The 6 core elements to ForeScout’s sales excellence
How their sales playbook helped the business scale
When is a good time to develop your businesses playbook
What your sales playbook should include
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to hear how Capovilla has used their sales playbook to turn A Players into Forescout superstars.
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“The goal of a sales playbook is to capture and certify what your top performers are saying, asking and doing at every stage of the sales cycle.”
Renee Capovilla is Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout and she came up with the concept of a sales playbook when she was a one-person team looking to scale their sales team quickly. She’s since taken the playbook and created the company’s own ‘sales university.’ Core to the sales playbook is the sales process.
“The sales process has to be the representation of your top performers so it’s going to be as detailed as it needs to be to capture what they are doing, saying and asking,”
explains Capovilla. “The playbook’s main objective is to drive excellence throughout the sales process. The playbook begins at the onboarding program. It’s the basis for developing the university courseware and the reference coaching guide that drives our overall process and best practice application post the onboarding experience.”
“Our sales playbook has enabled us to give clear direction and guidance on what the rep should do say, do and ask it at every stage of their sale cycle, replicating the best of the best.”
How Avalara transformed its enablement and onboarding program to scale
His five-level process for onboarding and certifying new sales hires, and
How Avalara has structured its five unique sales teams while maintaining the same corporate look and feel
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to hear how Marcouiller manages the challenges of scaling and enabling five leading sales teams at once.
To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to Soundcloud or find it here.
“Sales enablement is the foundation pillar, saw sharpener and keeper of the flame.”
That’s how Chuck Marcouiller views his role as Director of Sales Learning at Avalara. With a sales force of 325 people scattered across 5 countries and numerous cities, Avalara has managed to achieve scale and maintain enviable growth rates of between 40 – 60% year on year.
“My role is to ensure that each member of the sales team has the foundational skills when they come on board, and then and as they progress they continue to sharpen their skills weekly and make sure that they stay grounded in our strong corporate culture,” explains Marcouiller. “Managing five different sales forces, each unique with their different skill sets and different needs, yet trying to get them to look and feel as if they’re one Avalara, gets to be a bit of a challenge.”
“For us sales excellence really is having a marketplace leading highly capable sales force, creating customers at a rate that meets or exceeds our growth plan. And sales enablement is providing the training and tools that meet the salesforce’ needs to meet the needs of our customers and adapt to the ever-changing marketplace dynamic.”
We’ve been growing our sales team rapidly to generate exponential revenue growth.
My colleague and I are responsible for Sales Enablement at Mindtickle and we’ve been charged with the challenge of onboarding of our new sales reps over the coming months. As we’re both relatively new to this role, it’s a rather daunting task.
The key items we’re focused on are
Ensuring the sales readiness of our new reps as a matter of urgency
Ensuring our onboarding and enablement programs are robust enough to facilitate ongoing growth
Developing and executing a strategy that ensures our new hires are productive at the earliest possible time… or sooner.
One of the advantages of working at Mindtickle is that we have the opportunity to learn from the best sales enablement professionals in the business, as many are our clients. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity we spoke to sales enablement pros like Cherise Chin, Tom Levey, Tracy Meersman, Pete Childers and learned how they went about designing their world-class programs.
They each had some interesting suggestions about how to put together and implement an onboarding plan, the high-level takeaways that we had were:
Each of them reinforced that their single biggestobjective was to prepare their reps for the moment of truth. In a rapidly changing environment reps can’t afford to miss an interaction or opportunity to sell. So the moment of truth can be any time they have an opportunity to accelerate their sales. What became obvious from our discussions was that the moment of truth was different depending on the team. For some, it was when an SDR made a cold call. For others, it was when their account executive uncovered a deep pain point of a customer. In other situations, could be when a solution architect presents an innovative solution for improving the business process of a prospect. Identifying when the moments of truth were for our sales team was the first step.
Once we understood our moments of truth it was necessary to solve for them. So when we spoke to our leadership team, our discussions were now elevated to a new level. Rather than talking about content and process, we were brainstorming how our onboarding program should look in order to create a culture of sales excellence. Irrespective of the outcome, we want every prospect who speaks to a Mindtickle sales rep to have an experience that leaves them thinking our reps are awesome. It’s our job to prepare them for this.
Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean there isn’t a need to look at onboarding from a very functional level. Our reps need to understand and appreciate the typical customer pain points, how to solve for them, our product, sales process and case studies for example. But by focusing on the bigger picture, we could approach our onboarding from a different perspective.
