In the past decade, businesses have come a long way in giving their front-line salespeople the tools and information they need to operate more effectively and engage customers more successfully. The results from sales training and enablement programs — otherwise known as sales readiness, sales support or sales effectiveness — have mostly worked to provide sales content assets and support sales teams’ transactional needs.
But these days, sales enablement leaders are stymied for ways to push beyond one-time sales training and tools that don’t necessarily work to boost sales performance. And it’s not just sales training that leaders have to consider: It’s also rep onboarding, building deep knowledge about competitors, and ongoing education, all in an effort to engage customers. Training tools are proliferating, but most are point tools, meaning they don’t leverage one another. Sales enablement leaders are trying to see the forest but are growing anxious about the sheer number of trees.
If Only I Had Five More Top Salespeople …
Then there’s the unrelenting worry that most salespeople can’t match the proficiency and effectiveness of the top performers. In almost every business I work with, I ask the best salesperson the same question: “Why are you the most successful salesperson in the company?” The answer is always the same: “I know how to overcome the obstacles my company puts in front of me.”
What if you could remove those barriers and engage your top performers in the way they want to be enabled, as opposed to what sales enablement defines as effective? Even better, what if you could “clone” your high flyers and scale out their success to reps who don’t yet have the same level of skills and knowledge? We’re all familiar with the CRO’s lament, “If only I could move more of my B players to become A players, I would be over plan.”
This can become possible if you let salespeople know they can win. Here are three critical success factors for sales enablement programs:
Communication
I sometimes hear sales enablement described as a symphony orchestra, with the enablement executive as the conductor. It’s not a bad metaphor, but a sales enablement leader doesn’t usually have that level of power or authority. In fact, except in large enterprises with a dedicated staff, very few sales enablement executives have a budget.
That’s unlikely to change anytime soon. So to help sales win more often, it’s essential to communicate strong, visible executive support. This needs to go beyond the usual buy-in: Visible support means that leadership is communicating the importance of the initiative from the top down, looking at the metrics and following up. It means they’re committing to a charter statement, a strategy and an infrastructure. And in return, you give them the key performance indicator that really matters: increasing win rates.
You also need commitment from the sales team members themselves, and that means communicating clearly how this is going to help them in the field. At the end of the day, reps are going to focus on what helps them to close business. Show them how it works, and demonstrate that you’re dedicated to their success.
Content
All of your content — sales assets, videos, gamification modules — must be aligned with strategic initiatives for the business and must directly impact success in the field.
The right content at the right time can go a long way toward driving revenue in a more direct way than traditional approaches, such as relationship building. I remember talking with one sales leader who said: “I have a fantastic relationship with our biggest account. We belong to the same country club, we play golf together, our kids go to school together.” I congratulated him on the relationship but gently pointed out that that same account had enjoyed the lowest price for 15 years. Developing customer success content, for example, and training reps on how to use customer stories effectively could be great ways to build credibility and trust when that level of personal engagement isn’t a practical option.
Metrics
To win more deals, you need solid information about the impact of your sales enablement program. With the learning platforms and data available today, front-line sales managers can start to correlate learning outcomes with performance outcomes.
Let’s say you have 10 salespeople and two of them are hitting their benchmarks. You’ll want to know what they’re doing and how they’re performing from a learning standpoint. If you have enough data points, you will start to see trends in learning, and in some cases, gaps in your competency models. You can start feeding optimal resources like micro learning to the other reps to help them hit their stride. We may still be a long way from cloning top sales performers, but we can start to build an evidence-based framework for learning enablement.
This isn’t some sort of back-to-basics manifesto. There never really was a “basics” to begin with, as sales enablement has been a multifaceted activity from the beginning. Success consists of laying a solid foundation of commitment and communication, delivering powerful content and building up processes that are measurable so that the data can reinforce the methodologies. It’s not back to the basics, but forward to the facts, so we can give salespeople the help they need to win.
