledge buckets — value proposition, competitive intelligence, case studies, and product knowledge. Roll out 3-4 questions every week to collect data and identify the knowledge gap that might be impacting your reps’ ability to win deals.

Metric 4: Sales cycle

The B2B buyer journey has become more complicated. And thanks to the involvement of multiple decision-makers, the average length of a sales cycle has gone up by over 22% in the past five years.

It’s simple — shorter sales cycle = more deals to close = more revenue. The maths is right, the impact is clear.

But reducing the sales cycle isn’t that simple! And this is especially because unless you do something groundbreaking, you’ll only be able to see the impact of your efforts reflected in the sales cycle over a period of time. Reducing sales cycle is thus more of a long-term objective for enablement managers.

As reducing the sales cycle is something that takes time, it makes sense to show the sales cycle in your report only once or twice a year. You can also show the revenue impact on compressing the cycle. For example, if you reduce the sales cycle by 10 days (down from the average duration of 4 months) and your average deal size is $20k — your estimated revenue impact could be $50-$100K additional revenue for every sales rep every year.

How you can improve this metric:

Sales cycle and win rates are interrelated. A lot of things that you can do to improve win rates will reduce your sales cycle as well. Apart from the suggestions mentioned above, here are few other things you can do to reduce your sales cycle:

  • Work with sales operations to identify the biggest drop off stage in your sales funnel. Hubspot was a pioneer when it came to implementing a data-driven approach to coaching. Mark Roberge, their VP Sales, talks about it in this For entrepreneur article. As an example, Mark suggests that if they see drop-offs at ‘worked-lead to demo conversions’ of their sales funnel, they usually break it down to find out if reps are struggling to connect with the prospects, or whether they are able to get in touch but unable to get their time for the demo. Depending on their findings, the coaching strategy is defined for maximum impact.
  • Next time you’re trying to decide on a sales enablement campaign or initiative, ask yourself just one question — ‘Will this information help my reps close more deals?’ If the answer is ‘no,’ discard the idea and move onto the next one. This will keep you laser-focused on the end impact and help you improve your metrics over time.
  • With Mindtickle customers, we’ve seen time and again that it is not about the number of content modules you create per month. You need to share relevant and high-quality content to trigger engagement amongst your reps and give them a reason to keep coming back to learn more. Recognizing the challenges and problems faced by reps plays a huge role in the success of your enablement efforts here.

And although the metrics given above are super important, don’t forget to track engagement metrics. While it might not be of supreme value to your business heads, it will definitely provide you with great insights that give you direction for effective enablement.

What metrics do you track to prove the impact of your enablement efforts? Tell us more about it in the comments section.

The Flipped Classroom Action Plan in Just 5 Easy Steps

Shankar Ganapathy on January 20, 2016

flipped classroom in 5 steps
Companies that implement ongoing education for their employees are setting the stage for long-term success. Your employees need to upgrade and broaden their skills periodically as well as stay familiar with the latest industry trends, technology, and practices.
This can’t be understated. Technology evolves rapidly in most industries. Failure to maintain the skills needed to succeed, makes it challenging for employees to perform their duties with any degree of productivity.

The reality of implementing ongoing training consistently with sales reps in the field, customer service agents on the go and busy remote employees, is an entirely different story altogether…

The flipped classroom approach presents a highly scalable way of making an ongoing training program a reality for any business that needs to keep employees up to date. The premise behind the flipped classroom is to create an environment where the lecture and homework aspects of your course are reversed. Today’s employee, more tech-savvy than ever before, is used to consuming learning content online. This enables trainers or managers to spend time in class engaging in discussion, applying concepts and answering employee questions.

In 4 Signs You Should Invest in a Flipped Classroom, we gave you a few questions to consider for an investment in the flipped classroom approach. Here is step by step tips on how to develop and implement the flipped classroom for your organization.

Action Plan for Developing Your Flipped Classroom Training

  1. Start By Setting Objectives – It’s important to know your objectives before you start designing a plan. Set the end objectives you want to achieve with your training program. For example, assume a bunch of new sales hires are joining soon. Objectives of the training could be focused on getting the sales reps prepared on buyer personas, buying habits, customer pain points and how your product addresses the customer’s needs. In addition, objectives could also cover how your product solves the customer’s problem and the positive impact.
  2. Develop a Training Plan – Once you identify what outcomes are needed from the learning activity, decide on the optimal mix of training content for your organization and develop an outline. Create a training structure based on your objectives and priorities. Then, identify topics that go inside each of the training elements.