So with this in mind, here’s how we approached our onboarding program.
Week 1: Vision Readiness
The objective this week was to bring our new reps into our overall vision for the business and where sales fit in.
This was about addressing the Why and What of Mindtickle to our customers.
The “Why”
Why does Mindtickle exist?
Why do our customers love us?
Why do our customers face sales readiness’ challenges?
Why do our customers need our product to address these challenges?
The “What”
What problem do we solve for our customers?
What value do we add to our customers?
What specific Mindtickle features add the most value?
The first thing we did was speak to key stakeholders from within our business, such as Product, Customer Success and of course Sales and Marketing. We then allocated topics to each and asked them to create relevant sales missions on Mindtickle. For example, our CEO Krishna Depura created sales missions on our Corporate Values and Company Background. Customer Success created some product use cases and our marketing team completed the missions on buyer personas.
Co-ordinating people is no easy task, so we used the messaging functionality on Mindtickle to appoint each individual to record their pitches on the sales mission. This helped keep our project on track. And by crowdsourcing the content we were able to create about 20 sales missions in under 90 minutes. Thanks to the reminder functionality it took just a couple of days for all the videos to be created for week one of the onboarding program. In just another 30 minutes of my time, the sales missions were organized and ready for a new hire. This covered a large range of content that new hires would need to know about our business, customers, and product.
Once the new hires started to join they each were invited to complete the onboarding program. Using the Mindtickle analytics dashboard we were able to go in and see who had completed the program, how they had performed, what badges they’d earned and whether they struggled with any of the content.
Week 2: Product readiness
This week we honed in on the specific aspects of our product that work and how they are used by our customers. Following a similar process to week one, we got in touch with our Product and Customer Success teams to create sales missions covering The How.
The “How”
How does our product work?
How do sales enablement professionals use Mindtickle?
How do sales reps use Mindtickle?
How do sales managers use Mindtickle?
Within a couple of days, we had a treasure trove of content to ensure our new reps were product-ready. We anticipate iterating this process regularly as this module will continuously evolve as our Customer Success team keeps discovering new ways that our customers use Mindtickle to solve for their specific moments of truth.
Week 3: Sales Readiness
Being sales ready for our product is ensuring that our reps can handle any conversation. So it isn’t about developing a standard pitch that they use verbatim, but rather learning how to pitch for different scenarios.
The pitch
How do you make an elevator pitch?
How do you pitch for existing and new use cases?
When creating content for this week, the focus was on practice rather than listening to missions and completing quizzes. For example, for our new SDRs we created seven different scenarios for them to practice and become certified in.
At the end of the three weeks, our reps were then certified and ready to start putting what they’d learned into practice. But this didn’t mean they were onboarded yet, there’s still a way to go before they’re productive. We’ll share more detail about our onboarding plan in our next post.
The first 90 days in a new role is critical, but for a sales rep, it can make or break. There’s so much information for them to learn, from the product and internal processes to customers and the competitive environment, that it’s easy for them to become overwhelmed. To keep your new hires learning, adopting and moving along the path towards their first sale it’s important to structure their first 90 days.
Sales onboarding is all about making sure your rep is sales-ready; ready to connect with your customers and start selling. To reduce their ramp-up time and increase their sales readiness, here’s our roadmap for the first 90 days.
Make sure you’ve covered everything to ramp-up your new hires and make them sales-ready with our sales training checklist.
In my previous post, I talked about how important our customers believed it was to get their channel partners set up for success quickly. Many felt that ramping up their partner’s reps to sell their product as early as possible was critical to their future success. And some found out the hard way that if it took too long for their channel partners to start closing deals, their reps simply lost interest in their product and it was then virtually impossible to get them back on track.
But those that managed to onboard and certify their channel partners early believed that it solidified their partner’s ability to sell their product with confidence, and in some instances even gave them the edge over other products in their channel partner’s suite.
The channel training continuum
While the depth and breadth of your onboarding and certification will vary depending on where you sit on the channel training continuum, I’ve identified three areas where our customers focused their efforts.
The welcome kit
Channel partner kickoff
Channel partner onboarding and certification
The welcome kit
Most people I spoke to felt that a welcome kit was the bare basics that were essential to set their channel partners on the right track. Some things that they recommended including were:
Stakeholder details: Giving them points of contact when they need to register a lead or have an objection query;
Welcome message from your leadership team: Providing high-level information on the product and where your channel partners fit into the overall business strategy; and
Process and product information: Giving them access to everything to get them started, from your partner enablement platform to price lists and product information.
