The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

In a B2B company, you're either "in sales", or you "support sales"

I remember being in a sales kickoff meeting many years ago, and as we were going around the room saying what we hoped to get out of the next three days, one of the reps said, "Let's face it, in a B2B company, you're either in sales, or you support sales. So I'm here to see who here can help me sell." 

At the time, I thought "what a pompous ass."  There's so much more that has to happen for a B2B company to be successful.  But over the years, as I've mastered sales enablement and climbed the ranks in executive management, I've realized that the ass was right.  Every major accomplishment I've had has been to the direct benefit of the sales team's ability to sell.  The successes that get recognized in company forums tend to be those that contribute to sales.

Think about it.  Marketing is obviously a sales support funtion...create awareness and interest, generate leads, help the reps advance their deals, etc.  Product management has to spec out great products, but first and foremost it has to be a product that the channel can sell.  How about Finance?  The most important thing they can do (besides pass the audits) is make sure sales can execute contracts in a way that ensures collection.

I've been using that line whenever I talk with someone who's overly focused on things that don't help sales.

CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization report finds that sales performance continues to decline

The CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Report is out, and the results of their annual survey of 1,800 firms are not pretty:

• 41% of sales reps are failing to make quota
• Companies on average are hitting 86% of plan
• 15% of reps are turned over
• 70% of reps are taking 7 months or more to ramp up

• 86% of companies have higher sales targets in 2009

You can get a copy of the report here.

Here's a great excerpt from the executive summary:

We do not believe that success in 2009 will be achieved by making more sales calls. The number of calls—face-to-face meetings or on the phone—has already been increasing over the past few years with minimal impact on sales results. The real objective is going to be how to make great calls: motivating stakeholders to meet with you; creating a sense of urgency that moves evaluating your solutions to the top of their priority list; differentiating yourself from the competition; selling value (so you can avoid discounting); creating a compelling business case to get the project approved now.

These will require your salespeople to be more effective at selling than they were in 2008. So what are you going to do to support them in this endeavor? You may think you can cut your way to sales effectiveness: spend less on sales training; get by with fewer sales support personnel; avoid investing in CRM technologies; ask each of your sales managers to take on managing more reps and/or reduce travel budgets. Think again. You may reduce expenses, but you will see revenues and margins fall as well.

2009 needs to be about investing your way to sales effectiveness. If freeing up more money to support sales is not an option, then look at how you are investing the current dollars you have allocated. For example, if your budget calls for adding five salespeople, consider hiring one or two, and investing the rest of the budget in making the people you already have much more productive.

Why am I blogging about sales enablement?

For more than 20 years, I’ve supported B2B sales teams, first as a product manager, then as a sales effectiveness manager, and now as a marketing executive.

For too many of those years, I delivered everything I was asked to do. Beautiful collateral?  Yup, I created reams of it. Killer demos? I’m your guy.  I fired emails to my sales team announcing new materials, and was constantly frustrated, because no one read the emails or used the materials.

Then one day, I had a life-changing experience. One of my sales reps—let’s call him Tom-lost an important deal that had been forecasted to close. When I asked him what happened, Tom seemed genuinely puzzled: He said he had really “hit it off” with the decision-maker—they were both into cycling and had gone to a Bulls game together. According to Tom, the client team “really liked the product” and had made positive comments during the demos. “Every call went really well,” Tom said.

But when I called the decision-maker who shot us down, I got a very different story.

Yes, Tom had given “very slick presentations,” the prospect said, “but he didn’t know enough about our business.” Further, Tom “did little to help me understand how our product would solve his company’s problems.” When pressed with questions, Tom “took a long time getting back with answers” and when he did, some of the information was just plain wrong.

But it got worse. When I reviewed some of the information Tom had shared with the prospect, I found he had used a four-year-old slide deck with outdated messaging and branding, and a poorly written, inaccurate data sheet that he had “borrowed” from another rep. I can only imagine what his conversations sounded like.

That's when it hit me.  Tom hadn't failed, the company had failed Tom.  I realized we weren't doing anything to help Tom have the conversations he needs to have to give buyers to move to the next step in their buying process.  And the things we were doing were actually causing more harm than good.

I set out that day to reinvent sales enablement, and this blog contains lessons I've learned in the trenches, and provocative ideas that I hope will get people to consider a new mindset towards how they enable sales.