In this 16-minute podcast, Crepeau and Wolber outline:
Why there is a pressing need for sales enablement
What industry trends are shaping B2B sales
Common mistakes sales enablement leaders commit
The key sales enablement initiatives at G5
“Today, sales enablement spans every function within the organization. Let me take a step back, and say why sales enablement is so hot now in my opinion. Having sold enterprise technology for more than 25 years, the reality is it’s harder to sell than it ever has been. Only 60% of reps are hitting quota, leaving 40% of reps unsuccessful in reaching their targets,” explains Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results.
Following on from the previous podcast, where Steve Crepeau and Mike Wolber discussed how G5 built a successful sales enablement team, they share their thoughts on why enablement is a must-have in every company.
In this episode, they also discuss what mistakes organizations commonly make when setting up their sales enablement team. “The biggest mistake is not having executive buy-in. Regardless of how large or small the sales team is, without the support of leadership, it is difficult to execute a sales enablement program,” explains Crepeau.
“The second mistake is not assigning a superstar performer to head sales enablement. I think sometimes you pick someone who seems convenient because you’re afraid of taking such a productive resource out of the field. And then you have the wrong person heading up sales enablement within your organization,” he adds.
This post is based on a webinar where Stephen Hallowell, VP of Sales Enablement at MuleSoft discusses why companies should invest in sales coaching.
MuleSoft is a leading high-growth technology company that focuses on application integration under one platform. With over 800 employees and over 1000 enterprise customers across 60 countries, MuleSoft has had astounding growth.
“We have been evolving quite a bit as a company over the years. We have gone from what was a fairly tactical engagement to selling business value associated with what otherwise can be a pretty technical concept. We are enabling change on a broad scale inside some very large companies,” explains Hallowell.
Why sales coaching matters
A significant part of MuleSoft’s success can be credited to their investment in sales coaching. “To improve the outcome and win more deals, the sales rep has to start doing things in a fundamentally different way than they were previously. Natural behavior is to put one foot in front of the other and keep marching straight. We need our sales reps to stop and take a left turn at some point. The only way that we’ve been able to drive that behavior change is through coaching, ” says Hallowell
Two main aspects of the coaching program
Sales leadership at MuleSoft decided that their sales coaching initiative should answer two questions:
Are
their reps doing what is important?
How can their managers help their reps sell the right way?
Most sales teams get their approach to the second question right by coaching their sales reps. But the first question is often under-recognized yet it’s vital to ‘accountability’.
“If the manager doesn’t actually know and doesn’t have the ability to know, whether somebody’s doing the right thing, and the individual contributor also doesn’t know, you can never get that self-diagnosis. The more you can make it very apparent to people what they’re doing well and what they’re not doing well, you create the need for change,” explains Hallowell.
“If somebody comes in and coaches me and says, “Ah, well, hey, here’s a better way of doing things,” and I haven’t seen that reason yet for doing things differently, I’m not going to get the results out of it,” he continues.
Building a competency map
The first step was to identify what knowledge gaps their managers had. This was done through effective benchmarking.
“To kick this off, we did some benchmarking with our managers by assessing them against some third party statistics. That helped us realize some are exceptional and some are not. That helped create that need for change across all levels of the organization,” explains Hallowell.
Once the gaps were identified, the next step in the process was to train them effectively on their skill gaps. “The next thing we did was build the competency maps. We did that probably 9 to 12 months into the process. In my experience, for a competency map to be effective it’s got to be somewhat detailed, just because you’ve got to be precise about what you want people to do. That level of detail delivered too early can be a bit overwhelming. Trying to find that right balance of really defining for the managers, these are the specific behaviors and skills you need to coach, to giving them enough detail to be actionable, but not so much detail that you overwhelm them,” explains Hallowell.
Designing the certification program
“One important thing we drove was a significant relaunch of our messaging. A pool of leaders and individual contributors locked themselves in a room for a couple of days and came out with something that everybody felt really good about. Once it reached the field, there was no question of “Is this the right message?” Our leaders bought into it,” says Hallowell. The primary element in the coaching program at MuleSoft was message calibration, which was done by the leadership team.
“We had the core team record themselves in the Mindtickle platform to provide examples and best practices. Then we formed a group of best performing reps and managers who we call black belts. This group of black belts then certified the full team. We had over 500 people go through this program,” explained Hallowell.
