Coaching Quotes to Inspire your Sales Coaches

Shankar Ganapathy on March 21, 2017

quotes-inspire-sales-coaches

Coaching is often proffered but not performed. Being able to execute it right is one of the biggest challenges faced by sales organizations. Managers put it in the too hard basket leaving them, and their sales reps, behind the eight ball. Companies that understand the impact that coaching has on their sales managers invest more and see greater top-line revenue. In fact, they prioritize coaching with frontline managers spending up to

70% of their time coaching

and mentoring their reps. Some businesses even attributed an

increase

o

f

2

5

% in their win rates to their focus on coaching.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here are six quotes from successful sales coaches on the power of coaching.

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” ~ Timothy Gallwey, Author

Coaching is not about telling someone what they should be doing, it is about helping them develop so that they get there on their own. Even the most self-aware rep might find it challenging to see how far they can go, that is where a good coach steps in.

“Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details” ~ John Wooden, former basketball player and coach

While coaching will lead to transformative change in your reps, the devil is in the detail. Helping reps make small behavioral changes can actually have a huge impact on their performance in the short, as well as long-term.

“The most important thing in coaching is communication. It’s not what you say as much as what they absorb.” ~ Red Auerbach, former basketball coach

While giving feedback is one part of coaching, the coaching process as a whole has an important role to play. If your reps are coached in a structured manner where they have visibility of their progression path, the coaching is likely to have a greater impact and drive behavioral change than if they’re just given ad hoc feedback. This is also where coaching tools that enable role play and watching peers can help reps gather insights into their own behavior that they can use to improve their performance.

“What do you coach? You coach the gap. Build a bridge that takes your people from where they are today to where they want or need to be” ~ Keith Rosen, Author and CEO Profit Builders

Gap identification is the foundation of effective coaching. Having a structured process in place to identify gaps is crucial for coaching to commence. Once a comprehensive plan is designed to fill the gaps, reaching your target objectives will be relatively easy.

“When you’re coaching your sales reps, make sure your feedback is timely, consistent, objective, accurate, individualised and relevant.” ~ Barry Trailer, Research Principal CSO Insights

In order to be effective, coaching needs to be contextual. This helps reps understand how to put it into practice and be their best in their customer conversations. Unless you’re sitting next to your reps it’s impossible to provide feedback that meets each of these objectives all the time, but it can be achieved by leveraging sales enablement technology that enables structuring coaching.

“Everyone needs a coach” ~ Bill Gates, Founder and CEO Microsoft

Even when you’re at the top of your field, there is still scope to be better with effective coaching. Here’s what Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, have to say about corporate coaching

.

Don’t you think it’s time to take coaching seriously in your sales organization? 

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What is Sales Enablement?

Shrimithran R on March 13, 2017

Sales_Enablement_Two_sides_1Are you building a new sales enablement strategy to grow revenue? Before you get started it’s worth taking a deeper look at exactly what sales enablement is.

Forrester defines sales enablement as:

“

A strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system.”

Topo

also does a great job at explaining the different facets of sales enablement:

“

Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales organization with the information, content, and tools that help salespeople sell more effectively.

”

So what does this mean for you?

Mindtickle POV: Sales Enablement = Sales Readiness + Sales Asset Management

There are two parts to sales enablement. The first one is foundational, like preparing your salespeople to have meaningful customer conversations. We call this “Sales Readiness” – the space that Mindtickle operates in.

Sales readiness delivers on three things:

  1. Ensuring customer-facing staff have the requisite knowledge of your products or services;
  2. Giving reps the skills to clearly articulate your unique value proposition; and
  3. Providing on-the-field coaching for contextual triggers like deal motion and skill development.

The goal of sales readiness is to ensure your reps are on message and always up-to-speed on your unique value proposition. For new hires, it is about accelerating their ramp up.

Ultimately, you are preparing your reps to have smarter sales conversations. Sales readiness initiatives are internally focused, not customer facing, so the content you produce would be consumed only by your sales team.

The second part, “Sales Asset Management”, is about ensuring your salespeople have the right conten

t in the context of where they are in the sales process fora specific deal

. The key objectives of sales asset management are:

  1. Improving customer engagement;
  2. Faster content delivery; and
  3. Simplifying content creation and management.

With so much customer-facing content being produced by marketing and sales enablement, it’s no surprise that your sales reps struggle to find the most relevant content for their prospects when they need it most. Companies like Showpad, Seismic and KnowledgeTree excel in this space.

So in a nutshell, sales asset management is about equipping your reps with the right content for their customer conversations, while sales readiness is about improving their performance by ensuring your reps have the knowledge, skills, and processes they need.

