Sales Enablement by Byron Matthews and Tamara Schenk is an excellent book. It explains what sales force enablement is and how it should work – “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“.
In the foreword, Amy Borsetti, Senior Director of Global Sales Readiness at LinkedIn, explains that sales enablement is not just training. She says: sales training by itself is ineffective almost 100% of the time. Organisations also need to provide the right conditions to sustain newly learned skills, and an engaged sales leadership needs to lead from the front by coaching new habits.
Introduction
- In 2013, only 19% of companies had a sales enablement person – now <in 2018> it’s 59%
- Only 35% of organisations say their sales enablement meets or exceeds expectations
- But orgs with SE are seeing 67% of sales people meet quota, compared to 42% without sales enablement
- There is little agreement around what SE is or does – it usually isn’t geared to helping with the macro and micro changes affecting sales that are listed below
- Goal of the book: give SE professionals the ability to create a sustainable, consistent enablement discipline that has real impact on performance by developing skills, knowledge and behaviours.
Macro-level changes impacting sales
1. Digital first – sales has become technology and data-driven
2. Emerging middle class
3. Increased urbanisation
4. Aging workforce
5. Invisible sector boundaries
Micro-level changes for sales
1. More buyer involvement – there are now 6.4 people in the average buying team
2. Increasingly formalised buying process
3. Political and business-driven decisions
4. Evolving buyer expectations – they want to know what the product does for them
5. Longer sales cycles
The Science of Selling
Sales is no longer only about relationships. We can track behaviours and activities – we no longer need to guess what works. There are two critical levels of sales success:
1. Relationships
2. Process
Sales relationship levels for vendors:
Level 1 – Approved vendor
Level 2 – Preferred supplier – still transactional with some knowledge of how the customer uses the product
Level 3 – Solutions consultant – deeper understanding of the customer
Level 4 – Strategic contributor – vendor is often invited to help define the challenge
Level 5 – Trusted partner – have a lot of knowledge about the customer – almost part of their org
Sales process levels for vendors:
Level 1 – Random – vendor lacks a single, standardised process. A few top performers have figured it out.
Level 2 – Informed – a documented sales process exists but is not followed. Successful sales people do their own thing.
Level 3 – Formal – useful but can be too rigid
Level 4 – Dynamic – formal but adaptable with situational fluency
Most orgs want to be a trusted advisor with a formalised process. The Sales Relationship Process Matrix gauges organisational performance (see p14). 47% of sales people achieve quota at level 1, compared to 60% for level 3.
12 world-class practices:
1. Our salespeople consistently and effectively articulate a solution that is aligned to the customer’s needs
2. We deliver a consistent customer experience that lives up to and aligns with out brand promise
3. We continually assess why our top performers are successful
4. When we lose a salesperson, voluntarily or involuntarily, we consistently investigate the reasons why
5. We effectively collect and share best practices across our sales and services organisations
6. Our sales managers are held accountable for the effective use of sales tools and resources by the sales force
7. Our salespeople consistently and effectively communicate appropriate value messages aligned to the customers’ needs
8. Our culture supports continuous development of sales people and leaders
9. Our culture supports continuous development and ensures implementation of personalised performance improvement plans
10. Customers have consistently positive interactions with us regardless of channel
11. Our sales team are effective at surfacing the specific reasons why certain customers are doing business with us
12. We are effective at selling value to avoid discounting or gaining competitive value in return for price concessions
The orgs that excel in 10 of 12 areas were mainly level 3 on the SRPM but not all. “World-class” isn’t the same for everyone – for example, a small law firm doesn’t always need a process whereas a large commodity org doesn’t always need relationships.
Evolution of Sales
1. Product selling – salesperson was a product expert, matching product to customer issues
2. Feature-benefit selling – still product focused
3. Solutions/consultative selling – using diagnostic skills to understand customer objectives and using language of customer. Solution sales was supposed to be dead in 2012 and replaced by ‘Insight’ selling, which was supposed to challenge the buyer. But solution selling isn’t dead as questioning is still good.