Coaching is not a checkbox exercise
The importance of this program is well understood given that over 500 employees went through the coaching program. The program was well received across the organization. What exactly worked for MuleSoft?
There were multiple factors including support from their leadership, setting high benchmarks for their sales reps and providing personalized feedback for each rep.
“One of the things that were really important for us is that this wasn’t just a check the box exercise. If it had been simply a box-checking exercise, there wouldn’t have been a lot of opportunity for coaching. I can’t overstate the importance of really broad management support and solving a pain point that everybody recognizes. The next thing is holding that performance bar very high. We did not pass people who were not completely 100%. Yeah, it might take a little longer than we want, but we’re going to make sure we get everybody’s attention on,” says Hallowell.
Finally, make it awesome
The success of a coaching program is measured on how well it is adopted. “
The last thing I’ll leave you with is we have a set of core values at MuleSoft. One of them is to make it awesome. It’s one that I love. I use it with my team all the time, and I think it’s so important in our role. You’re going to ask a lot of people going through this program. If they detect anything that’s not awesome, they’re not going to invest, ”
says Hallowell.
Did Hallowell and his team make it awesome? Given their success, it sure looks like they did. The coaching program helped MuleSoft scale their sales team without compromising on the performance of any individual. Their average selling price went up from $ 77K to $169K. And feedback about the coaching program was really positive across all levels of the organization.
“A number of people that came up to me and just said, “Thanks for making me go through that.” I think this quote is verbatim from half a dozen people, said, “You know, I was pretty skeptical about this thing when we first started, but I’m so glad you made me do it. I’m so much more confident with my customers,” says Hallowell proudly.
How to lay the foundation for a new sales enablement team
Key goals a new sales enablement team should focus on
KPI’s and success metrics that matter
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“As a digital marketing company, we’re really focusing on best-in-class lead generation strategies. We want to help our partners and customers increase the value of their assets and net operating income by investing in the right advertising channels,” explains Mike Wolber, Sales Enablement Leader, of G5. G5 specializes in digital marketing for real estate companies.
Wolber was one of the first members of the sales enablement team at G5. In collaboration with Steve Crepeau, from True Sales Results, they have laid the foundation for their sales enablement function
.
“
I think that you can give five different sales reps the exact same toolkit; computer, documentation, training log and even the same manager But those reps are all going to approach conversations differently. They’ve got different DNA,” adds Wolber.
Just like each sales rep is different, so is each sales team and the team that supports them. That’s why it’s crucial to have everyone involved in the enablement of the sales organization.
“The sales enablement function needs to be cross-functional by design. You really need to work with professional services; your client success team, the sales enablers, the sales reps, the inside sales reps, marketing, product marketing,” explains Crepeau.
There are two main reasons why 63% of sales reps fail to achieve their quota according to SiriusDecisions – improper training and an inability to find and use the relevant content. This week, Mindtickle and Seismic – the leading enterprise-grade sales readiness solution and sales enablement solution respectively – have created a technology partnership that solves these issues. Together they enable enterprise sales reps to train for and execute their sales interactions more effectively than ever before.
In this day and age, buyers have changed the way they purchase and interact with salespeople, and sales organizations need to be agiler to keep up. Customers now come to the table well informed and much further down their purchasing journey, and they expect reps to be ready to respond to their questions, needs, and objections. That’s why it’s now crucial to ensure your reps are prepared, up-to-date and able to engage prospects with the most relevant and personalized content.
The sales organizations that have adapted to this new world order have achieved this by ensuring their reps and everyone in the enablement process, from content creators in marketing to sales ops and training, have access to technologies that:
Provide on-demand access to all materials necessary to increase performance:It’s no longer sufficient to just email updates or conduct training sessions a couple of times a year. Best-in-class organizations ensure their reps receive feedback on both presentation dry-runs and the content used within them. Their reps are able to tweak content on Seismic and receive coaching on their pitch on Mindtickle whenever and wherever they need.
Enable just-in-time readiness on new content:By leveraging Mindtickle’s training and video coaching capabilities, sales reps can access new content and become smarter quicker. This has the added benefit of decreasing the time spent on separate training sessions or on requesting guidance from content creators.
Give access to valuable information:Information on reps’ performance and content engagement collected in Seismic and Mindtickle is fed back to individual reps. This enables them to continuously and intelligently improve how they perform their job, focusing in on the aspects that are directly tied to closing deals more effectively.