As a sales enablement leader, it’s important to communicate with your sales leadership to define and align the initiatives that will help your reps close more deals. These priorities may change from time to time. One month you may be focused on improving your SDR’s messaging and conversion rates, while in the next you could be focused on producing fresh content for a new product release.

Your sales enablement strategy will be based on the needs, challenges, and obstacles that your sales team are facing. Given how fast things change in the digital age this means your initiatives may change often, but the end-game always remains the same; to enable your sales reps so they can close more deals.

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

Enabling Sales Coaching in the Digital Age

Shankar Ganapathy on February 20, 2017

The digital era has arrived and research has found it to be the route to the customer, not the balance sheet. That means the biggest asset a business can have is a foolproof process to engage and convert prospects into customers. But the route to the customer has also undergone considerable changes.

Customers now research your business and competitors at the click of a mouse, reading reviews and seeking out advice without ever leaving their desk. In fact, over 60% of a buyer’s journey is over before they even speak to a sales rep, and it’s estimated that by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship with businesses without talking to anyone. The phenomenon is so common now it’s even got a name, “webrooming.”

Businesses that don’t find new ways to engage and convert prospects will be left behind or disappear completely. In fact, according to Pierre Nanterm, CEO of Accenture digital is the main reason over half the companies on the Fortune 500 have disappeared since 2000.

For sales organizations, the challenge is set.

Sales reps who once relied on the hard sell can no longer bamboozle prospective customers with details about their product features, because the customer may know more than they do. And customers don’t want to hear your pitch anymore, they’ve already read it on your website. What they want is proof that your product or service can solve their problems, data that shows what a difference it can make and facts that prove it’s the best option for them.

While sales managers still need to deliver the same things, from recruitment through to training, coaching and performance management, how they do their job also needs to change with the times. Many managers still spend much of their time focused on their team’s lagging and efficiency indicators. A multitude of reports and meetings are dedicated to order reviews and pipeline management, but how often do sales managers review their sales rep’s effectiveness?

Who is beating their quota? What are they doing well that the other reps aren’t? What knowledge and skill gaps do their individual reps have? Are their reps following the correct process?

This type of behavioural analysis is the first step for managers to be able to codify their best sales practices and identify what individual reps need to achieve results. Traditionally one on one sales coaching has been left in the hands of sales managers, with no real tools or structure to help them make the most of their efforts. In the digital age of sales codifying behaviour is key to achieving predictable sales results. And as a sales manager, if you can predict your sales results you will be successful.

So if codifying behaviour through coaching is the key to success then the problem of selling in the digital age is solved, right? Not exactly.

Sales coaching is still very much the domain of the sales manager and not every manager is cut from the same cloth. Each sales manager has their ow distinctive style. Some mentor their charges to success while others get down and personal to help coach individual reps. Some are confident to the point that they inflict their own style on their reps, whilst others focus more on what’s happening around the business rather than on their team.

This creates a unique sales enablement problem. In order to equip sales reps with the information, tools, and skills they need to succeed in the digital age their managers first need to be enabled to coach them effectively. And as sales managers have their own style, they need to be enabled in a way that gives them the flexibility to add their own personal touch. This can be solved for by using a sales coaching framework that provides both structure and flexibility.

Working closely with our customers we’ve found that there are three main areas where coaching is most effective:
sales-coaching-framework

The amount of coaching that is required in each category will depend on your business, your product or service and the experience of your reps. For example, if you’re selling FMCG to mom and pop retail stores then execution discipline is likely to be more important than knowledge. Whereas sales skills are likely to be key if you’re selling a complex enterprise software platform.

In order to be effective your business first needs to identify how important each of these areas is and what weighting each should have in your coaching framework. This then forms the basis for a structured coaching framework that incorporates processes and tools that help sales managers identify what their reps need and how to coach them. The framework moves the focus of sales coaching from addressing a single incident in one meeting, to the overall success of your reps and their cumulative sales outcomes.

Following a sales coaching framework also helps identify the needs of individual reps. While a couple of good reps may have been able to lift an entire team in the past, this isn’t the case anymore. Traditionally sales managers have tended to focus in on the “tails” or their very best and very worst reps, while the majority are left to fend for themselves. Research has found that focusing sales

coaching efforts on the middle 60%

can improve performance by a greater amount than addressing the top and bottom 10%. But there are more people sitting in the middle 60%, which means the top sales coaches need to be enabled to coach everyone effectively.

A sales coaching framework also has the additional benefit of providing a structure that can be leveraged by the broader sales and leadership team. As sales enablement and capability teams become more involved in helping reps sell, they are also taking on some of the responsibility for coaching them. That doesn’t mean that sales managers will eventually have no role in coaching. To the contrary, their role will be able to be elevated to focus in on the more challenging and higher impact opportunities that will make their sales reps not just good but great.

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.

