The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

Social Recruiting can't make a bad workplace look good

I was able to catch several of the sessions from Monday's #SocialRecruiting Summit via the video stream, and couldn't help but be impressed by some of the great examples of ways companies are using social media for recruiting. 

But another thing I noticed is that these companies that are held up as bright, shiny examples for social recruiting have a culture that fosters a great work environment, and makes people want to work there.  You can bet that this attitude towards treating employees well starts at the top and permeates through the management ranks. 

Social media doesn't make them great companies to work for, social media simply makes it easy for them to make their great culture and environment very visible to the outside world, especially to future employees.

That makes the flip-side true.  A few days ago I was working with a sales manager who's looking to hire 4 or 5 inside sales people in the next 30 days, and has been frustrated by how hard it is to find strong candidates.  I was coaching him on how to add social recruiting to the mix, to profile some successful sales people, and give prospective candidates a feel for what its like to work there. 

He mentioned two things that startled me.  First, the company has a ban on the use of social media of any kind at work, and second, that employees really don't like working there.  (I suspect the two points are connected) I won't go into why, but suffice it to say that a social recruiting strategy for this company could backfire, and make it more transparent that this is a bad place to work.

Using social media for marketing or recruiting is about being genuine, personal, and transparent.  You can't pretend to be something you're not. Social recruiting can't make a bad workplace look good.

Marketers: Walk in a salesperson's shoes

A real conversation with a marketing manager at a well-known tech company:

MARKETER: I'm so frustrated with them.  My salespeople don't read my emails and don't even look at the tools I create for them.  How can I get through to them?

JEFF: Give me an example.

MARKETER:  Back in June, I put together a bunch of case studies...the sales reps are always asking for case studies.  So I created them, sent them out, and nobody's using them.  Sometimes I wonder why I waste my time.

JEFF:  How'd you send them out?

MARKETER:  I attached them to an email and sent them to our sales team email alias.

JEFF:  In June?

MARKETER:  Yeah, middle of June.

JEFF:  What were your salespeople concerned about at the time you sent the email?

MARKETER:  I dunno, maybe kids getting out of school?  Summer vacations?

JEFF:  Try again.  Middle of June, what are they stressing about?

MARKETER:  Uhhh.

JEFF:  Have you ever had a quota to hit? 

MARKETER: Uhhhh...No..

JEFF:  Try to imagine what it's like to be a salesperson at the end of a quarter...

I could continue but you get the drift.  Marketers have always been taught to walk in our customer's shoes, understand their pains, speak their language, so our messages will resonate.  But if you want any chance of aligning with sales, you need to walk in a salesperson's shoes, and feel their pains.

Recognizing the "end of quarter crunch" that salespeople go through is just one example of putting yourself in their shoes.  Don't try to send out stuff for them to digest and figure out how to use in the last week or two of a quarter.  Some other points to recognize:

• Salespeople have to manage a portfolio of accounts the way an investor has to manage a portfolio of stocks.  They have to pay attention to existing customer issues, late stage deals, middle stage deals, as well as the leads you think are the hottest thing since sliced bread.  Take that into account when you're negotiating your SLAs for lead follow-up.
• Most salespeople don't have as high a base salary as you do, so keep that in mind when you call them "coin-operated".
• Time is the most valuable resource for a sales rep, and they have to manage their time very carefully, so its not a good use of time to have them chase poorly qualified leads.  They'll get skeptical of a particular batch of leads if the first 1 or 2 are garbage.

Help me out here, what else should marketing people recognize about the life of a salesperson?

Can your reps talk about your prospect's biggest issues with empathy?

My job is to create tension in the room.  I just conducted a Sales Enablement Workshop for a tech company with over a thousand salespeople, where I had 20 key players from marketing, product management, and sales in the same room. Their issues were very typical of what I see with all my clients:

• The marketers are trying to get the sales team to move from selling product features to selling solutions that bundle multiple products and services.

• The sales folks think that the marketers don't understand what the sales team really needs in the field and the tools they get from marketing aren't useful.