Mindtickle Sales Onboarding Course Example

Mindtickle Sales Onboarding Course Example

Note that there is no one size fits all solution. Instead, customize your approach to every topic keeping in mind the opportunity for pre-work. You want to first have employees experience the learning activity on their own, then come to the classroom prepared for discussion.
3. Prepare Content for the Training –  Video is an excellent medium for delivering the flipped classroom approach and preparation will reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the videos. (Unless you are an improv whiz!). For example in sales onboarding, simply record your “A player pitch” for a highly engaging demo to use in your training.
As you review content, look at your objectives and include data that makes for a good introductory overview along with seminal concepts. Every topic in the Analytically evaluate if your training content will meet the objectives.
Repurpose PowerPoint presentations into smaller presentations covering the topics. Script out your presentations from slide notes. Make sure each topic is a bite-sized one so that you don’t overwhelm your employees!
Recording video is much easier than you may think. You can use your mobile phone to record videos and use simple tools to do basic editing. A parting thought on video – resist the urge to be a perfectionist when recording or editing. When delivering live training there are bound to be mistaken here and there. It’s no different with video so don’t worry about small errors!
4. Implement the Flipped Classroom – When your employees go through the course online and come back to the classroom for an effective face-to-face session, it is even more critical to foster a team of intrinsically motivated employees. Having the right incentives in place will allow you to run a successful training with enthusiastic employees. Deliver the in-class discussion questions for each topic ahead of time. Let your employees know that they should prepare for in-class conversation and questions by sharing a structured learning plan with them upfront and explaining your ground rules and expectations about participation.  It is critical that they understand that those who come to training having completed the lesson, engaged and ready to ask questions to get far more out of the experience those are unprepared.
5. Evaluate Training Results – The next step is to evaluate (through an assessment) the efficiency of the training. The analysis of the training report will give you information on knowledge gaps on which your employees can be coached in the face to face session. It is important to seek feedback from your employees and deliver quizzes and assessments to ensure that you are on track to meet objectives. If some videos are not effective, find out what is effective! Finding out what works may take some time. Once the flipped training is complete deliver a final assessment to evaluate knowledge. Now your employees are prepared to do their job efficiently!
With the flipped classroom it is important to remember that the experience can be as much of a learning experience for you as a trainer as it is for your trainees. No doubt there is a learning curve and there may also be some resistance as you make the shift away from more traditional approaches to the flipped classroom model. Give the flipped classroom a chance and keep iterating to meet your organization’s goals!
What do you think about the flipped classroom approach?

Mike Kunkle on Sales Onboarding (Part 1)

Mohit Garg on January 13, 2015

Mike Kunkle Sales Onboarding

So you just hired a new salesperson? For many businesses, the ramp-up time for new sales reps is typically six months or more. With turnover being slightly less than two years for most reps, companies need to have a solid onboarding plan in order to realize a return on their investment. An outdated or overly labor-intensive sales onboarding program leads to increased turnover and wasted company resources.

sales onboarding ramp up times

Source: via Mike Kunkle, Sales Onboarding: Twice as Good, Half the Time

Sales onboarding isn’t just about going through pitch videos or having new reps shadow tenured sales reps. Not only should your sales onboarding have a clearly defined objective and end goal, your sales reps also need to know the milestones that they need to achieve to be successful. Your new salesperson has potential, but that potential is only unlocked with a structured onboarding program. For advice on what excellence in sales onboarding looks like, we turn to Mike Kunkle, a recognized leader in sales training and organizational effectiveness. Mike shares actionable steps you can take to help accelerate ramp-up times and reduce turnover.

What are the pressures and trends that sales managers must contend with today?

Mike Kunkle: The pressure is still all about the number… making your sales quota. It’s the environment that’s changed. Due to information available online, with a few clicks, today’s buyers are doing their own research before reaching out to suppliers. Buyers are more informed than ever – although not always more accurately informed.
Along with these changes in buyer behavior, there are more RFPs than ever before and more decision-makers involved. For instance, the average number of buyers involved in a complex sale is 5.4 (according to CEB). If that’s the average, there are some that have even more buyers involved.