Provide holistic sales engagement data:In this data-driven world, teams involved in the creation of sales content and training collateral require a comprehensive view of their reps’ engagement with all sales-oriented materials. Best practice sales organizations leverage this data to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of their salespeople and further inform their enablement initiatives.
Enable new content certification:It’s no longer sufficient to certify your reps once when they are onboarded and then forget about it. Reps in best-in-class sales organizations are constantly learning and improving their knowledge. Mindtickle’s certification process responds to this by applying to new collateral, including product brochures and case studies. This ensures that their reps only use the content in the field once they have demonstrated proficiency and expertise in presenting it.
By integrating Mindtickle’s training, coaching, role play and communication capabilities with Seismic’s personalized content creation and analytical capabilities, this technology partnership brings together each of these aspects. The result is a technology solution that enables best-in-class sales teams to focus on driving revenue. All teams involved in the sales enablement process, from Sales Ops to Content and Product marketing are enabled to accelerate deals, improve win rates and increase the revenue earned per sales rep.
“At Nutanix, we pride ourselves in providing sales reps with the right technologies they need to exceed quotas and drive revenue,” said Amir Chaudry, Head of Global Sales Enablement, Educational Services & Field Readiness at Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing. “The combination of Seismic and Mindtickle does just that, helping reps prepare and master messaging before meetings, and win the deal with the most relevant information and collateral during them.”
We’re excited about this partnership and believe it will add value to our customer’s businesses by helping their sales organizations to sell more effectively.
For more information on the Mindtickle-Seismic technology partnership, read the full press release here.
How to tackle sales readiness for new product launches
How to get the buy-in from your leadership
Tips to get your own sales enablement budget
Which metrics and KPI’s sales enablement managers should track
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“I’ve been actually practicing the sales enablement role for many years. In fact, so many years that I believe I was here before the term sales enablement emerged,” mentions Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Leader, and Practitioner. She has worked in Sales Enablement for more than a decade, working with companies such as Symantec, Rapid7. She is also currently the President of Boston Chapter of the Sales Enablement Society.
Working with multiple technology firms she has established sales enablement teams from scratch. With this experience under her belt, Guardia has a lot of experience to share with new sales enablement leaders and management on where to start with sales enablement. More importantly, she also has some great advice on how to get the budget approved for your enablement initiatives.
“To be successful as a sales enabler, you need to think about how can you run this mini-business inside your company successfully,” says Guardia.
“We measure a lot of different things, but are we measuring the right things? More than often you’ll find that sales enablement people are measuring indicators with a bias to training. They are measuring a number of people who are trained, the number of hours consumed in training, and the smile sheets. Is that really telling you the success of the sales enabler, enablement team? Probably not,” says Guardia offering some great advice to new sales enablement leaders.
Furthermore, Guardia enumerates important KPI’s and metrics that sales enablement managers should start tracking. Continuing on from the last podcast, where Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, in this podcast, she takes this her advice a step further advising sales enablers on the nitty-gritty of their role.
Listen now, as Guardia outlines how fast-growing companies can coach and enable their frontline managers and sales leadership, regardless of their size.
In this 16-minute interview Guardia outlines:
How to coach your frontline managers effectively
Ways to enable your sales leadership
Tips to deal with managers who are reluctant to coach
Best practices for sales enablement and coaching
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“If you just take your reps and you say,
’Hey congratulations! Tomorrow you are a manager, and we don’t provide any support or guidance about how best to do that, or stick with them throughout their journey to becoming the best manager they can be.’
t
hen that’s just wishful thinking, and it is not going to help the selling organization,” states Jill Guardia, Sales Enablement Practitioner and Leader, who is also P
resident of the Boston Chapter
of the Sales Enablement Society.
According to Guardia, “Sales enablement is really about ensuring that the selling organization and the partner community is prepared to do their job. That preparation comes in the form of skills, knowledge, systems, tools, and processes that focus on sales efficiencies and overall improvement of their sales effectiveness. In some cases, people call it an improvement to sales productivity.”
To ensure everyone contributing to sales effectiveness in an organization are on the same page, it’s crucial to enable the enablers.
Many managers don’t know how to coach well. They may have been great sales reps, but just because they’ve been promoted into a management role doesn’t mean they’re equipped to perform it.
This post is based on a webinar on the secret to building a sales enablement powerhouse. You can listen to the entire webinar here.
