The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

5 steps to enable better sales in the next 30 days

Sales reps will never use SFA, so stop beating them over the head

I hear it at least 10 times a week.  Every sales or marketing manager I talk to about Sales Force Automation (SFA) says that their company has to beat their sales reps over the head to get them to use it.  Here's how one of my clients describes their SFA experience:

“We spent almost half a million dollars to roll out our SFA system back in 2005, because we wanted more visibility into our pipeline so we could get better sales forecasts. We tried everything to get the reps to enter data. First we offered incentives, but that didn’t work. Then we started sending emails to the sales managers when their reps hadn’t logged in. That didn’t work either.  Now we're threatening to withhold commission checks if they don’t update their deals. So the reps wait until the night before their sales manager's meeting with the VP to make update their deals. We don't have much confidence in the data, but at least we’re getting the salespeople to log in.”

I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard someone tell a story like this about their SFA adoption struggles.

You can't blame the salespeople.  They want to be out selling, but we're asking them to be bookkeepers.  As Joe Galvin from SiriusDecisions puts it, "SFA really stands for Sales Force Accounting, since it provides management with visibility into sales but does little to help people sell." 

It's no wonder it takes a stick to get them to use it.  Stop beating them over the head.

What would your reps say if you asked:

• Has the SFA system helped you be better prepared for the dialog you need to have on sales calls?
• When was the last time you won a deal because of your SFA?
• Do you get more value out of the SFA than you put in?

The last question is the kicker.  The value meter is way out of whack.  Reps are being asked to put a lot of data in, but they're not getting an equal amount of value out.  So they stick to using the tools they value...their Blackberries and iPhones.

While an SFA system has become an absolute necessity for the management of a sales team, it has been implemented as a tool of control rather than a tool of sales enablement. Traditional SFA systems are intended to collect data about sales activities for the benefit of managers, so they can get their pipeline and forecast reports, but are not built to help a sales person sell better.

If you want people to use your SFA and keep their opportunity records updated, give them a reason to go in.  As you're discovering the messages, tools, and conversations that are proving to work for your best reps, make sure these are delivered to your sales team through the SFA.  Put your sales playbooks into the SFA.  Turn your SFA into an SEA... Sales Enablement Automation.  More on this next week.

What is SFA usage like in your company?  And what have you done to get reps to use SFA?

What Shade is Your Sales Enablement Lipstick?

Is Sales Enablement just lipstick on a knowledge management pig?  So asks Gerhard on his Selling Power blog.  He takes some potshots at sales enablement vendors and the industry analysts who cover them. Many of them are deserved, others are not. 

Maybe the question he meant to ask is "What do I have to do to get those sales enablement vendors to sponsor the Sales 2.0 conference?"  I've shared my opinions on that directly with Gerhard because I want to see those conferences prosper.

For one thing, sales enablement vendors want to sell to VPs of Sales who believe in scalability and repeatability, are willing to do the work to make it happen, and recognize the role that enabling technology can play.  They are out there, I've worked with many of them.  And one thing they know is that you can't just throw "Sales 2.0" technologies at the problem and expect sales performance to improve overnight.

Gerhard starts a great discussion about whether sales enablement can impact sales productivity, and asks if sales enablement has a future? As long as Jim Dickie's data shows 40% of reps missing quota, and Lee Levitt's research shows buyers think sales reps actually slow down their buying process...then the answer is yes.

Gerhard says that "The noble purpose of Sales Enablement companies is to help sales organizations save time finding relevant information, create and organize sales content and create quick access to all experts across the enterprise."  I disagree.  Those aren't noble, those are by-products. Not too many VPs of Sales care about content. 

The real purpose of sales enablement companies (both technology and services providers) is to help the VP of Sales address an issue that keeps him/her awake at night: "How do I scale my sales organization, to generate more revenue with fewer resources?"

As I've written here before, sales is like any other business process.  The only way to scale it cost effectively is to drive repeatable behavior.  The only way to drive repeatable behavior is to surface best practices - the activities, strategies, and conversations that are proven to work in different selling situations, so that every rep can do more of those things.  That's the role of sales enablement.

If you truly believe that best practices are not resusable, then your only choice to scale sales is to hire only gifted A players.  We know how well that works.  You've got to enable the B and C players to be incrementally better.

The sales enablement vendors all try to surface best practices, but they do it in very different ways.  Some are focused on delivering a better sales portal, some are using Web 2.0 capabilities to automate the inefficient ways sales people work today, while others allow you to guide sales reps through the customer's buying cycle using proven playbooks.  The best approach for you depends on your culture. 

Don't let the vendors fool you, there's no way to enable sales without hard work.  But I for one would rather have a sales enablement person spend one hour to save 1,000 salespeople an hour each.

Sales call problems: can you say "improvise"?

I had a big sales call today.  Thirty minutes before, I noticed I lost my internet connection.  It got worse, none of my computers had internet.  Even worse, no phone.  My whole Comcast service was out (which meant my 17 year old had no TV, yikes).

For most people, panic sets in, but not for a sales enabler.  I still had my Blackberry.  And it gave me a perfect excuse to put aside the powerpoint and just have a conversation.  Isn't that what selling is all about? 

As it turned out, the call went just fine, but it reinforced my strong opinion that the best thing we can do to enable sales people is to make sure they can carry on an in-depth conversation with the "fox" in the buyer's organization.  If I had my way, powerpoint would be banned from sales, because too many sales people hide behind it.

Tell me your story about how you've improvised instead of going into a panic when something goes wrong on a sales call.

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. 

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.