• The product guys feel they really understand the value propositions of their products...the sales guys disagree.

The list goes on, but you get the idea.  This group of incredibly talented people, who all have the same goal of helping all reps sell like their top reps, was missing something so important.

Scott Santucci from Forrester captures it brilliantly in his recent post on A Story of Empathy - The Lost Art of Selling?  Scott says:

What truly separates top sales people is in fact that innate ability to connect the dots with a buyer...When I ask them how they sell, I get more or less the same answer; “well, I just sell a vision – you know what I am talking about.” I do, but it’s a hard thing to describe to the rest of the organization.

They are talking about empathy.

Scott shares some data from a recent survey of technology buyers, who were asked the question, “When you meet with a vendor sales person, in general how often are they prepared for the meeting in the following ways?" (% are for respondents who answered 'usually’)

  Knowledgeable about their company and products                88%
  Knowledgeable about my industry                                      55%
  Can relate to my role and responsibility in the organization     34%
  Knowledgeable about my specific business                          29%

These reps clearly aren't connecting the dots.  As Ardath Albee says in a post Is Sales Connecting the Dots with Buyers, that comments on Scott's data:

Salespeople don't need to know more about your products' feeds and speeds, they need to learn and assimilate information about their prospects. And they need to learn it well enough to have conversations with those prospects so they can earn the right to play a role in helping them craft the solutions to their most pressing business issues.

Ardath continues with a statement that echoes the first of my New Rules of Sales Enablement:

It should be becoming clear that what sales enablement should, um, enable is better and more valuable conversations between salespeople and buyers. Not just the end-game decision maker, but all the people involved on the buying committee.

Amen.  But how do you help your reps show empathy with buyers situations?  Here's one easy thing you can do.  Create "Issue Sheets" for the top 4 or 5 issues of each of your primary buyer personas that your solution can address. 

You know what the issues are, so scratch out as much as you know about the issue and its implications for that buyer on a piece of paper.  Then make it fun.  Invite a few reps (make sure there are some top reps in the bunch) in for lunch or out for a beer, and ask them this:

"When you're having a discussion about this issue with a prospect, what does the dialog sound like?  What's the tone of their voice?  How is it personally affecting them?  How have they tried to address this issue before, and what were the results?  What are the consequences of not solving it?"

Record it as a podcast, type it up in a doc, the format isn't important, just get this information into the hands of all your reps, help them internalize it, and listen in on some calls to see if their conversations improve.

I love it when I can apply what I learned in Kindergarten to the real world.

What do you think?  Can your sales peole empathize with buyers pains?  What are you doing to help them have these important conversations?

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.

What are you spending on sales support?

I always knew companies were wasting a ton of money on ineffective and disjointed sales enablement programs, and now Forrester's Scott Santucci has put a number on it in his report Uncovering The Hidden Costs Of Sales Support.  His research shows that:

"Technology vendors are spending, on average, 19% of their selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs or $135,262 per quota-carrying salesperson in support-related activities."

Yikes. How has this gotten so out of control?  Forrester found that the costs are spread around different budgets and programs across the company, from sales, to sales operations, marketing, product development, and even human resources groups. 

I think this is a symptom of my point that in a B2B organization, you are either in sales or you support sales.  CEOs are demanding that all parts of the company are contributing to revenue generation, but the result is disjointed, redundant efforts.  Scott calls these "random acts of sales support."

So what do you do?  Forrester says you should organize your sales support initiatives around four core sales activities:

• Gaining access to the right people in the buying organization
• Conducting great sales calls that make buyers want to do business with you
• Helping buyers visualize how your solution can solve their problem or deliver a desired outcome
• Enabling buyers to build a business case that leads to buying

Sounds a lot like the first of my New Rules of Sales Enablement, in which sales enablement is not about creating more collateral and throwing it into a portal, rather its all about enabling your sales people to have relevant, compelling conversations that help buyers advance through their buying process and want to buy from you.

I'd like to hear from you, where are you spending on sales enablement.  Comment here.