Sales Enablement by Byron Matthews and Tamara Schenk
Sales Enablement by Byron Matthews and Tamara Schenk
Sales enablement as a service
…enablement is something you do and provide for others. Speaking in terms of a deliverable or output focuses the conversation on the end product, whereas sales force enablement is responsible for the entire process: strategy, definition, creation, localization, publishing, delivery, and implementation and adoption of services.
What I’m stealing
Cross the chasm - from tactical support function to strategic partner. To be effective and provide value enablement must be seen as a strategic discipline.
Earn the right - to collect, analyze, and share potentially provocative information.
Be the conductor - orchestrate the process of creating and delivering enablement services by enlisting the aid of other functions within the organization.
Find a champion.
Long-term strategy with long-term colleagues - engender a spirit of conscious collaboration instead of competition, always play to keep the game going.
Coach-the-coach - enablement services area for future growth for most organizations and enablement functions.
Obsessively Reduce Friction - Ideally, the CRM becomes the one-stop-shop for content, based on an integrated sales enablement content solution that reinforces and improves the probability of sales leveraging CRM.
Repetition and Re-surfacing - The forgetting curve, first introduced in the late 1800s and corroborated through additional research, shows that people will have forgotten an average of 50% of the information they just learned within one hour. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70% of new information, and within a week, 90% of it has been wiped from their memory.
Fingertip feel for quantitative metrics - Sales enablement should have a fingertip feel for key quantitative metrics, tracked and reviewed weekly. i.e. Quota attainment, win rates, deal value, sales cycle time, funnel sufficiency, velocity, and growth.
Curate, Synthesize, Connect - Sales enablement understands the end goal of technology better than IT. Sales enablement professionals understand the sellers’ needs better than marketing. They know what makes a successful seller better than HR. Sales leadership doesn't have the bandwidth to deeply investigate the latest sales technologies.
Commentary
This is a fully work/career-specific book, so if you aren’t in sales, operations, or sales enablement professionally, feel free to skip this one.
I read this at the recommendation of a colleague (shout out to Jean Gibson) as I’m transitioning from my 2-year rotation, learning the ins and outs of sales compensation strategy, and planning back to a strategic sales enablement role. I tore through this in a couple of days. It was exciting to see so much of what I’ve had to invent on the fly over the past decade be codified in this book. I would have loved this as a resource back in 2015 when I first delved into sales enablement as a career path. If you are standing up a sales enablement organization, let this be your map of an otherwise amorphous territory.
Supplemental Resources
I’ve been devouring podcasts on Sales and Revenue Enablement. I simply never thought to look for podcasts on the topic while I was previously neck-deep in architecting sales enablement services, so this was a fun rabbit hole to explore. While there aren’t a ton of high-quality programs out there, I have found a select few listed below that are well worth listening to, including some with the authors of this book that provide additional perspectives and insights.
Revenue Enablement Society - Stories from the Trenches - This is my favorite show on the topic. Beyond it being a wealth of inspiration and insight it’s fun to hear the stories from active practitioners of all different ranks and levels of experience.
A selection of episodes with the authors:
Dog ears, highlights, marginalia
elements of a true sales enablement discipline: content, training, technology, and one of my favorites, sales coaching.
shift from tactical support function to strategic partner,
standard performance metrics that are meaningful to almost every organization: win rate, percent of salespeople achieving quota and percent of revenue attained.
In most organizations, sales operations is responsible for defining, managing and measuring sales processes. Nevertheless, as we'll discuss throughout this book, sales enablement plays an important role in facilitating and reinforcing those processes through the services it provides.
When it comes to relationships, sales enablement takes the lead. Its objective is to enable customer-facing professionals to add value in every interaction.
Table 1.1 Top 12 World-Class Practices
(Too many salespeople at quota is a strong indication that quotas were not set high enough.)
The successful sales professional adds perspective by combining deep knowledge of the customer, their challenges and their desired results with the experience and insights gained from working with similar customers and their knowledge of potential solutions.
Sellers must earn the right to share potentially provocative information with their customers if they want that information to help guide thinking versus destroy rapport.
Sales organizations are best served by defining a successful talent profile, selecting an adaptable sales methodology, defining a dynamic sales process and building out an enablement road map. Sales enablement is in the unique position to help drive and align these activities to ensure that they are tightly integrated to selling realities.