4. Perspective selling – level 3 requires solution selling but to get to Trusted Partner you need Perspective Selling
Your buyer comes with info and misinfo in their head already. The sales person adds perspective by understanding the customer, their challenges, their desired results, using previous experience. They also bring research, thought-leadership & SMEs to help buyers see challenges and opps in new ways. The buyer needs to commit to change and to do that they need to see measurable business value.
Perspective selling is better because:
1. It works well with a range of seller types
2. It works with a range of customer types (there are 5 different decision-making styles)
3. It provides multiple ways to capture a customer’s interest
4. It uses conversation and relationships
5. It works in a range of scenarios
Successful orgs have a talent profile, an adaptable sales methodology, a dynamic sales process and an enablement roadmap.
What is Sales Enablement?
- Sales ops defines, manages, measures sales processes
- Sales force enablement (SFE) takes the lead on relationships. Its objective is to enable customer-facing professionals to add value in every interaction. Adding value leads to ever-higher levels of performance.
- SFE facilitates and reinforces the processes that Sales ops manages – SFE must work within the process but it doesn’t own it
- SFE is “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”.
The Sales Force Enablement Clarity Model is diamond-shaped because it always needs work – it never emerges fully polished and perfect.
- The customer is at the top of the clarity model – you can only be successful if you work with customers in their context
- Next are the customer-facing professionals and their managers
- At the foundation are the sponsorship, strategy, and charter
- In between are the 4 facets:
- Effective sales enablement services – this is what most people see and expect from SFE. Effective content has been proven to lead to 8% improvement in quote attainment.
- Formalised collaboration
- Integrated enablement tech
- Efficient enablement ops
- 2-4 above are the mechanics that deliver the services and they cannot all be done by SFE by themselves.
The Customer’s Path
- Customers must be the primary design point for enablement.
- The customer’s path = “the process the customer follows to approach a challenge or opportunity, gather info, make a decision and implement a solution”.
- SFE’s role is to provide the enablement services that equip the sales professional to add the value the customer needs at each stage of that path. But every customer path is different.
- SFE’s biggest challenge is helping sales people align to ever-changing customer paths
There are 3 phases in the Customer’s Path that are common to every customer:
- Awareness
- Buying
- Implementation & adoption
Awareness
- Awareness is the stage where the customer is identifying the challenges and opportunities, the ways of addressing them, and gathering info on the possible solutions
- Enablement is critical during the awareness phase – this is often left to Marketing and that isn’t right. The sales people must be enabled to be relevant, valuable, differentiating
- “No matter how excellent Marketing’s lead generation efforts may be, Sales needs to take responsibility for prospecting to ensure they have a full funnel.”
Buying
- This is where sales people tend to want to invest their time – it’s the phase of the answering questions, creating proposals, overcoming obstacles, closing deals
Implementation & Adoption
- This phase is included because sales people need to stay involved in a project to ensure that value is delivered. They also need to find new value from those deals. Service teams also need to be enabled to ensure renewals.
There are four levels of alignment with the Customer’s Path:
1. Random – sales process is not aligned with the Customer’s Path
2. Informal – Customer’s Path is acknowledged but no true effort to align
3. Formal – the sales process is mapped to the Customer’s Path and processes and systems have been adjusted
4. Dynamic – the sales process is derived from the Customer’s Path and selling processes evolve as the market or customer behaviour changes
To move from Random to Dynamic, you need to use your sales methodology.
Sales process = a defined set of activities in a certain sequence to create and close deals, e.g. what is a qualified lead? When does an opp hit forecast?
Sales methodology = tells you what to do at each step of the process, how to do it and why. If a sales process defines the steps involved in a sales call, the methodology adds the detail on how to do the analysis before the call and why it matters.
Sales skills = the capabilities needed to follow the processes and apply the methodologies (e.g. listening skills, questioning skills)
To summarise: process defines the steps + methodology is what, why, how + skills allow people to follow the steps and methodologies
The Enablement Charter
Your enablement charter is your business plan – your guide for turning a random enablement effort into a formal, scalable, strategic SFE discipline.
Research for Your Enablement Charter
- Step 1: Do Your Homework
- Meet with exec Leadership – what are the goals of the org? New markets, market share etc
- Meet with Dept Leads (HR, Product, Finance, IT) – what SFE have they been doing?