Making Sales Coaching a Team Effort

Shankar Ganapathy on January 27, 2017

make_sales_coaching-team-effortNo athlete is perfect. Each has their own unique skills and areas that they can improve upon, that’s why even elite athletes need a team behind them. Usain Bolt is the fastest person alive but in the lead, up to the Rio Olympics (where he won his ninth Olympic gold medal), he credited his team led by coach Glen Mills as the strength behind his success.

Mills has never been an elite athlete. He’s a

career coach

, one who has learnt the ropes from the ground up and trained in aspects of anatomy, agility, coordination and even talent identification to become the best in the business. Running may be an individual sport, but Bolt’s success is thanks to a team of experts from doctors to nutritionists to Mills, who all put his needs front and center.

 usain-bolt_coach

Focus in on the target

Sales is no different. While achieving quota is up to the individual rep their success is a team effort. For each team, the focal point of their efforts starts and ends with the needs of the sales rep.
sales-rep-manager-enablement

In order to stay on top of their game reps require sales coaching on three areas:
sales-reps-coaching

The mix of each of these disciplines that a rep requires will depend on a range of factors such as their industry, product and skill level. Each business will need to determine what is the appropriate blend of weighting that each need for their business. This then forms the basis for your sales coaching program. By structuring your coaching program you can take the risk out of your revenue forecasts. Research from The

Corporate Executive Board Company

showed that reps who received as little as three hours of coaching a month exceeding goals by 7%, boosted revenue by 25% and increased their average close rate by 70%. Without a structured program in place, your sales organization is leaving your revenue in the hands of fate.

Success is a team effort

While the manager plays an integral role in coaching a sales rep to success, they are not the only person involved in the process. Sales enablement and capability, sales coaches, leadership and product teams are becoming increasingly involved in the coaching process. Some actually take on the role of coach in some areas, while others help enable the sales manager so they can coach more effectively. Each and every role in the coaching process is important.

For example for some organizations their sales coaching framework looks like this:
sales-coaching-team

With the roles of each stakeholder defined within the coaching framework, your subject matter experts have clear expectations of what they need to do. This also surrounds sales reps with a team who are all there to help them achieve success.

Having everyone on board is an important step towards creating a culture of coaching. To ensure the culture is entrenched it’s also necessary for coaches to be accountable.

Scott Erdinger

suggests some useful ways to reinforce the culture of coaching like establishing uniform expectations across every member of the team from the VP Sales down. This ensures both giving and receiving coaching is role-modeled by all. Highlighting those you are achieving is also effective, but the key here is not to just mention who they are but to also share what they did. This again helps role-model behavior and imparts knowledge to other reps. Finally, he suggests a carrot and sticks approach to accountability, where those who engage in the coaching process are rewarded and those who opt-out face consequences.

The mix of activities that are appropriate will depend on the nature of your team, its members and how entrenched sales coaching is in your organization. Like anything worth doing, coaching requires hard work, but the potential benefits to your team and topline are endless.

In Conversation with Avalara on Sales Enablement

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

 

Avalara sales enablementThis post is based on a podcast on Avalara’s five levels of sales certification. You can listen to the entire podcast

here

.

Avalara is the leading provider of sales tax compliance technology. The company has been growing aggressively, achieving an average growth each year of between 40% and 60%. Its sales team has become increasingly complex as it has grown; 325 salespeople are located across the 3 major offices in the US, internationally in Europe and Asia, and with some remote roles working from home offices across the country.

There are five distinct sales roles within the sales team that each have their own unique challenges.  The diversity of the team adds to the complexity of their sales enablement requirements.

According to Chuck Marcouiller, Director of Sales Learning,

“Avalara aspires to have the most successfully, highly skilled sales force in the software as a service technology sector. 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. For us, 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.”

Avalara faced three challenges when enabling its sales teams

When Marcouiller first started the business two years ago he was faced with several challenges.

The onboarding program was inadequate

The onboarding program was originally just a week-long course. It was conducted in person and supplemented with periodic webinars. This was not sufficient to convey the necessary knowledge, engage the sales team and ensure that they remembered and could apply the messages.a

Building progressive sales skills

The business has identified different core competencies that they required from their sales team. These include marketplace skills, business acumen, sales skills, product skills and knowledge of their sales tools. Avalara’s challenge was finding a way to progress their new hires through the different levels of competency so that they could become capable and consistent sales performers.

Creating consistent messages across multiple sales teams

Managing five different sales forces with different skill sets and needs is challenging. But the key enablement issue is making sure that each team had the same look and feel from a customer perspective. This consistent messaging was considered essential to the business’ success.

The technology was key to solving Avalara’s challenges

Avalara implemented several initiatives to achieve its goals.