To be effective, enablement must be seen as a strategic discipline that is set apart from other functions such as marketing and training, even though those functions contribute to enablement.
Having a common definition to anchor our discussions is a tremendous help. Here's one we developed that has served our clients well:
Sales Force Enablement: A strategic, collaborative discipline designed to increase predictable sales results by providing consistent, scalable enablement services that allow customer-facing professionals and their managers to add value in every customer interaction.
Enabling roles beyond sales is a hallmark of a World-Class sales organization, but given where most organizations are today, our focus in this book is going to be on enabling sales roles.
Sponsorship, strategy and charter. Next, we'll drop down to the bottom of our diamond and look at its foundation. Of course, you need to start with a strategy, but even the best sales force enablement initiatives fail if the team has the responsibility but not the authority to enact the strategy. This includes gaining the all-important executive sponsorship.
Sales Force Enablement's Impact on Performance
Enablement professionals must orchestrate the process of creating and delivering enablement services by enlisting the aid of many other functions within the organization.
The sales process is usually defined by sales operations, with enablement's primary role being one of providing services that help reinforce adherence to the defined process.
sales methodologies tell you what to do at each step of the process, how to do it and why.
one of the most important points to take away from this discussion is that sales methodologies connect your sales processes to your customer's path.
Your charter functions as your business plan and is your guide for turning a random sales enablement effort into a formal, scalable and strategic sales force enablement discipline that has a definable, positive impact on the business.
Meet with executive leadership.
Meet with other departmental leaders, e.g., marketing, product management, HR, L&D, finance, IT, etc.
Many of these departments may see themselves as being at least partially responsible for sales enablement and will have questions as to how they fit into your broader plan. Remember, your goal at this point is to gather information, not to provide strategy statements
sales force enablement does not and cannot be responsible for creating every enablement service. Including other team leads at this stage will help engender a spirit of conscious collaboration instead of competition.
Find a champion.
what content do they spend time creating? In the CSO Insights 2017 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, sales professionals created 18% of the content they used. Find out why they felt they had to create that content instead of using content that was already available. Finally, what processes and behaviors have they developed on their own that help them get more done in less time?
Business strategy: The goals of the business tell you what's important to the organization. To garner support and funding for the enablement discipline, it is essential that your end goal be in support of those objectives.
Sales strategy: The sales strategy tells you how the organization expects to achieve its sales goals, and your enablement strategy must be aligned to it. For example, if an organizational goal is to enter a new market by selling exclusively through an indirect channel, your enablement efforts must align accordingly. You may agree or disagree with this approach, but that decision is outside of your control. Your role is to determine how sales enablement can effectively support the implementation of the sales strategy.
enablement maturity. We've separated enablement maturity into four levels: Random, Organized, Scalable and Adaptive (see Figure 4.4). These four levels correspond to the CSO Insights Maturity Scale that we introduced in Chapter 1 – the maturity scale designations are in parenthesis – however, we've added a label for some of the levels in the sales force enablement maturity scale that reflects the importance of moving from one level to the next.
According to Boris Kluck, VP of Sales Operations for the combined organization, “Given that we were bringing two companies together with very different organization models and structures, and as you might imagine, a completely fragmented set of sales strategies, methodologies, processes and the like, it was important to make a big investment in sales enablement as a foundational element in being able to achieve those growth ambitions.”
In the appendix, we've included a sample charter you can use as a guide.
emphasize that enablement is something you do and provide for others. Speaking in terms of a deliverable or output focuses the conversation on the end product, whereas sales force enablement is responsible for the entire process: strategy, definition, creation, localization, publishing, delivery, and implementation and adoption of services.
It is a discipline, with services as the method for achieving the goals that have been defined in the enablement charter.
Enablement content is any content designed to help customer-facing professionals prepare for interactions with prospects and customers. Examples include playbooks, battle cards, cost-justification tools and so on. This content could be context-specific, such as a discussion guide for selling equipment into the oil and gas market. Or, it could be a playbook that provides salespeople with an overview of what they need to know, links to related content and relevant value messages aligned to the customer's point of view. It might also be content, such as a product-launch presentation, that supports a broader enablement initiative.
be content like white papers, solution guides, implementation guides, success stories, third-party research. Internal content includes content like a sales playbook, competitive overview, positioning guide, sales process and also tools like ROI calculators, win-loss calculator etc.
