Selling Power Blog

Successful Sales Enablement: Bridging the Gap between Strategy and Execution

Today’s post is by Wendy Mack, director of consulting services for Wilson Learning Corporation. She has more than 20 years of experience in sales effectiveness, leadership, and organizational development arenas. She has co-authored three books on the topics of learning, leadership, and change.  

In working with sales organizations around the globe, I have found that everyone wants a piece of the sales force. Internal functions such as marketing, training and development, R&D, and sales operations all have information they want to get out to sales. When these functions aren’t working together, the result tends to be costly chaos.     

When working with companies, I ask three questions to help them assess whether this is an issue for them. Consider if any of the following are true for you:

1. Are various internal functions competing for your salespeople’s time?  
2. Are your salespeople receiving conflicting messages from different sources?
3. Is time being wasted in training that doesn’t drive sales?  

A Better Way – Sales Enablement

As we have all seen over the past few years, more and more companies have sought to address the information overload problem by establishing sales enablement functions. The emphasis on sales enablement grew out of what Harvard Business Review calls “the notoriously fraught relationship between sales and marketing.” As companies sought solutions for aligning sales and marketing to drive better revenue results, people started to talk about how marketing and other functions could and should enable sales.

I have encountered numerous and varying definitions of sales enablement. We view sales enablement as:

An approach that bridges the gap between the sales strategy and execution and provides the sales force with all of the information and resources they need to generate revenue.

An effective sales enablement function allows you to be deliberate and strategic in managing how information is transmitted and accessed. Of course, it’s one thing to call a person or team “sales enablement” – it’s another to actually have a positive impact on sales performance.

What Enablement Isn’t

Sales enablement is a relatively new term and many companies make the mistake of applying the new term to old ways of doing things. They rename “sales training” to “sales enablement” or they decide to create more mobile or technology-assisted selling tools and call it sales enablement. The reality is that learning and technology are important to sales enablement, but they are only parts of the equation. Focusing on any one element in a vacuum is likely to produce limited results.  

A Systems View of Sales Enablement

Based on our ongoing work in the arena of sales effectiveness, we have identified four elements that must be aligned and fully integrated for any sales enablement approach to be fully effective:  

1. Sales processes and systems  
2. Information and resources
3. Learning strategy
4. Leadership practices

When these elements are aligned in support of a clear go-to-market strategy and consistent vision for the customer experience, organizations can:

• Speed time-to-productivity for new hires
• Minimize disruption of both sales and sales support functions
• Reduce time out of the field
• Ensure consistent messages to the market, regardless of channel  
• Positively impact customers’ perception of their experience

Integrating these elements requires cross-functional dialogue, shared commitments, agreements, and accountability among multiple functions. Sales executives do not need to be experts in marketing, technology, and training. However, it is critical that they drive and facilitate alignment and coordination across all of the functions and people who support sales. We think Harvard’s Cespedes and Gartner’s Bova make the point well: “The cross-functional communication and coordination that is required to navigate this change is the job of leadership.”

Let Me Leave You with This

An effective sales enablement approach can yield increases in sales as well as cost savings. Done well, it will reduce redundancies, eliminate time spent searching for information and resources, and limit time spent out of the field. Done poorly, sales enablement is just another fad that will disappoint and then disappear.

Why Customers are the Cornerstone of Successful Sales and Marketing Teams

Today’s post is by David Kerr, COO of TinderBox. He brings more than 20 years of experience in executive management, business development, marketing, and sales.

 

The age-old angst between sales and marketing will never disappear as long as marketing leaders are driven by metrics such as leads generated – and quota attainment serves as the sole north star for sales. However, a new generation of sales and marketing leaders are emerging, bringing with them an entirely new focus on the first unified metric in selling: customers.

Since the explosive growth of CRM in the late 1990s and early 2000s, companies have sought the idea of a unified view of their customer, with teams across the organization driven to delight prospects and customers alike with a seamless experience. Today, that concept is becoming a reality as companies unify teams, metrics, and focus around the customer.

In working with world-class sales and marketing teams around the world, there are four key concepts that make customer focus a reality. Here’s a quick overview of each and how teams can begin to integrate each into daily operations.

Create an Ideal Customer Profile

Historically, sales and marketing teams are among the most expensive organizations in a company, with companies like Salesforce investing as much as 53 percent of its revenue in sales and marketing. Not every company can – or should – devote half of its revenue to sales and marketing. The rapid expansion of marketing tech has improved marketing’s ability to measure efficiency, but friction still remains: while sales measures one set of metrics, marketing often measures another.