- Find a C-Suite Champion
- Take Stock of Enablement Initiatives – everything should be included: tech asks, meeting support etc. Research shows that Sales create 18% of the content they use – why are they doing this? It is not their job.
- Step 2: Manage Multiple Priorities – you must accept this as a fact
- Step 3: Create a Realistic Roadmap – what is your enablement maturity? Random = no discipline of SFE. Organised/Informal = probably only focused on field sales. Scalable/Formal = targeted at all levels of sales, so you start to see results. Adaptive/dynamic = a mature SFE discipline that also includes the Service teams.
Example: Cable & Wireless revamped its SFE to achieve a number of goals
1. Improve sales results
2. Dramatically improve each sales person’s performance to quota
3. Improve win rates and conversion rates
4. Improve the customer experience
To do this, they defined enablement + collaborated with other departments + secured stakeholder buy-in.
How to Write Your Enablement Charter
Section 1: Situation
– Include org goals, GTM strategy, current sales execution – where are you starting from?
Section 2: Success
– Vision: what is the future state of the enabled sales force that you’re aiming for?
– Mission: describe the approach
– Objectives: times are not needed here
– Metrics: how you measure depends on enablement maturity
Section 3: Scope
– Audience: field sales in one region? Several regions? Partners too?
Section 4: Roadmap
– The timings
Prioritising Your Enablement Efforts
The only thing that really matters: what does the sales person need to help customers move forwards in their process and feel comfortable with you? Use the charter to guide you and be clear on the cost of creating content that doesn’t get used.
Enablement Services
- ‘Services’ is used rather than ‘outputs’ or ‘deliverables’ because enablement isn’t about a single end result – it’s about a process covering strategy, definition, creation, localisation, delivery, implementation, adoption.
- It’s not a ‘program’ either, as that suggests training or a project
- Enablement is a discipline <SM note: an ongoing, permanent function>with services as the method for achieving the goals
There are 3 categories of enablement services and they all rely on each other:
1. Content
2. Training
3. Coaching
Content Services
- Sales move up the relationship spectrum by adding valuable perspectives during every interaction
- They offer the right case study or whitepaper at the right moment to keep the value flowing
- What is enablement content (rather than customer-facing content)? It’s any content that helps customer-facing professionals to prepare for interactions with prospects and customers – playbooks, battlecards, cost-justification tools.
Awareness: The customer needs a future vision of success and how they can solve their challenges to get there.
– Customer content: whitepapers, case studies, blog articles, research.
– Enablement content = market landscapes, industry challenges, buyer roles & painpoints, social media guidelines
Buying: The sales person is helping the customer to make a decision from a set of options. They need to achieve the future vision of success with a deeper level of perspective.
– Customer content = articles that are more focused on specific vision, financial/IT focused content, 61% of buying teams do an ROI analysis so cost justification tools are important
– Enablement content = battlecards, proposal templates, SLA agreements, objection handling, technical responses
Implementation & Adoption: The content goes back to Awareness-style content as the sales person uncovers new opportunities
– Customer content = case studies
– Enablement content = account management tools, implementation checklists, relationship mapping tools
Who creates the content?
Their research shows that Marketing creates 39% of content, Product 18%, SFE 16%. But they highlight that Sales is creating 18% and this is too high – Sales should not need to create content.
Two things matter:
1. Quality of content – if it doesn’t move the customer forward on the Customer’s Path then it isn’t effective and that is the only measure that matters.
2. Quantity of content – the demand here is usually because sales people want more specificity to match the phases of the Customer’s Path or their specific industry or role
When asked to choose the types of content that need improvement, the top three were case studies, client-focused presentations, business value templates.
Playbooks
Playbooks should be a one-stop shop for content – guiding the Sales teams to the content they need in any scenario. They can be interactive PDFs, presentations or even websites. Use modules for different stages of the Customer’s Path.