Tweet This: “The pressure is still all about the number… making your sales quota.”

Then there are factors like corporate cost reductions that result in shrinking training departments and budgets, making it more difficult to serve our sales forces.  To further complicate things, even in this day and age of big data, many still roll the dice when we hire and select sales reps on gut feel.

Bottom line is that the expectations placed on sales managers are enormous, and often organizations pull them in far too many directions, rather than removing obstacles to allow them to focus on hiring, training, coaching, and managing their teams as effectively as possible.

You said: “It takes many companies from 7 to 12 months to ramp-up their new sales reps.” Why is sales reps ramp time moving in the wrong direction?

Mike Kunkle: If you look as far back as 2003, which I did recently for an article I was writing, ramp-up times were shorter. “Ramp up times have generally gotten longer over the years. There’s variance, but if you trend-line the data, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. There could be quite a few reasons for that, though, including a more complex, competitive business environment, a shift toward the buyer’s market, and/or an increase in complexity of problems, opportunities, and solutions to address them, or even some year-to-year difference in research protocol or other speculative reasons.”

Selling was a lot less complex than it is today, and to a large degree, it’s because there wasn’t a proliferation of information on the Internet. It was before buyers were doing so much research on their own.

Combine that with a drain on training department budgets and sizes, in comparison to the early 2000’s, and how much new reps need to learn to be productive, and it’s not hard to imagine why onboarding remains a sales challenge.

Question: What can be done to accelerate sales rep ramp time?

Mike Kunkle: I’d start by defining outcomes. When you say accelerate, is that just a faster time, or is it higher productivity in the same time, or both shorter ramp-up time with higher productivity? The first thing is to get clarity around what you want and benchmark where you are, so you have a measuring stick to gauge your progress. Put a stake in the ground saying, “This is where we are today.” Then ask yourself: “where are we aiming and what are we trying to do?”
When companies actually try to shorten their ramp up time, many of them are actually deterring productivity as opposed to enhancing it. There’s an awful lot of five days of death by PowerPoint in orientation and onboarding.

Tweet This: “The sales job has become increasingly complex.”

We need to step back and apply some sound instructional design thinking, stuff that has been around since the dawn of time. Analyze top producer practices and really try to understand what are the differentiating factors between top and mid producers. Then document the best practices in your organization.

The best practices give you a real focus on what are the things that are making a difference. When you’re developing content or teaching content to new people, you know what you’re teaching gets results. This is where hard core prioritization and decisions need to be made. What are the absolute need-to-know and need-to-do things to achieve sales rep productivity?
For example, three common goals I’ve used in some businesses include:

  1. making their first sale,
  2. achieving their first monthly quota,
  3. and then making quota 3 months in a row.

These goals won’t work for every business. They have to match reality, and when achieved, they signify that the employee is truly ramped-up and a fully-productive sales rep. The concept sounds simple but it is far from easy… People struggle most with the NEED to know vs. NICE to know piece.

You also want to have ways to reinforce what is taught such as job aids, places to get answers, buddies or mentors, and plenty of follow-up and coaching from either specialized onboarding coaches or sales managers.

Check back for part 2 of our interview on sales onboarding with Mike Kunkle. We’ll cover common mistakes training managers make in sales onboarding as well as actionable advice and best practices.

You can see more of Mike’s thoughts about sales onboarding at http://bit.ly/SalesOnboardingLI

Mike KunkleMike is a training and organizational effectiveness leader with special expertise in sales force transformation.
After his initial years on the frontline in sales and sales management, he spent the next 21 years as a corporate manager or consultant, leading departments and projects with one purpose – improve sales results.

Today, in his role as commercial training & development leader for a Fortune 10 corporation, Mike uses his in expertise in best-in-class learning strategies, methods, processes, and change leadership to develop the capabilities of sales representatives and sales managers to drive business results.

Mike freely shares his own sales transformation methodology, speaking at conferences and writing online (see http://slidesha.re/PerfLevers082011  and http://bit.ly/EffectiveSalesLearningSystems as examples) and can be reached at <mike at mikekunkledotcom>, through his blog at http://www.mikekunkle.com, or on various social media sites.

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