Most felt it was best to make the welcome kit available on their partner enablement platform rather than overwhelming reps with bulky hard copies or attachment-laden emails.
Channel partner leadoff
To get their new relationship off to a flying start, most customers held a channel partner meeting in the first couple of days. One customer used the leadoff as an opportunity to relay their vision for the relationship and generate excitement about their products.
While it is possible to conduct the leadoff remotely most felt it was more effective in person. One organization brought in some of their business leaders and key stakeholders to speak to their new sales team in real time. They felt this was not only very impactful but also showed their channel partners how committed they were to their success and the relationship.
Channel partner onboarding
In my discussions, I was interested to learn that not all channel partner onboarding programs were created equal. Some companies had different levels of training depending on what the primary KPIs of the channel partner’s reps were. This in turn also influenced how long the onboarding process took, and ranged anywhere from three to ten days.
For example, one business used a channel partner only to generate leads for them. Their training included:
How to frame an elevator pitch
Product training
How to conduct cold campaigns
Examples of email templates and cold calling scripts
Their best success stories
Another customer also charged their channel partner with managing opportunities, so their onboarding program also covered:
In-depth product capabilities and benefits
How to conduct a product demo
Handling common objections
Case Studies and talking points
Regardless of the depth of the training provided, all of our customers found that their onboarding program was most effective when it included a mix of media such as video, presentations, quizzes and even role plays. For example, one used quizzes to help reinforce product training and role plays to perfect elevator pitches.
One of the customers I spoke to runs a very complex channel partner program, with a tiered approach to their partners’ sales team. Some channel partner’ reps only conducted lead generation, while others were charged with seeing the sales process right through to closing. In line with these different services, their onboarding program had several training paths. This ensured that no one was being trained for anything they didn’t need, thereby cutting down the onboarding time for some reps so they could start selling quicker.
Another organization that I spoke to found that it made sense to tailor their onboarding program so that it fits in with their channel partner’s specific business model. This high touch approach meant that they couldn’t bring on board several channel partners at the same time. But they believed that taking a bespoke approach reaped greater benefits in the long run as their onboarding program made more sense to their channel partner. In some instances, they even removed parts of their onboarding program because they found it had already been covered by another product’s process. This not only cut down the onboarding time for their product but also ensured they weren’t providing reps with the information they’ve already been trained on.
The shorter training sessions, when coupled with other tools also helped improve engagement. All of the companies I spoke to believed that the information in their onboarding was adopted more readily when it was made interesting or had a tangible outcome. Some facilitated peer to peer interaction in the learning process, while others created healthy competition by gamifying outcomes.
While each organization bore the responsibility for putting together their onboarding program, some also involved their channel partner when creating the program. Many found this is to be particularly helpful when the channel partner was responsible for a marketing budget, as it gave them buy-in into the onboarding process.
Channel partner certification
All of our customers felt that certifying their channel partner’s reps was an important step in their partner management process, and translated into a greater share of wallet for their product.
One company commented that as their certification process improved, they were able to scale their business faster as well. This is because the certification process helped them identify what additional coaching or training their channel partner’ reps required, and also enabled them to prioritize their efforts between different channel partners.
Just as the onboarding process had different tiers, those customers with complex channel partner relationships also had different levels of certification for individual reps. For example, one organization used:
Level 1 – For partners who are responsible for lead generation
Level 2 – For partners who are also responsible for conducting demos
Level 3 – For partners who are also responsible for closing the deal
They then rolled up these individual certifications as part of their broader accreditation for each channel partner.
I’ve previously talked about how some of our customers decided what was the best channel partner strategy for their business. But once they signed on the dotted line many found that was when the real challenges began. While each had different issues, the overriding theme was how important it was to make sure their channel partners were supported from the get-go. But this wasn’t just about giving them product manuals or case studies. It was about enablement, process, and tools.
There were four things that emerged from these discussions that seemed to particularly help organizations ramp up their channel partners quicker and make them more effective and efficient.
Communication was a key issue that was raised by most. Making sure that channel partners (and their sales reps) know who they can speak to for specific issues was critical to their partner’s success. While those who had an exclusive channel partner strategy had a channel partner manager, those with targeted or global channel partners also had numerous people within their organization that spoke to their channel partners regularly. This could include sales engineers, partner marketing communications, and sales training managers.