Best practices for playbooks:
1. Create the playbook from the customer’s perspective, eg the business challenges
2. Design the playbooks to align with the Customer’s Path
3. Use playbooks to reinforce your methodologies – e.g. if you’re using perspective selling, link to content that adds valuable perspectives
The outline for a playbook:
- Section 1: Background Info – Market opportunity, competitive landscape, market dynamics and micro/macro challenges, links to additional content, glossary of terms
- Section 2: Awareness Phase – Roles (who is involved in buying), phase-specific value messaging, methodology-specific content such as how to do discovery, skill-related such as how to engage buyers on social media, links to awareness content
- Section 3: Buying Phases – More detailed phase-specific messaging focused on business value and differentiation, answers to commonly-asked questions, objection handling, links to detailed content, links to ROI tools, best practice on cost justification, guidance on preparing a proposal
- Section 4: Implement & Adoption Phase – Methodology-based guidance on role of salesperson post sale, questions on ascertaining value delivered from project etc.
Orchestrating Content
SFE has to orchestrate content contribution from other teams – they cannot do it all themselves.
5 step process:
1. Take stock of what you have – including all the informal stuff
2. Gather feedback and data – from customers and from internal teams. Ask why informal content was created. Look for as much usage data as you can find.
3. Assess your assets – throw out anything so obsolete it can’t be refreshed
4. Identify the gaps – by Customer’s Path, role, industry
5. Prioritise – use your Charter to prioritise. If someone asks for something that doesn’t meet the Charter, ask if the Charter needs updating before you say no.
SFE is the gatekeeper for Sales time when it comes to content, to help avoid overload and confusion: Sales are often given different content from Product, Marketing, Product Marketing that doesn’t match in terms of messaging. The job of SFE is to orchestrate the teams to ensure Sales is getting content that matches and works.
Training Services
Training means different things to different people. You can train on:
1. Knowledge – product training, market training
2. Methodology – what to do and why. Give the sales people the situational fluency to assess customer context. Connects the sales process to the Customer’s Path.
3. Skills – capabilities needed to execute the methodology, e.g. active listening, asking questions, how to curate content
Training modalities: use a mix of remote and in-person. The best way is to do some remote training first, then bring people together to practice, the follow up with tests via mobile or PC.
‘The Forgetting Curve’ is real – people are likely to forget 50% on average of what they learned within 1 hour of hearing it. 70% will be forgotten within 24 hours. 90% within a week. Reinforcement is critical.
The modern learner: we want to learn when we need to learn.
Terminology of training:
– Badging
– Credentialling
– LMS
– Micro-learning
– Massive online open course (MOOC)
– Virtual instructor-led training (VILT)
One of the best ways to get support for SFE is to show that SFE can get new hires productive, faster. Put the names of all new sales people in Column A and then in B-Y enter their revenue contribution for each month. hen compare to experienced people and show how you can close the gap.
Orchestrating Training
- Take stock of what you have – ask HR etc and include even informal product demo recordings
- Gather feedback and data – you may not have much
- Assess your assets – delete any out of date stuff
- Identify the gaps – work out which stages of the Customer’s Path are currently neglected. Which roles have not been covered? Are sales selling value?
- Prioritise
Coaching Services
What is sales coaching? “The process by which sales managers use a defined approach and specific communication skills combined with domain expertise to facilitate conversations with team members to uncover improvement areas and opportunities for new levels of success.”
Why is it hard? Managers struggle to find time. They lack methods, skills, tools. Each org has coaching maturity – Random = each manager coaches as they see fit
Informal = coaching is lightly documented with no accountability for doing it
Formal = coaching training is provided and sales managers are accountable for it
Dynamic = coaching training is actively targeted at sales managers
It’s challenging but it’s worth it. Coaching is the best way to drive adoption of enablement.
Types of coaching
- Opportunity coaching: the manager and sales person consider what is needed to deliver a piece of business
- Lead coaching:
- Early on, it is critical to add perspectives and insights early on in the Customer’s Path, plus coaches should be focusing on asking which Leads will turn into business.
- Later on, the discussion focuses on engagement strategies and how the sales person can move things along
- Recommended focus for lead and opp coaching:
- The customer’s business challenges, their goals, their desired results
- The customer context – the buying process, their financial situation, their strategic initiatives
- The opportunity – what is the solution and how will it help the customers? How will it be valuable and different?
