The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

Sales methodologies alone are not enough

In my last post, I talked about how Proven Plays are better than More Methodologies.  Why is this?

If you look at sales performance across a sales team, it almost always forms a bell curve. The top ten percent are the star performers. These are the folks who can sell blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs. We all want more of these stars, so we spend millions of dollars sending people to sales training where we parade our product experts, methodology gurus, and motivational speakers in front of the team—all with the hope that methodology and training will give our reps the knowledge, skills, attitude, and structure to become stars.

But it doesn’t work. Studies show that the average salesperson forgets more than 80 percent of what they learn in sales training within 30 days. The rep gets back to the office, puts the training binder on the shelf, reverts to old habits, and continues to follow the path of least resistance rather than adhere to your sales process.

What do they remember from your high-priced sales meetings? They remember the stories they heard your best reps telling at the bar about deals they won. They remember Paul, showing pictures of his new vacation home, telling everyone what he did at Big Whale Financial to eliminate the competition within the first two weeks and bring in the contract with no price discounting. Rather than paying attention to the training, the junior reps are thinking “If I just do what Paul does, I’ll be able to buy a vacation home too.”

I’m not knocking methodologies. They certainly have their place in providing structure to the sales process. The reason they often fail is that companies don’t give salespeople the guidance to put them into practice. A methodology or process tells you why to do something, but it doesn’t tell you what to do in a specific situation, when to do it, or how to do it.

And no amount of training is going to enable a sales rep to be ready to handle every selling situations he or she will encounter. What a rep needs to know to do solution selling exceeds what any one person can retain in their head.

Stop trying to turn every “B” and “C” player into an “A” player and instead focus on shifting the whole performance curve a few points to the right. The real opportunity is in the middle 80 percent of performers.

• What if you could help each of these reps be more effective and close two or three more deals a year from working the same number of opportunities? That would cause a significant increase in revenue across the company.

• What if you can make each rep more efficient by taking away some of the time-wasting activities they’re doing today, enabling them to work three or four more opportunities in a year? The effect is like an investment (in a good economy)—it multiplies.

Salespeople are just-in-time, opportunity-specific learners, so they need just-in-time, opportunity-specific knowledge. This knowledge is best delivered to sales teams as dynamic coaching, in the form of repeatable sales playbooks. You can shift the performance curve by bottling up the plays that are proven to work for people like Connie and putting them in the hands of reps like Mark.

The New Rules of Sales Enablement: 3. Proven Plays

Connie is a top salesperson at one of my client companies. Like most other stars, one thing that separates Connie from the pack is that she’ll never wing it. Whenever she’s in a particular selling situation, she does the same set of things that helped her win similar deals in the past.

When something stops working, she finds an alternative and sticks with it as long as it keeps working. You might say that Connie has a set of repeatable playbooks in her head. These playbooks have been developed and adapted through her four years of experience in front of customers.

Mark sells the same products as Connie. He is a career middle-of-the-packer, always near or at quota, but never hitting it out of the park. Mark just sort of makes it up for each deal as he goes along. Sometimes it works. And sometimes it doesn’t. Mark believes he would be so much more successful if he just got more at-bats. The problem is he can’t swing the bat like Connie. So giving him more at bats won’t improve his batting average.

Connie and Mark’s boss thinks he has a solution. He is planning to roll out a new sales methodology at the next sales meeting, believing that this is the missing link to improving sales performance. Think again.

A methodology alone won't get Mark to hit a split-fingered fastball.

OLD RULE: If we implement a new sales methodology, every salesperson will become an "A" player.

NEW RULE: Any salesperson can improve performance by following sales playbooks that are proven to work in winning deals.

Don’t get me wrong, I think a sales methodology or process is essential, but in my experience, they usually don’t have the impact they could because salespeople don’t have a practical way to follow them.  I'll talk about why sales methodologies alone are not enough in my next post.

Your salespeople learn something new every day about what works and what doesn’t.

Recently I posted the second New Rule of Sales Enablement: Experience BEATS Expertise.  I want to tell you why it works, and give an example.

There’s a treasure trove of knowledge in the heads and on the laptops of your salespeople. In a sales 2.0 world, it’s critical that your sales and marketing teams collaborate in a process to unlock this treasure and apply it. This is a process of discovering what messages, tools, and tactics are most effective, and getting that knowledge into a framework where everyone can find and use it. It’s capturing feedback on what works and doesn’t work, and using that feedback to continuously improve the base of knowledge.