Use technology to engage the team in learning

“One of the first things that I knew that I had to implement two years ago was a sales enablement platform or a technology tool that would allow us to efficiently capture and deliver learnings in bite sized nuggets, meaning somewhere between a YouTube video and a Ted talk. Because great sales people are, I’ve found over time and include myself in this, are attention deficit children. You got to keep it short, sweet and focused otherwise we’re going to lose interest,”

reflects Marcouiller.

With these requirements in mind, Avalara chose Mindtickle for its ease of use and ability to deliver updates and information in quick and easily digestible formats, including audio and video.

“It’s far more efficient to have an online video that people can use to learn the base concepts then to run small classes that meet everyone’s schedule. Humans are the most expensive component and we adopted a phrase of “record once, learn many times to then only get a chance to sit in front of a live instructor,”

explains Marcouiller.

Implement five levels of competencies

The next step was to implement a learning program that met their needs, progressing sales people through Avalara’s competencies.

“We’ve developed 5 levels to certification,”

explains Marcouiller.

“The first level is when something is brand new the most efficient way to teach someone or help share information to someone is through a recording. Because we learned from study after study if you make a learning module somewhere between a YouTube video and Ted talk people will sit down and learn when they have the ability to learn, and it’s a great way to get the information out. If they want to refresh they can go back and hear the recording at any time.”

This is delivered to sales reps on their mobile devices via the Mindtickle app.

“The second level is after you put the sales enablement course out there, you have to have a test to make sure that they learned and were actually paying attention to the course and they got the key learning objectives,”

explains Marcouiller. He chose Mindtickle because of its ability to conduct tests online that reinforce the key learning objectives of the course.

Only once the test is passed is a rep considered ready for live instruction. “

Because sales is a contact sport we want to make sure that our sales people can take the learnings, be it the product or sales skill, and actually execute it and use it. So what we wanted to do was have an online testing tool. In order to be able to test this process and make sure we could listen to their talk track, see their demos, listen to their ability to handle objections, and then have them rehearse that and then evaluate that,”

he continues.

Mindtickle was chosen for its role play capability so reps could demonstrate their demos and objection handling. Detailed analytics allows the sales enablement team to identify which reps are competent with the material and whether any are struggling with some parts of the course and require additional time or support.

Once an individual has passed this phase they’re ready to do a live role-play in front of their manager. Once they’ve passed this stage they’re ready for the final stage and are certified to sell. This process has ensured the consistency of their sales team

Avalara is a leader in leveraging sales enablement for its competitive advantage

By leveraging technology for its sales enablement initiatives Avalara now has an onboarding program that engages its new hires while bringing them up to the requisite level of baseline knowledge quickly.

Each member of their sales team also has a clear path to progress their learning and management has an objective method of determining when an individual is ready to sell thanks to their five-level certification program.

Finally, everyone sings from the same song sheet at Avalara, regardless of the product or customer they are selling to. This means they portray a consistent and robust message to customers and prospects, clearly articulating the value of their product.

ForeScout Combines Technology & Role Play for Successful Sales Onboarding [Podcast, Part 3]

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016

In this 7-minute

interview Capovilla outlines:

  • How ForeScout’s 30 – 60 – 90-day onboarding program is structured;
  • What the pitch back is and how it’s used to keep new hires on track;
  • Her advice to new sales enablement directors on how to build an onboarding program from scratch; and
  • How ForeScout has leveraged technology in its onboarding.

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

forescout sales onboarding“

The best way to learn is to have the trainees apply concepts to real deals so we have them do teach back concepts. We do a lot  of these role plays where the trainees have to present what they’ve learned to their peers and it’s through that collaboration that the learning really starts happening.”

Renee Capovilla, Director of Sales Enablement at ForeScout, is reflecting back on what has been critical to ramp up their new sales hires quickly.  “Our goal is to really pack those first 90 days with a lot of learning and effective training and then get them out into their territory. But it’s about month six to nine that they start hitting their productivity targets.”

Ramping up new sales hires so quickly is no mean feat and Capovilla puts it down to a combination of effective learning and smart use of technology. “You want to know how they are using [their learning] on a sales call and the only way you’re going to know that is if they tell you. So the pitch back is so important for us, to hear what they are going to say when they get to the customer, a great way to reinforce the learning through listening,” she says explaining the importance of online role plays.

When prompted to explain her secret to success she offered humbly, “I think what I might have as an advantage is the fact that I enabled the technology sooner rather than later. Don’t feel intimidated to add technology early on, because it won’t just help with the cycle time.”

ForeScout Turns A Players into Superstars with Sales Playbooks [Podcast, Part 1]

Abhinav Guru on December 5, 2016


In this 12-minute

interview Capovilla outlines:

  • 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

Listen now

to hear how Capovilla has used their sales playbook to turn A Players into Forescout superstars.

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

Forescout sales enablement“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.”

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