- Buying influencers – who are they and what role do they play? How can we engage and add perspective?
- Situational analysis – what strengths do we have and what could be working against us?
- Action planning – what are the best actions we need to take?
- Funnel or pipeline coaching:
- How to identify the most valuable deals, manage risks, and allocate resources
- How to understand the shape of the funnel/science of the funnel
- Recommended focus for pipeline coaching:
- Value and stages
- Velocity – what has moved and what hasn’t?
- Volume
- Shape
- The horizon
- Action planning
- Skills/behaviour coaching:
- A lot of the actions will involve conversations with customers – sales people need coaching on how to do this, e.g. surfacing concerns, asking questions, listening
- Recommended focus for skills & behaviour coaching:
- Alignment to customer’s path
- Demonstration of value
- Discovery of needs
- Delivery of key messages
- Sales call skills
- Account coaching:
- Supporting sales when they’re selling into named or strategic accounts
- Relationships, strategic context
- Recommended focus for account coaching:
- Research & analysis
- Focus segments
- Relationship mapping
- Territory coaching:
- How to approach the territory – which accounts, buyer roles etc
How to coach is as important as what to coach – you need:
1. Coaching processes
2. Coaching skills
3. Coaching tools
Coaching pitfalls to avoid
1. Confusing management activities with coaching – coaching is about what the sales person says on the call
2. Viewing coaching as only manager-to-sales-person – you also need to coach the coaches who may need to unlearn bad habits
3. Not ensuring coaches have domain expertise – they need to know exactly what their sales people are doing and how they can help them to do it
4. Over-investing time in admin and skimping on coaching – coaches need to use AI to help them identify issues and then focus time on fixing those issues
Evolving coaching maturity
- Take stock of where you are in coaching maturity (see stages above, random-dynamic)
- Gather feedback and data – how well are the managers coaching? Is your manager helping you reach your potential?
- Assess your assets – do you have what you need?
- Prioritise and act on gaps – is it in awareness? Buying?
Coaching is critical for enablement of sales managers.
Value Messaging for Consistency
- Value messaging is the glue that aligns the enablement services.
- The complaint the authors hear from sales is often that “nothing fits” – product deliver different materials to product marketing who are not aligned with marketing campaigns. Sales then don’t use the materials.
- Value messaging is the necessary input to all internal and customer-facing content – the central themes that run through all content. The value messaging can be customer role-specific.
What is value messaging?
- Value messaging explains how a product or service helps the customer solve a challenge and achieve their desired outcomes and objectives
- But the messages must align to the Customer’s Path so the type of message will vary at each phase
- In the awareness phase you need value hypotheses:
- They address the customer’s challenges and help them envision a better future state
- Sales people have to develop a future vision of success with their prospects in order to move the Lead to an Opp
- Value hypotheses are used to create content such as case studies or success stories to show how others have achieved their aims or high level, role-based presentations that focus on a business problem, the impact of that problem and how to resolve it
- In the buying phase, you need specific value propositions that map the value and benefits of the solution to the customer’s desired results
- The sales person is proving that the solution helps all members of the buying team to achieve their desired results
- The specific value propositions relate to products but always and only in the context of the customer’s business challenges/desired results & wins/viewpoints
- In the implementation/adoption phase, you need value confirmation messages – new stakeholders will appear and relationships have to be built
- You should always be communicating the value that was delivered
Value messaging is not about pushing products – it is helping the sales person connect solutions to business challenges and expected results and wins.
Important: value messaging must be adapted to match the customer’s context. Your playbooks need to cover different scenarios so the sales person can ensure it is adapted.
Orchestrating the value messaging process
- SFE rarely creates messaging – ideally they would never create messaging. It belongs with Product Marketing, Marketing, or Product.