Table 5.1 Examples of Content Services
What sales needs is customer-facing content (externally focused) or enablement content (internally used), but not marketing content.
Content must be a collaborative effort. The special expertise required of sales force enablement is the ability to connect the knowledge salespeople and buyers need with their content consumption preferences and orchestrate contributions from other functions. Regardless of what percentage of content is seen as coming from enablement, the real question is: Is enablement effectively orchestrating the process?
Salespeople still create 18% of the content they need on their own.
While an improvement from 2016 (26%), this percentage is still too high because this is time the sales professional could spend adding value for customers. Whenever sales professionals have to create their content from scratch, something is wrong with the overall enablement approach. At most, salespeople should only have to tailor and customize content that has already been provided. If salespeople can't find the right content, aren't satisfied with its quality or don't know how to use the tools, then fixing these problems is enablement's responsibility.
Content Services Need Work
content types voted to be in most need of improvement included some highly critical customer-oriented assets: case studies, client-focused presentations and ROI templates
create playbooks that correspond to a customer's business challenge or industry.
the trend is to create modules that automatically generate an interactive playbook when the salesperson enters an opportunity into the CRM system. Additional modules may be added as customers progress along their path and the salesperson enters additional details about the customers’ context, challenges and future-state vision.
Industry Playbook Outline
Enablement's role is to orchestrate the contributions of other teams. Enablement is a logical focal point for orchestrating the process because they have the vantage point needed to gather input from sales, study the effectiveness of current content and identify gaps that must be filled. Plus, they don't have the role bias that other teams will have.
Take stock of what you have.
Mereo did offer training to more than 300 salespeople over a three-month period, but the training was supported by more than three dozen playbooks segmented by competitor, industry, use cases and requirements such as regulatory compliance. Individually, each playbook was organized in line with the sales methodology, providing exactly the kinds of support the salesperson needed in order to follow the prescribed methodology yet adapt their specific approach to the customer's context.
have an extensive library of programs. We mapped our sales competencies to programs in our eLearning platform and could identify courses, books and videos that could be used for the personal development for our sales professionals.
Reinforcement of learning through online modules and micro-reinforcement tools is essential. The forgetting curve, first introduced in the late 1800s and corroborated through additional research, shows that people will have forgotten an average of 50% of the information they just learned within one hour. Within 24 hours, they have forgotten an average of 70% of new information, and within a week, 90% of it has been wiped from their memory. Reinforcement training services can help students retain more information longer.
Once you are ready to begin developing training services, whether they are classroom services or m-/e-learning modules, you will need someone to lead the effort. Your L&D allies won't be the subject matter experts (SMEs), but they can help your SMEs translate their knowledge into useful enablement services.
The program, called “Progressing Your Sales Opportunities,” centers on applied learning and real business outcomes using actual client business scenarios and opportunities.
The course is primarily self-paced, with blended online and offline activities managed and delivered through the Intrepid Learning platform as well as an in-person peer and manager coaching component.
If you can correlate a training service to performance improvements, such as decreased cycle times, so much the better, but this may not be easy if you're just starting to develop your sales force enablement discipline. You often won't have systems to collect the granular data needed for a full analysis. However, you can compare data points like training assessments to overall performance levels. As with content, focus on the extremes, such as those with high assessments and high performance or low assessments and low performance, to gather insights into how training affects performance.
Developing coaching skills is also essential for an organization looking to make any sort of significant transformation, such as a move from a transactional, product-oriented approach to one focused on business outcomes.
Sales leaders and sales directors. Those who manage sales managers must be equipped for their roles in helping sales managers become more effective and leverage the methodologies, skills and tools they are provided. Coach-the-coach enablement services are an area for future growth for most organizations and enablement functions.
Recommended Focus for Lead and Opportunity Coaching
Recommended Focus for Funnel Coaching
Recommended Focus for Skills and Behaviors Coaching
Recommended Focus for Account Coaching
Value messaging provides the necessary input to those creating internal and customer-facing content. Value messages are the central themes that run through all these services, providing consistency for both salespeople and relevant buyers. Additionally, if you are working with various relevant buyer roles, you have a role-based value messaging approach to address each role appropriately. Effective value messaging deserves a dynamic approach that follows the same design point: the customer's path. These kinds of scenarios can be resolved when value messaging is created for every phase of the customer's path, then used consistently in customer-facing materials and throughout all of the new and updated enablement services.