Procore is the world’s most widely used construction project management software. It helps contractors keep track of their projects throughout the entire lifecycle of a project, from bidding to closeout, and helps them reduce errors and cost overruns. Procore was featured on Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2016 and reached unicorn status on Dec 2016. With such high growth, the size of the company inevitably increased, and they now have over 700 employees in 7 offices across the United States.
Three challenges triggered Procore’s need for sales enablement
Procore’s sales team was growing rapidly and they were having difficulty gauging the performance of their sales team, so they implemented a structured sales enablement program. Alex Jaffe, Sales Enablement Manager for Procore, played a critical role in executing this strategy. The key challenges they addressed by implementing a well-structured sales enablement program included:
Keeping their salespeople up-to-date on a constantly evolving product, industry, and competitive information.
Aligning their core messaging and sales process in a period of hyper-growth. This included hiring new reps and ramping them up quickly.
Managing and delivering sales collateral in a way that ensured a consistent customer experience
They focused on three key areas of excellence
“Our approach to sales enablement is in three different areas of excellence. They are selling skills, a definite approach to product and industry is being a powerful leader in that perspective, and then working efficiently with our technology and maximizing the results. So, we focus really in depth on creating the knowledge, process, and skills to make it simple and digestible,” explained Jaffe.
The strategy was deployed using a two-prong approach
Sales enablement at Procore was structured into two distinct categories:
Segment based
Functional based
All roles within the categories functioned as a conduit between sales and the different departments involved in each initiative.
The distinction based on functions and initiatives helped Procore handle their overall sales enablement program with ease.
“If you have one person focusing on sales enablement then you are not going to be able to to boil the ocean and focus on all the areas. What you guys can do is use productivity measures and understanding of what you can maximize and then do the prioritization based on that. So, at Procore what we have done is split these into two distinct buckets, which we think are two different mindsets. Different people are responsible for each of these initiatives,” explains Jaffe.
Procore’s sales enablement framework
Procore facilitated a structured, streamlined and outcome-oriented onboarding process to ensure their reps were set up for success. The first 90 days was the initial onboarding phase, and from then on it was about continual improvement, called ongoing enablement.
“We start with a simple framework that works pretty well for us. It’s very important to see sales readiness in the two distinct views. First, the onboarding, which we view as 0-90 days, and then the ongoing enablement which is 90 plus days,” explains Jaffe.
Setting expectations is key to your onboarding program
With the framework in place, Jaffe then suggests setting goals and targets based on your onboarding program. “The first thing that you guys need to start on from an onboarding perspective is understanding the approach you want to do. Ultimately the one thing that you need to address is at what stage of onboarding you are, and what are the outcomes that you want to drive. So, if you are running let’s say, an onboarding program that’s five days long on the next Monday, what does the sales reps need on that day to be successful and working on their own. Maybe it’s about understanding the pitch, understanding the customer stories and understanding how to demo and that’s all that it is. Driving those outcomes and then taking the 30-60-90 days approach and asking what outcomes do I need my teams to have in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, and then proceed to ongoing enablement.”
There are three important objectives to an ongoing plan
According to Jaffe ongoing enablement is as important as the initial onboarding phase. He recommends that it’s tailor-made for each of your ramped up reps. Procore leverages Mindtickle for its ongoing enablement to achieve these three objectives:
Constant reinforcement of knowledge and skills
Regular updates of knowledge and processes
Periodic re-calibration of processes and skills
Aligning your objectives helps to measure the impact of your program
Before you think about measuring the impact of your program, Jaffe suggests ensuring that it ’s well aligned with your overall objective.
“I think aligning your objectives with your global sales objectives as well as your company’s’ is critically important when you are measuring the impact of sales enablement. Sales enablement is not in a bubble creating its own objectives, it’s going to be completely dependent on what are we trying to drive at a company level and a global sales team level,” explains Jaffe.
At the end of the day, outcomes matter
Jaffe shared insights on how the impact of this program was measured and shared their impressive outcomes. “The most important thing with measuring the impact is identifying leading vs. lagging indicators. Leading indicators are going to be what you can coach and train your reps through. Lagging indicators are how you are going to measure that success. Lagging indicators are going to be the results closed, dollars won improvement in sales and things like that. Leading indicators would be an adoption of your program, how comfortable your reps are with the program.”