- But SFE DOES ensure that messaging is available all along the Customer’s Path
The process
- Phase 1: Assess
- Assess messaging across all customer and enablement assets for effectiveness, consistency, relevance, coverage of the customer’s path
- Analyse the results
- Define next steps
- Phase 2: Build
- Estimate the effort required to build the business case for value messaging
- Build the framework
- Build a work plan – roadmap of milestones, collaboration needed, pilot projects
- Phase 3: Create
- Conduct a workshop with contributors for first pilot
- Agree on business problem you solve
- Agree on business value
- Create the value messages for most important buyer role
- Repeat
- Phase 4: Integrate
- Update content services
- Update internal enablement services
- Update training
- Create new services
- Update coaching services
- Update website and other materials
- Phase 5: Implement
- Ensure curriculum is in place
- Ensure coaching
- Gather feedback and refine
The Inner Workings of Enablement
1. Collaboration – SFE’s biggest role is to orchestrate the efforts of others to create consistent and effective enablement services
2. Enablement technology is now critical
3. Enablement operations – the engine that drives enablement efforts
Collaboration
- SFE is a separate discipline but it completely dependent on others
- SFE professionals must therefore we fantastic at getting things done via others
What does effective enablement collaboration look like?
- It is “the process of working across functions or with third parties to provide services that help the sales force to achieve better results, ideally in a shorter amount of time.”
- If you need to negotiate for resources and a process every time you start a new piece of content, you’ll be dragged down
- Enablement collaboration should be in the job specs for Product, PM and L&D
- Collaboration process should be repeatable and predictable
- There should be a regular meeting cadence for enablement, with attendance prioritised
- Department managers must ensure that time is dedicated to enablement
- Everyone must understand the role of enablement
- When changes happen, effort is given to how enablement will respond
- A formalised collaboration approach is needed
The RACI model should be put in place for all enablement services – training, playbooks etc. This avoids discussion every time something is needed.
Where is collaboration needed?
– With Product for product briefs, one pagers, value calculation
– With Marketing for customer-facing content, campaigns, social
– With HR for hiring profiles, competency modelling
– With IT for CRM, data
– With Legal for contract templates etc.
Enablement Technology
- It all starts with the CRM system
- Then it’s about your Sales Enablement Content Management/SECM system (Sarah note – these are also called Revenue Enablement systems)
- It must integrate with the CRM so it can suggest content at the right moments
- It must give you data on use – customers only read the first page of this whitepaper, does sending this piece of content to a prospect results in more follow-ups
- Examples: (Sarah has updated the list)
- Large Enterprises: if you have thousands of reps and need advanced governance, these are the market leaders: Seismic, Highspot, Showpad
- For Mid-Market & SaaS: something faster to implement that focuses on the modern buyer experience. Allego, Dock, Spekit
- For SMBs & High Velocity: HubSpot Sales Hub – if you already use HubSpot for CRM, built-in content tools (Playbooks, Documents, and Sequences) are often enough to avoid paying for a separate SECM tool. Or try Paperflite.
- You also need a training system and a coaching system
- And then other systems for meeting scheduling, account intelligence etc.
One company creates portals for every prospect: that way content can be shared and accessed.
Data
- SFE might not get to choose the tech but they need the data from the systems to measure success
- The tech can also help to guide SFE in how they structure, organise, and maintain content and training they deliver to sales
How to define your tech strategy
- Step 1: Identify missing tech – sales analytics? SECM? LMS? Coaching? And make clear in your Charter that it is missing
- Step 2: Identify functional gaps – is SECM integrated with the CRM? Do you have data? Are you able to create playbooks automatically based on phase/role?
- Step 3: Prioritise investments – if your goal is “reduce sales time spent looking for content” then you need to be clear on whether this could be achieved without tech. Start small and always be guided by your charter on what you need.
Enablement Operations
3 areas of enablement operations:
1. Enablement governance – deciding strategy, making decisions, resolving conflicts
2. Enablement production
3. Enablement analytics – how you measure success
Governance
- Effective governance = enablement becomes strategic
- To do this you need an Enablement Advisory Board
- Establish a clear purpose for your advisory board
- Communicate responsibilities – define the long-term SFE strategy, which must be connected to the org strategy
- Focus on getting senior execs on board
- Establish regular cadence for meetings – quarterly or monthly
- Who? 5-10 members, senior execs from Marketing, Sales, Sales Ops, HR, Product
- When? Quarterly or monthly and in-person once a year (best around SKO)
- Tips: tight agenda, focus on initiatives that are underway, results achieved, actions needed, decisions to be made, use first meeting to agree the Charter, use pre-reads, formal reporting every quarter
Production
- Production covers all the steps of enablement services: creation, localisation, deployment, analytics, adoption, reinforcement
- SFE is responsible for ensuring they are done effectively
- Define & map:
- Purpose of the service and why it is necessary?
