The Sales Enabler - Jeff Ernst - Sales Enablement Best Practices

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.

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.

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.

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.

CSO Insights Sales Performance Optimization report finds that sales performance continues to decline

The CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Report is out, and the results of their annual survey of 1,800 firms are not pretty:

• 41% of sales reps are failing to make quota
• Companies on average are hitting 86% of plan
• 15% of reps are turned over
• 70% of reps are taking 7 months or more to ramp up

• 86% of companies have higher sales targets in 2009

You can get a copy of the report here.

Here's a great excerpt from the executive summary:

We do not believe that success in 2009 will be achieved by making more sales calls. The number of calls—face-to-face meetings or on the phone—has already been increasing over the past few years with minimal impact on sales results. The real objective is going to be how to make great calls: motivating stakeholders to meet with you; creating a sense of urgency that moves evaluating your solutions to the top of their priority list; differentiating yourself from the competition; selling value (so you can avoid discounting); creating a compelling business case to get the project approved now.

These will require your salespeople to be more effective at selling than they were in 2008. So what are you going to do to support them in this endeavor? You may think you can cut your way to sales effectiveness: spend less on sales training; get by with fewer sales support personnel; avoid investing in CRM technologies; ask each of your sales managers to take on managing more reps and/or reduce travel budgets. Think again. You may reduce expenses, but you will see revenues and margins fall as well.

2009 needs to be about investing your way to sales effectiveness. If freeing up more money to support sales is not an option, then look at how you are investing the current dollars you have allocated. For example, if your budget calls for adding five salespeople, consider hiring one or two, and investing the rest of the budget in making the people you already have much more productive.