The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

5 steps to enable better sales in the next 30 days

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.

"Sales 2.0" term still not used or recognized by sales leaders

The Sales 2.0 Conference is coming up this week in Boston, and as a sponsor, I've been inviting my customers to attend the event.  What I've learned in talking with VPs of Sales and Marketing at my customer sites is that they aren't familiar with the "Sales 2.0" term.  It seems to only be used by vendors and authors, not practitioners.

This was validated at the SiriusDecisions Summit last week when a speaker asked a room full of sales and marketing folks "Who's heard of the term Sales 2.0?"  About 25% of the hands went up, almost entirely vendors.

My take on the reason for this is that the definitions of Sales 2.0 that the vendors are bandying about are too focused on the usage of Web 2.0 tools by sales reps...namely social networks, blogs, wikis, etc.  I've got a very different definition of Sales 2.0, and it starts with the buyer...

Because of all of the social media resources available to buyers today on the web, power has shifted from sellers to buyers.  No one can deny that buyers today are much better educated about a seller's offerings long before they talk with a sales rep. 

Sales 2.0 is all about how the changing buying process requires changes in how companies sell.  Buyers get frustrated if sales people are giving them the same general information they already have.  They are demanding that sellers add much more value, by giving them information that's tailored to their unique needs, at the exact time they need it. 

Once we stop talking about Sales 2.0 as Web 2.0 tools for sales reps, and start recognizing it as a fundamentally different way to sell, it will become more relevant to and recognized by sales and marketing practitioners.

In a Sales 2.0 world, sales reps need to be better prepared than ever.  What are you doing to prepare your reps?

The New Rules of Sales Enablement - ebook

I'm launching my new ebook today, entitled:

The New Rules of Sales Enablement: How to Stop Sabotaging Your Sales Team and Start Empowering Them for Success

In this ebook, I explain why the traditional things people do to enable sales are just plain broken, and often cause more harm than good.   The book challenges you to think about sales enablement in a new way, and shares a more effective approach that I’ve learned by trial and error during my 20 years of supporting sales teams.

You can download it by clicking on the image of the ebook over there in the right column.  Here's a snapshot of the rules.

Old Rule:
Sales enablement is about putting the sales and marketing collateral rack online.

NEW RULE:
Sales enablement is about ensuring salespeople are able to have valuable conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process.

Old Rule:
The folks in corporate know best what salespeople need in the field.

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

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.

Old Rule:
It takes a stick to get salespeople to use the tools we give them.

NEW RULE:
Adoption of sales enablement applications is driven by the value a salesperson gets out of it, not the data they key in.

Old Rule:
With this economy, we need to cut our spending on enabling sales.

NEW RULE:
In an economic crisis, it’s even more important to invest in knowledge enabling your salespeople to perform.

You may find some of my claims to be counterintuitive, or you may even disagree.  Tell me what you think by commenting here.

New definition of sales enablement

I wish I had a dollar for every person I talk to who thinks that sales enablement is nothing more than pumping out more collateral and deploying a better sales portal, with no regard for the buyer’s information needs.

We need a new definition of sales enablement, but before defining what sales enablement is, let’s consider the desired outcome of effective sales enablement.  A well-enabled salesperson can:

• Get access to the key stakeholders in the buying process
• Understand the customer’s marketplace and business issues
• Help the buyer envision solving their problems using his or her products and services
• Get stalled deals moving again
• Sell newly launched or acquired products, and cross-sell unfamiliar products
• Frame the buyer’s evaluation criteria so that the competitors are at a disadvantage
• Help the “buyer champion” justify the purchase and sell within his or her organization
• Overcome objections raised by the buyer
• Respond to the tough questions immediately and with credibility
• Do all this within three months of being hired rather than seven months

What do all these abilities have in common? A real give-and-take, back-and-forth, you-and-me kind of groove. Something all humans recognize in that wonderful thing called a “conversation.”

So recognizing that sales enablement is about relevant, valuable conversations, the best definition I've found for sales enablement comes from Lee Levitt at IDC's Sales Advisory Practice (See IDC Defines Sales Enablement):

Sales enablement is:

The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right place necessary to move a specific sales opportunity forward

What I like most about this is the context of moving a specific sales opportunity forward.  Sales reps are already overwhelmed with general information, but as you can see from the desired outcomes above, the conversations they need to have need to address the specific issues their buyer is having, and how the rep can make those issues go away.

New Rules of Sales Enablement: 1. Conversations, NOT Collateral

If your company is like most, you equate sales enablement with collateral and sales tools.  You’ve treated sales enablement as a task—loading your one-size-fits-all sales and marketing collateral into a sales portal or intranet site and giving your salespeople a login. Then you ring the dinner bell, cross your fingers and wait for the magic to happen.

One of my clients is a large technology company with five businesses, a field sales department, and a corporate marketing group. Several years ago, they launched a sales enablement initiative.  The product folks within each business unit had to compete for the attention of the sales team to try to get them to sell the new and updated products they kept launching. So they would work with corporate marketing to create a ton of product collateral and 75-slide PowerPoint presentations.

They created a sales portal, which their salespeople could access by clicking a big blue button right on the front page of the corporate intranet site, and they posted all their collateral to the sales portal.

I asked my client how often the reps use this content. She said there was no way to know.  So we polled some of the salespeople and shadowed a few experienced reps on sales calls.  We heard the same story from each rep. It sounded something like this:

“When I first joined the company, I got a couple of documents and presentations from my sales manager. Every time I have a meeting, I take these files and modify them for the current opportunity.  I now have dozens, no, hundreds of versions of these documents and presentations on my laptop.  The sales portal? I don’t remember how to get to it or what my login is.”

Can you imagine what the conversations are like between this salesperson and his customers?

OLD RULE:  Sales enablement is about putting the sales and marketing collateral rack online

NEW RULE: Sales enablement is about ensuring salespeople are able to have valuable conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process

We need a new definition of sales enablement, which is the subject of my next post.