[Podcast] Transforming Sales Enablement for Ongoing Sales Readiness with Joe Booth from SecureAuth

As the Senior Director of Sales Enablement and Competitive Intelligence at SecureAuth, Joe Booth is responsible for putting the systems and processes in place to ensure reps are effective in the field. Mindtickle was one of the key tools for helping reps find accurate, up to date information that was consistent across the channels and the sales reps were able to find quickly and easily when they needed it.

“Not only are we able to keep content in Mindtickle and keep that very up to date, but we’re also put together training on how to use that content and also training on sales process and onboarding and a lot of the other things that you would expect from a system like Mindtickle to be able to do. But I would say that Mindtickle being able to integrate with our content management system as well as integrating into our CRM has been a huge, huge gain in productivity and efficiency for our sales reps across the organization,” explains Joe.

Joe continues on to discuss how SecureAuth’s enablement program includes sales certifications for passing different kinds of Missions, Mindtickle’s virtual role-play capability, to develop and practice skills such as elevator pitches, demo presentations, or writing prospect-facing emails. For example, “SecureAuth’s Account Executives complete a video role-play with a screen-share scenario presenting their pitch deck. The Sales Engineers practice a screen recording of a demo.” As continuing enablement, Joe is developing various quizzes associated with these different scenarios as well as coaching programs to engage SecureAuth’s leadership in their enablement programs.

In this 30 minute podcast, Joe explains how SecureAuth:

  • Established best practices and periodically ensures reps are on-message
  • Reduced admin overhead and accelerated the onboarding experience with Mindtickle and Salesforce user-sync
  • Ensured consistent adoption of enablement programs through steady stream of communication
  • Plans for the future of partner enablement and onboarding

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

As

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

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

explains Ali.

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

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

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

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

As Ali says, “

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

In this 20 minute

podcast Ali explains:

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

[Podcast] How Sales Enablement can Strategically Guide the Sales Organization with Pat Lynch

In this

17 minute

podcast Pat explains:

  • How sales enablement has evolved over the past decade
  • How to turn around some disturbing trends in sales performance and productivity
  • The questions that can help sales enablement professionals focus on the right things at the right time
  • How to deal with sales tool fatigue

Pat Lynch has seen the evolution of sales enablement from several perspectives – in large companies like Xerox and FedEx and in research firm CSO Insights, to name a few. Now as Vice President of Enablement Excellence and Innovation at Mindtickle, Pat’s responsible for driving better outcomes for sales organizations through innovation and world-class enablement.

In recent years, Pat has seen some disturbing trends in sales organizations.

“Until last year, selling time for a sales professional was decreasing six years in a row. Now only 35% of a seller’s time is actually spent selling. Until last year, overall quota attainment also went down for six years in a row – from 63% to 51%. These are two alarming trends,”

exclaims Pat.

“Then add in the fact that you may only get 17% of the time with somebody who’s actually interested in purchasing your product or service. That’s very little time to actually develop rapport and trust with a potential customer, let alone trying to sell to them. That means salespeople have to be far more concise about the value-add that they’re bringing.”

While the numbers are worrying, it has ignited a fire under sales organizations. “

They realized that they needed to actually get somebody in the position and hold them accountable to stop these trends going in the wrong direction. With the Sales Enablement Society coming to fruition just about two years ago, we’re now seeing that enablement is a role that’s a critical success factor to getting sales organizations back on track and hitting quota,”

explains Pat.

The growth of sales enablement is certainly a step in the right direction but Pat has observed that some enablement professionals are at risk of missing a big opportunity. “

What often ends up happening is that the sales enablement executive is relegated to being a tactician. They’re trying to solve problems for salespeople. But sales enablement has a fantastic opportunity to look over the horizon to see what’s coming. They can provide strategic guidance to the VP of Sales. Some need to take a step back and look at the big picture and how they can help their sale organization.”