Procore has achieved impressive results with their sales enablement strategy, the figures speak for themselves:
>90% adoption of content and sales enablement technology
Sales reps rate the overall program at 4.8/5 according to their internal NPS survey
99% of their sales reps recommend the program
Through a well-structured sales enablement program, Procore has been able to keep pace with their globally expanding sales team. With Mindtickle they have found the right balance between strategy, data, and technology to achieve an impressive outcome.
Listen now to learn how Powers deployed a successful sales onboarding program and maximized value from their boot camp experience.
In this 16-minute interview Powers outlines:
How onboarding helped MongoDB’s sales reps achieve sales excellence
How you can reinforce information after your boot camp
The key metrics that determine the success of an onboarding program
How sales enablement is structured and who owns it at MongoDB
“At MongoDB, we have a pretty thoughtful and structured approach to our new-hire onboarding. The goal is to provide the sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and solution sets. The second step is to build upon that baseline and knowledge to equip our reps to consistently qualify their opportunities, setting great meetings with the right people and then ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects.”
That is the vision behind the sales onboarding strategy at MongoDB. MongoDB is a leading technology company who spends nearly six times the industry average onboarding their sales reps. In this episode of the Sales Excellence Podcast, Jeremy Powers, Senior Director of Sales Enablement, shares how they structure their sales onboarding and boot camps to maximize their results.
“I think we took somewhere around 11 months before a rep was productive. In the last six to eight months we have really fine-tuned this onboarding program using Mindtickle from the boot camps to advanced sales training. And what we have seen is very consistently our people getting ramped in about five months. So we’ve gone from 11 plus months down to five which is just tremendous,” exclaims Jeremy.
When it’s time for your sales organization to invest in sales enablement and productivity
How to enable your sales managers to perform at their best by shifting their mindset
How to prioritize and continuously improve sales enablement and training initiatives
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“If you’ve got to double your revenue to stay on track with your projections, you can’t do that on 30k deals. And if marketing is doing great things and attracting really great logos, but sales aren’t doing the right things, you’re not going to get what you’re looking for. And if sales is doing a really good job targeting their accounts and they’re motivated to hit the phones, but marketing isn’t giving them any air cover you’re not going to get the lift you’re looking for.”
That was the problem the Marketo was facing by relying on inbound marketing for its sales leads. So it decided to find a new way to scale, and leveraging the power of Account Based Marketing Engagio was born. Ray Carroll moved to Engagio as VP of Sales and was tasked with the job of building and scaling this next generation marketing technology company. As the business grew the issue of sales productivity became more apparent.
“The incremental efficiency on the average sale price, the time it takes to get a rep to productivity, the average sales cycle; you get those gains through having a first-class sales enablement function. And that’s why you see companies like Box, Zendesk, and HubSpot have Directors of Sales Productivity. Because if you can get 500 people with all deals at a 1% more close rate or making their deal cycle less, that is a significant uplift. That’s bigger than any single deal which you close for half a million dollars,” explains Carroll.
Thanks to sales enablement the role of the sales manager is also changing. “Managers have to realize that your job no longer is having your name in lights or closing the deal. It’s helping your team be as good at their job at scale, and only when you do that will you win as a team. It’s shifting from tactical to strategic.”
Listen now
to find out how Carroll has helped Engagio make the transformative shift from tactical to strategic sales.
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
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“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.
“Today, sales enablement spans every function within the organization. Let me take a step back, and say why sales enablement is so hot now in my opinion. Having sold enterprise technology for more than 25 years, the reality is it’s harder to sell than it ever has been. Only 60% of reps are hitting quota, leaving 40% of reps unsuccessful in reaching their targets,” explains Steve Crepeau, CEO of True Sales Results.
“As a digital marketing company, we’re really focusing on best-in-class lead generation strategies. We want to help our partners and customers increase the value of their assets and net operating income by investing in the right advertising channels,” explains Mike Wolber, Sales Enablement Leader, of G5. G5 specializes in digital marketing for real estate companies.
There are two main reasons why 63% of sales reps fail to achieve their quota according to SiriusDecisions – improper training and an inability to find and use the relevant content. This week, Mindtickle and Seismic – the leading enterprise-grade sales readiness solution and sales enablement solution respectively – have created a technology partnership that solves these issues. Together they enable enterprise sales reps to train for and execute their sales interactions more effectively than ever before.
“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.”