While the channel partner manager received leads, product marketing might help with product training, and the sales engineer provides tactical support in how to deal with specific objections. In order to avoid confusion, and also make sure issues could be dealt with quickly, most companies found it important to have a primary point of contact, usually the channel partner manager. This role is responsible for ensuring the success of their partners, so they would pull in different departments to help support a partner if necessary.
2. Provide well-defined objectives
Providing your channel partner with objectives that suit your business model is critical. For example, one of our customers created different levels of objectives for their channel partners that matched their internal strategy and then used certification levels to help their partners understand their role within the broader business.
For example, a Level 1 certification provided enough context and information to enable a seller to perform lead generation, while someone with Level 2 certification was qualified to also do customer demos, and a Level 3 certified seller was accountable for opportunity management. All the partners could see a defined progression and knew that they had to succeed at one level before progressing further.
Another customer took a different approach to help their channel partners understand how they fit into their broader business objectives. They sell tea through franchisees and found that their channel partners were more effective at selling after they had communicated their brand positioning. This is because their franchisees then understood what made their product unique, and they could then articulate this to customers, thereby validating their premium price positioning. This also provided context that they could then use to underpin their own objectives, defining for their reps what they needed to sell and how they needed to do it.
3. Give them well-oiled processes
While the customers I spoke to knew that their channel partners needed processes to enable them to sell, many underestimated just how much detail they really required. For example, one high-growth tech company found their channel partner kept asking questions about what collateral they should use when talking to customers and how they could provide specific feedback.
This experience made them realize how important it was to have well-defined processes for their channel partners. For example, their partners needed to understand not only each stage of their sales process but also what kind of questions they should be asking prospects in each stage. One customer used the
CHAMP framework
(Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization) to help their channel partners qualify a prospect. They then used the
Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion) to help them get through the discovery process. By sharing the process and their questioning frameworks, they found their channel partners were more effective.
As part of sharing the process, many also found it helpful to share the specific collaterals that they used at different stages of the sales process. For some, this was quite a detailed process as they broke down the information so that their channel partners understood which collaterals helped counter a specific competitor objection for example.
Finally, all had implemented a simple and quick feedback loop. This allowed channel partners to share information from prospects that could then inform the company’s sales collaterals and decisions.
4. Provide the right software to support the success
While having a well-defined process is certainly important, it’s also critical that partner reps are supported with the right tools. The people I spoke to had several different areas where they found technology really helped their partners manage deals and also made it simpler for them to manage their partners. These included:
Partner relationship management: These tools are used to register deals, make market development fund requests, conduct joint business planning and determine loyalty/reward programs, and report on the pipeline and indirect sales;
Partner onboarding, certification, and ongoing learning: This helps provide training, certify sellers and automate their accreditation programs. Many of our customers use Mindtickle to help them do this; and
Sharing sales collaterals: Providing channel partner reps with access to relevant collaterals like sales decks, demo information, competitive battle cards and success stories. This kind of functionality tends to be included in most partner relationship management tools and can be facilitated using Mindtickle.
With these four elements in place, the next stage for many was to put together a robust onboarding and certification program for their channel partners. I’ll take you through how they achieve this next.
In my previous post, I gave you a glimpse at the SiriusDecisions framework for Sales Onboarding that was presented at their SiriusDecisions Summit 2016. Since there is so much to cover I broke it down into two separate posts.
After you structured your onboarding program in terms of Knowledge, Skills, and Processes is time to think about certifications. SiriusDecisions divides certifications into two categories:
Effectiveness and Efficiency.
For each of them, there are three levels of certification to consider:
Content Mastery
Simulation
Actual Execution
Certification is important because it validates that the sales rep can actually apply the learnings they have received. The first level of certification ensures the rep knows the material. The second level looks at whether the rep can apply the material in a simulated, pre-set scenario and controlled environment. This can be accomplished in many ways including using video role-play technology that gives the sales rep a safe environment to train in with a structured approach and the ability to obtain feedback. The third level has the rep in an actual customer engagement giving sales managers the opportunity to see how the rep applies the learnings in a real situation and also provides a great opportunity for coaching.
Measuring sales onboarding
SiriusDecisions recommends combining leading and lagging indicators to help assess the success of your onboarding program. The goal is to understand if your reps are progressing through the program at an adequate pace and if they will be ready by the time the program is over. The importance of the leading indicators is that they serve as a good early warning system that something might be amiss or that course-correction is needed. You don’t want to wait 6 months only to realize the sales rep is not yet fully ramped up because of something that could have been identified earlier during onboarding.
What to measure, is, of course, the key question, so here’s what the analysts suggest.