- Audience
- Phase of customer’s path
- Localisation/verticalisation
- Anticipated impact
- Create & localisation:
- Collaboration is key
- You need value messaging in place
- Publish & provide
- Make them accessible and searchable based on opportunity criteria and Customer’s Path
- Track and measure
Mistakes in production:
1. Not mapping the service to the Customer’s Path
2. Providing a service without localising
3. Disconnection from value messaging
4. Not considering how services will be delivered
5. Collaborating on one step only
6. Creating the services without knowing how you’ll measure
Measuring Results
- Measuring results is hard – focus on a few metrics and set expectations wisely.
- There is no direct causation between enablement and revenue, only correlations – therefore don’t focus on revenue as the main metric
- When you’re starting out, measure the milestones
- Remember Albert Einstein: “Not everything that be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted”
- It’s important to leverage metrics that already exist – L&D might use Kirkpatrick-Phillips, for example, on data collection on training, e.g.
- Level 1 – reaction: a survey of how the training was viewed
- Level 2 – confidence: assessment of whether they recall the content correctly
- Level 3 – application & implementation: 30 days post-training
- Level 4 – business impact: connecting skills, knowledge and other outcomes to leading indicators such as conversion rate
- Level 5 – ROI
Top Sales Productivity Goals You Can Use
- Increase selling time
- Decrease onboarding time
- Streamline opportunity management process
- Reduce sales admin burden
- Improve visibility into buyer intent
- Improve cross-functional collaboration
- Reduce cost of sale
- Streamline forecast process
- Decrease content search time
- Decrease client prep time
Top Sales Performance Goals You Can Use
- Increase revenue
- Increase margins
- Increase new account acquisition
- Increase forecast deals and win rates
- Reduce turnover of sales force
- Increase account penetration
- Reduce customer churn
- Increase average deal size
- Reduce sales cycle length
Expectation management is key: if you introduce a new service, it will take the length of a deal cycle to see the impact.
Remember that some measurement is also subjective: do sales people appreciate the effort? What do they think is good and less good?
See objective and subjective measurement Examples on P.190
Leading indicators
– MQL-SQL-Deal conversion is a very good leading indicator, as is the rest of the funnel
– Conversion can be measured by volume, financial value, velocity
Other leading indicators:
– Ratio of first contact to follow-up meeting
– Number of contact attempts required
– MQL-to-SQL
– Email response rates
– Open rates for content
– Conversion rates between phases of customer journey
– Seller competencies as assessed by sales managers
Advice on measurement
- Start small with a handful of metrics and be clear on how you are measuring
- Having a dashboard to track conversion rates is critical – talk to Sales Ops
- Don’t try and attribute everything – if you want productivity improvements, focus on that and don’t overthink what activity is leading to it
Where to go from here?
- Estimate your current point of departure – be honest
- Put a stake in the ground for where you want to be – it’s not always the most advanced stage but if you have complex solutions and long lead times, it will need to be at least Formal
- See p.201 for the explanations of maturity
What are the upcoming changes in sales that SFE can help with?
- Buy/sell cycle will be guided by AI – “If you can’t stand the idea of your every move being analysed, sales might not be the profession for you.” Sales people will be among the most studied people on earth. AI will use the data to guide sales on what to say and when to say it.
- Sales as a job function will fundamentally change – at the moment only 35% of time is spent on selling – the rest is travelling, admin, meetings. AI removes the need to write up meeting notes and provides more time to add value.
- The types of sales people who succeed will change – they’ll be comfortable with tech, comfortable with data, less about emotional intelligence and more about analysis.
- SFE will pave the way to the future of sales – SFE will know better than HR what makes a good hire, they’ll understand SFE tech better than IT, know the customer needs better than Marketing