Let me give you an example of how I’ve applied this new rule. I was working for a company that had a best-of-breed product in a market where big companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft had acquired lighter-weight products and released them under their own brands.  Our product had a huge differentiator, and we’d never lose when this capability was important to the buyer.

That is, until one of our competitors introduced a new module that claimed to do everything our product did. I knew our sales reps would encounter this competitor in more deals, and I wanted to arm them with knowledge to combat the evil empire.

If I had applied the old rules, I would have talked to a few industry experts, inspected the competitor’s product, written up a great competitive brief, and posted it in my sales portal. And the sales team would have ignored it.

Instead, I still did all that research and wrote up my notes. But before releasing anything to the field, I got on the weekly sales call and asked who’s been encountering this competitor. 

The folks in the field gave me some valuable insight into what the competitor’s reps had been saying to our prospects. They validated a few of my data points. One of my more experienced salespeople had written an email to a buyer that had been effective in getting him to realize the competitor’s approach to solving this problem had too many shortcomings compared to ours. I had the rep send me that email, I merged it with the competitive intelligence I had gathered, and sent him back a draft.

After including more of his feedback, we jointly rolled it out to the field the following week.

Guess what happened? The team ate it up.

What a difference. I had worked with salespeople to discover information that was already being used effectively in competitive selling situations, so the sales team had more trust in it.  Does that surprise you?

The New Rules of Sales Enablement: 2. Experience BEATS Expertise

Look at any job description for a product marketing or marketing communications role, and I guarantee you’ll see a bullet point like this under “responsibilities”:

Gather input from a variety of sources—customers, industry analysts, media, competitors, and salespeople—and create powerful sales tools that communicate value and differentiation.

Often these marketers (and those who write their job descriptions) spend too much time trying to “communicate value and differentiation” and don’t see what salespeople really want to know - what other salespeople are using and doing to win deals.

No matter how much time marketers and product managers spend with salespeople and customers, they just don’t see enough of what happens at the moments of truth—the points in time at which the buyers are receiving and responding to the messages the sales team delivers. Look how fast the competitive landscape, the needs of the marketplace, and the product portfolios change. A top-down approach will never keep up.

So salespeople spend way too much time creating their own materials and rarely reach out to marketing unless they want that new product data sheet or more company-branded tchotchkes they can give to customers. 

So it shouldn’t be surprising that they ignore 90% of the “stuff” that the folks in corporate give them.

OLD RULE: The folks in corporate know best what the sales people need in the field.

NEW RULE: The most effective selling content, messages, and strategies are discovered from experience with buyers.

Being a marketing professional myself, I know that this is the hardest mindset shift for marketers to make, and I wish I had accepted this reality much earlier in my career. If you are a marketer, don’t feel bad, it’s not your fault. We’ve been classically trained to work this way. If you are in sales, send this to your marketing folks.

Where to focus your sales enablement efforts

I've been getting this question a lot lately.  Companies have been cutting their sales support staffs (as well as sales reps) so they have fewer people to do more work.  The sales enablement task seems daunting, so where do we start?

Here's what I'm doing with one of my customers.  We took a look at their sales cycles, and found that they were pretty good at getting leads into the top of the funnel, having initial exploratory conversations, and even getting late-stage deals over the goal line.  The choke point was getting folks who had shown interest in their product to convert to sales opportunities. 

This type of analysis is not that hard to do.  Lee Levitt, the Director of the Sales Advisory Practice at IDC, has long been advocating a careful analysis of Days in Stage and Conversion Rates as a way to target areas for improvement.

So rather than continuing the broad brush approach to sales enablement, we decided to focus on improving that one conversion point.  We looked at what the most frequent objections they were getting in stalled deals, and not surpirsingly, it sounded like this:

• We have no budget
• Our staff has no time for this right now
• We've got too many other projects in the queue

This told me that we needed to come up with some messaging and tools to allow the sales reps to dig deeper into the "no budget" excuse to the root cause.  We needed to arm them with tools to make the prospect realize that they could get started incredibly easily.  And we even adjusted the pricing model to reflect the reality of today's buying environment.

Look for the choke points.  Give your reps what they need to improve the dialogue when buyers are going dark.