Examples of Leading Indicators:
Velocity by stage
Conversion rates
Pipeline to Quota
Overall pipeline flow
Forecast accuracy
Examples of Lagging Indicators:
Close rate
Average deal size
Client mix
Win/Loss ratio
Another way to look at the indicators is to consider what SiriusDecisions calls “programmatic” and “individual” indicators.
Programmatic indicators are:
Activity-based (how much time are reps spending on core selling activities vs. non-core activities)
Stakeholder feedback (sales managers, team leaders, etc. observations of the rep’s performance)
Business impact (the rep’s pipeline, productivity and performance metrics)
Individual indicators are:
Know it (test if the rep knows the material and can do certain key activities)
Demonstrate it (use a structured certification process to ensure reps can demonstrate the ability)
Execute it (can reps perform in front of a buyer, do they understand the buyer and can they drive the sale?)
Critical stakeholders for successful sales onboarding
The closing thoughts from the SiriusDecisions session on sales onboarding are that there is a functional interlock when it comes to sales onboarding involving sales enablement, sales operations, marketing, channel marketing, sales leadership.
The sales leadership has to communicate to sales managers the importance of onboarding and support a culture of measurement and accountability. Sales operations have to provide the analytics to help assess leading indicators of onboarding success and sales enablement has to develop an onboarding process that is consistent and programmatic, with rigorous certification processes that simulate what reps will experience in the field.
I hope this gives you some interesting ideas as you review your current sales onboarding plan and can apply some of the best practices described above.
During the session “Assessing Execution and Impact of Sales Onboarding”, SiriusDecisions VP and Group Director Mark B. Levinson gave a compelling presentation about the state of sales onboarding and what companies can do to get in shape.
The current state of sales onboarding is worrisome. Two key stats shared by SiriusDecisions show that 26% of sales organizations have not yet implemented a formal onboarding process
and only 7% of sales enablement leaders have indicated their onboarding program is robust and complete.
Sales onboarding as a first impression
Let’s start with the basics first, and why sales onboarding is such a critical component of sales productivity. The example Mark used in his presentation is excellent. Research done shows that you have one chance to make a good first impression and for that to happen there are several elements to take into consideration such as:
Know your audience
Exude confidence
Answer questions
Prepare and practice
Listen carefully
Dress to impress
In sales, the sales onboarding is typically the ‘first impression’ for new hires which sets the tone and expectations as well as serving as a welcoming program to the company. The problem is that it often consists of a week of ‘product dumps’ and reps are quickly pushed into the field. Sales enablement professionals must then balance driving sales competencies with the need to get sales reps productive quickly, often competing for priorities. On top of that, sales enablement leaders also need the ability to assess the onboarding process and understand if there are performance indicators that can tell whether reps are progressing as expected or if something needs to be done.
Evaluating the effectiveness of sales onboarding programs
According to SiriusDecisions, most onboarding programs are 60-90 days long, however, regardless of the length of the program the determination of whether a sales rep is “ready” is often done by the sales manager without any help of indicators or metrics to rely on. In fact, most organizations use “time to first deal” as the key productivity metric, with an alarming 23% of organizations not even measuring “time to productivity”
. It is clear that there is a lack of critical measurements to determine the ROI of sales onboarding.
That’s where SiriusDecisions Sales Onboarding Effectiveness and Efficiency Model comes in. Their framework breaks down the onboarding process into certain competencies:
Knowledge
Skills
Processes
These are great foundations to think about as you review your own sales onboarding initiatives. What are the knowledge areas you need your reps to be proficient at? Which are the skills they need to master to be able to sell effectively? What are the processes they need to be aware of? For example:
Typical Knowledge Areas:
Company history
Buyer Personas
Corporate Pitch
Product knowledge
Competitive intelligence
Pricing
Typical Skills to Master:
Core selling skills
Negotiation
Social selling
Closing
Objection handling
Demos
Forecasting
Typical Processes to Learn:
Sales methodology
Prospecting
Sales process
SFA
Lead management
Quote/proposal generation
By thinking in those terms you can create a structured onboarding program that covers all the needs of a sales rep.
In the next post, I’ll share additional details about the framework including how to think about sales certifications and how to measure the effectiveness of your program.
“The goal of a sales playbook is to capture and certify what your top performers are saying, asking and doing at every stage of the sales cycle.”
“Sales enablement is the foundation pillar, saw sharpener and keeper of the flame.”
We’ve been growing our sales team rapidly to generate exponential revenue growth.
I’ve previously talked about how some of our customers decided what was the