[Podcast] Managing Change in a Global Industry with Johanna Kuusisto – Episode 28

In this 21 minute

podcast Johanna explains:

  • How to manage industry transformation from a sales perspective
  • How they build and measure sales competencies consistently across remote sales teams
  • Her top three tips for implementing change in a global sales force

Wartsila is a Finnish company with over 18,000 professional in over 200 locations in more than 70 countries. The company enables sustainable societies with smart technology. Their solutions cover the energy and marine industries. We spoke to Johanna Kuusisto, Senior Development Manager. She has a background in Learning and Development and now brings her expertise to the sales team.

“I work in marine solutions and am responsible for supporting our salespeople to sell and serve our customers smarter. We develop processes, tools and competencies that help our salespeople be prepared for the future,”

outlines Johanna.

“Our sales cycle can be anything from one to five years. For example, if a cruise line decides to build a new cruise ship our salespeople first need to be engaged early on to influence and be part of the bidding process,”

explains Johanna.

“There are many players in the process – ship owners, shipyards, ship designers, and operators. Our salespeople need to create relationships and build trust with all of them. We also have hundreds of products that our salespeople need to be aware of and understand the value of. They need to match this value with each customer’s specific needs.”

Long sales cycles and complex products make sales challenging at Wartsila, but the rate of change in their industry is accelerating their need to sell differently. 

“There are mega trends happening in our industry. Regulation is changing, some products will be mandatory. People are also getting older which means we need to develop the tourism and service sector more and this involves influences customers, shipyards and ship owners,”

explains Johanna.

“Our salespeople need to accept this change. They need to be flexible in their mindset and keep their know-how up to date.”

Keeping everyone on the same page can be challenging, particularly with information scattered across emails, social media, and documents. This is amplified by remote and global sales teams.

Sales readiness is crucial for a company like us. We need to continuously find new ways to work and connect our people.”

[Podcast] The Future of Sales Enablement with Steven Wright: Episode 27

In this 20 minute podcast Steven explains:

  • What we can expect from technology in the sales enablement space
  • The key challenges to really enabling your sales team through content and process
  • Some of the pitfalls of trying to get sales enablement change off the ground
  • What are the hallmarks of a good sales enablement practitioner

With 20 years of experience in sales enablement both as a practitioner at companies such as IBM and as a Senior Analyst for Forrester, Steven Wright has seen a lot of change. In this day and age, change is the new normal and how we sell is transforming bringing with it new challenges, particularly with the use of technology.

“Sometimes there’s a very sharp pain and somebody finds a tool that will address it, but they haven’t really thought about the bigger picture. The overall process and program and dedication it’s gonna take to consistently execute on the sales enablement program. This tool may not help them get people onboard or keep them up to speed and keep reinforcing what they’re doing as part of an ongoing process,” explains Steven.

An area where technology has the potential to really transform how we sell in the future is in customer relationship.

“From the sales enablement perspective, companies who are using a lot of different technologies could try and lower the burden of the CRM on sellers so that they’re spending more time selling and less time doing data entry. A lot of that has to do with being able to capture data about sales activities that they were doing like how they are using emails, what they’re doing with content, is it being opened, is it being read and using all those analytics to be a real source of intelligence on what to do next,” says Steven.

Improving the productivity of reps is one area where technology has the opportunity to help and possibly hinder, training is another challenging area, particularly for businesses that have already invested in LMS.

“A lot of companies have a hybrid approach to training. This varies by industry – some have more need for certification like financial services or pharmaceuticals – that the curriculum in an LMS has. Other companies, with a focus on sales, need the approach Mindtickle brings to bear. Something that can be delivered very quickly, which on one hand meets a lot of tactical needs but can be part of a bigger development framework,” explains Steven.

“I think a lot of companies that haven’t made an investment in LMS probably aren’t going to need it if they can adopt the right kind of technology with some of the newer approaches like Mindtickle.”