Table 8.1 The Value Messaging Process
Enablement professionals must be highly skilled at getting things done through other people. (And often, using someone else's budget.)
Collaboration is how enablement services get created and delivered by various departments, and it is our focus for this chapter (see Figure 9.1).
By predefining these roles by enablement service type, the cross-functional team can avoid the time spent negotiating responsibilities each time a new service is created.
While CRM implementation and adoption is usually the purview of another team (most often sales operations), enablement can help solve the problem in a couple of ways. First, if the enablement technology is designed to be used directly by the salesperson, enablement can work with IT to ensure it is integrated to CRM so that the data collected gets into the system. Second, enablement can leverage CRM to deliver
services that support the methodology. For example, when sales enters an opportunity into the system, playbooks can be automatically generated based on the opportunity details. When CRM becomes the one-stop-shop for content, ideally based on an integrated sales enablement content solution, sales is more likely to turn to the CRM system for what it needs and adoption improves.
More advanced SECM systems integrate with CRM to not only allow the salesperson to search for content, but also to proactively suggest content to the sales professional based on the customer's business challenges and the specific selling scenario. Some systems can automatically create playbooks and other content assets based on the attributes of the opportunity. Using this recommended content, the sales professional can adapt their approach and customize presentations.
These integrated solutions are also much better equipped to help sales force enablement professionals, content marketers and others track how prospects and buyers use content and what the impact is. As an example, they can answer detailed questions such as: Does sharing this case study lead more often to a follow-up interaction as compared to sharing another one? Do customers read this white paper in its entirety or only view certain pages? What percentage of customers who are sent an interactive ROI tool use it, and how often does that lead to a next step, an additional question, another meeting or directly to a proposal? The same kind of analytics can be leveraged for internal enablement content to learn how, for instance, a certain playbook is used, a guideline is downloaded or a battle card is viewed.
Examples of SECM systems include: Bigtincan, Brainshark, CallidusCloud, HighSpot, MobilPaks, Savo, Seismic, Showpad and many others.
As organizations discover the enablement benefits of offering bite-sized, online learning modules, training services (especially those that focus on knowledge transfer or serve as a reminder on how to use a specific message or apply a particular methodology) are being treated more and more like content assets. Ideally, these assets should be made accessible through the CRM system to provide the sales professional learning modules related to specific opportunities in a variety of e-learning and mobile formats. Examples of systems that offer learning functionality include Brainshark, CallidusCloud Litmos and Intrepid.
Examples in this category include: Clearslide and Jive (collaboration, engagement), Concur (expense reporting), Doodle (meeting scheduler), Five9 (predictive dialing for call centers), Gainsight, Kapta, Revegy (key account management), Go-to-Meeting and Skype (meetings and events), InsideView and Sales Navigator (sales intelligence) and RO Innovation (reference requests).
**Note:** Productivity solution providers
Enablement operations builds on the solid foundation provided by a well-constructed (and approved) charter and covers three primary areas:
Enablement governance provides the mechanism for making strategic decisions, resolving conflicts and staying connected to senior leadership's vision for the company. Enablement production includes all of the steps from the design of an enablement service through creation, localization, deployment, and the adoption and reinforcement of services. Enablement analytics addresses how you will measure success. This includes metrics that measure the impact of enablement activities and services on various key performance indicators as well as how well enablement functions as a cross-functional team.
Table 11.1 How to Set Up an Executive Advisory Board
Subjective Versus Objective Metrics
Albert Einstein's advice, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
As with any metrics, visibility is important and role-specific dashboards can help sales enablement leaders stay on top of the impact of their enablement services,
On the flip side, sales organizations will continue to advance their use of AI as well. But be warned, if you can't stand the idea of your every move being analyzed, sales might be the wrong profession for you. In the future, sales professionals will be some of the most studied people on earth, with data gathering tools capturing everything they do and say as well as how prospects and customers respond.
William Gibson observed, “The future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed.”
If sales enablement is crucial now (and hopefully you've seen why over the course of this book), it will be absolutely vital moving forward. Sales enablement has the responsibility to help sales organizations get ready for and leverage these pending changes. Sales enablement understands the end goal of technology better than IT. Sales enablement professionals understand the sellers’ needs better than marketing. They know what makes a successful seller better than HR. Sales leadership doesn't have the bandwidth to deeply investigate AI-augmented selling.
Appendix