The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

VP of Sales fires his top sales rep.The importance of cultural fit.

I'm helping a company hire and ramp up a bunch of new sales reps, and asked the VP of Sales if I could talk to his best rep to gain a better understanding of how he or she works.  He told me that he fired his best rep a few weeks ago.  I was shocked.  "Why the hell d'ya fire your best rep?"

To make a long story short, last year the company launched a couple new products that are now the main focus for the company, and they're quickly retiring their legacy products that are very expensive to service and support.  This rep was really good at selling one of the legacy products, and despite changes to the comp plan and strict orders from management, he just kept selling that old product.

The VP, who has only been with the company since February, is making a major shift in the company's sales culture, going from a bunch of cowboys who could do whatever they want as long as they hit their number, to a team of directed, disciplined reps.  And as good as this rep was at selling the old product, he wasn't a good fit for the new culture.  And there are probably several more reps who won't be able to make the shift.

Needless to say, we need to take this into account in the profile for hiring new salespeople.  When I asked the VP for the key requirements for the new hires, he gave me the traditional baseline requirements...someone who's sold this type of product, for a company like A, B, or C, who's got a track record of exceeding quota.   

So I pushed him on the importance of finding sales candidates who are a strong fit for the sales culture he's trying to create.  But how do you assess cultural fit from a paper resume?  You can't.  So what are we doing?  We're having candidates create short videos of their responses to three key questions, one of which is "What is an ideal sales environment for you to work in, and why?"  It's amazing how quickly this allows you to weed out the people who wouldn't last long in your sales organization, and focus your live interviews on the right candidates.

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?

5 steps to enable better sales in the next 30 days

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?

How to create a sales playbook in four easy steps

The first questions I always get from my clients when I talk about why they should create sales playbooks is, "How do we go about creating playbooks, and who does it?"  This is not surprising, given that most companies have cut way back on their sales support staff this year.

The key is to keep it simple and base it on what's proven to work.  Here's a simple four step process that I always use.

1.  Assess ::
You start by identifying recurring selling situations where you want to drive repeatable behavior. If you find your team competing in 80 deals a quarter selling a particular product line to CIOs in the manufacturing industry, that situation is a good candidate for a playbook.

Once you’ve identified the situation, profile winning sales engagements by interviewing your top reps to find out things like:

• What were the buyer’s information needs at each stage of their problem-solving process?
• What tools and materials did the reps use and when?
• What objections did they have to overcome?
• What experts did the rep bring in to help work the deal, and what role did they play?

Look for the patterns across multiple sales engagements, and then align these with your sales cycle or sales process.  Don't believe the statement you may hear that "each of our top sales people does things very differently."  Remember, sales is like any other business process, in that the only way to scale it is to drive repeatability.

2. Build ::
Organize the content, tools, and resources you identified in the Assess stage into playbook activities. Identify gaps where new information needs to be created and assign ownership for filling the gaps. Surround the playbook activities with coaching tips that help the reps know how to perform the activities.

3. Launch ::
Roll out the sales playbooks to the sales team. Start with a pilot group to get feedback. Make sure there are well-respected sales professionals who are opinion leaders in that pilot group. Expand usage to the larger team with the support of sales management, marketing and the opinion leaders in sales.  As you roll it out, make sure everyone knows which top performers were interviewed to gather the best practices for the playbook, because every middle-of-the-pack rep is always wanting to know what the superstars are doing so they can do it too.

4. Evolve ::
Playbooks should be living, breathing creatures. Monitor usage and measure the impact. And use these metrics to optimize the playbooks over time. You will find opportunities to:

• Refine the activities, content and messaging within the playbooks
• Eliminate the choke points in your sales process
• Keep deals from going off track
• Develop new sales playbooks

If it takes you more than a week to create a playbook, then you're likely overthinking it and making it too complicated.  You're better off focusing on the 10-15 things or activities that really matter in a sales cycle, rather than overloading the playbook with everything a rep may ever need.

And don't forget to check out the guide on How to Create Killer Sales Playbooks for more details and best practices. 

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. 

Shouldn't we call it "Buying 2.0"?

I'll admit it, I've finally bought into "Sales 2.0".  I wrote earlier this week about how the "Sales 2.0" term is still not used or recognized by sales leaders, and it won't be until the definition of Sales 2.0 better reflects the new dynamics of the buying cycle.  But after attending the Sales 2.0 Conference in Boston this week, I think the definition is much closer to being there than it was when I first got exposed to it three years ago.

The best evidence of this was when hosts Gerhard Gschwandtner and David Thompson were giving the opening remarks, and one of them asked "Shouldn't we call it Buying 2.0".  (You had me at "Buying".)  David flashed a definition on the screen:

Sales 2.0 combines customer-focused processes with Web 2.0 productivity technologies to enhance the art and science of selling while creating customer value. 

Eric Berridge, co-founder of Bluewolf made a great point that the balance of information (between buyer and seller) hasn't changed...rather the buyer's information has gone up AND the seller's information has gone up.  The key is making sure the sellers have the right information at the right time for the current opportunity.

The elephant in the room: recession, fear, layoffs. 

The advice: Go on the offensive. 

I'm seeing that too many sales and marketing leaders are putting their heads down and adopting a "do nothing" strategy, thinking that this is the safe strategy.  Do you think if you go unnoticed, you won't get fired?  That's a sure way to miss your number.

I'm taking the opposite approach.  I'm talking with more than one of the "Sales 2.0" tool providers that I think can help me build pipeline this year.  As a VP of Marketing, if I take a "do nothing" strategy, I will not survive.

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.