To overcome this challenge, companies should create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), with sales and marketing working together to create an ICP that includes a list of attributes that signal the best prospects and customers. Creating an ICP provides both teams with a set of common attributes and metrics, allowing marketing to search for and deliver the most qualified leads and sales to close customers that are the best long-term fit for the business. In addition to aligning more closely and driving better deals through the pipeline, sales and marketing can move from a cost center to a profit center.

Set Common Metrics

The most important element for any company – regardless of size – is consistency. Once a common set of metrics has been established, it’s critical to keep them as consistent as possible, adding new metrics only to improve the overall success of the business.

Chasing the latest KPIs makes it difficult to measure company health over time. Focusing on the fundamentals is key. Is a company retaining customers? How much is it costing to keep them? Is product adoption stable and rising? These are the core questions company leaders answer – quarter over quarter, year over year – to measure long-term company success. Common and consistent metrics also allow sales leaders to compare their companies with others in their industries, providing a benchmark of best-in-class organizations. This provides a way to examine metrics and methods against competitors and peers, and adjust as necessary.

Develop a Customer Timeline

Companies should abandon the notion of a “sales and marketing timeline.” It’s about the customer – not about you. Sales and marketing must prioritize creating a healthy customer experience. A customer timeline focuses on the teams using the same language, creating the best content for prospects, and concentrating on client success to ensure long-term retention. If marketing can understand what prospect traits make the best closed-won deal, and sales can understand which prospects are ideal initial leads, both teams will increase sales and close more, better deals.

Remember, Buyers Are People

With all the talk of metrics, KPIs, and timelines, it’s easy to lose sight of customers as people. Successful companies build relationships, manage expectations, and solve problems together. The goal of both sales and marketing is to find, nurture, and close deals. But the work doesn’t stop there. A company must create a healthy business transaction and a healthy business relationship over time. From marketing materials to sales development and the late-stage sales process, each step must focus on a customer’s unique pain points, working with them to solve them, and building a partnership that enables a customer to achieve sustainable growth.

Monthly and quarterly goals are important, but they should serve to bolster the viability of a business for years to come. Sales and marketing are critical to this. Giving them the tools to work together in a frictionless environment will not only improve a company’s business, but the business of its customers.

What’s Ahead for Sales Organizations in 2016?

Today’s post is by Mark Magnacca, president and cofounder of Allego.

 

 

It’s been another year of twists and turns for sales professionals. In early 2015, Forrester predicted 1 million U.S. B2B sales jobs would be lost by 2020. Six months later, the wave of panic died down when a subsequent Forrester report stated it wasn’t that sales reps would be laid off by the masses, but rather the type of sales skills required to best service modern B2B buyers would shift. How you prepare your sales force for the future is now more important than ever.

Here are our predictions on the five trends that will shape sales in 2016.

Trend #1: Training event budgets will decrease.

Studies show that, within 90 days of a training event, 80 percent or more of the information given during the event is forgotten. But the national sales meeting isn’t going away any time soon. Instead, companies will shift funds to emphasize ongoing coaching and training. Sales organizations are catching on to the fact that practice and coaching are key to message absorption, increasing win rates, and implementing methods and tools to reinforce learning.

Trend #2: Video will emerge as a pervasive sales enablement tool.  

Studies show that employees spend about 45 minutes a day watching video, with this number likely to double in 2016. Modern sales organizations are already harnessing the power of video to give sales teams a competitive advantage in capturing, curating, and sharing best practices from the field, as well as onboarding reps and providing ongoing coaching to sales reps. Video’s accessibility and ease of use – particularly when coupled with mobile technology – allows sales reps instant access to relevant content they need, when they need it. Knowing that more than 4 billion videos are viewed on YouTube every day, it makes sense that video is being embraced in the workplace.

Trend #3: Social selling will become ubiquitous.

We know that social media is an incredibly powerful tool for identifying and researching prospects, which is why – for several years now – the trend of social selling has been popping up on year-end predictions lists. However, all selling is social, which is why we’ve never differentiated between “networking-with-friends selling” or “going-to-networking-events selling.” Social selling will become a standard practice, so much that the label “social” will eventually get dropped and it simply becomes just another part of selling.

Trend #4: Sales and marketing teams will become more closely aligned.

The success of your sales organization depends on this interlock. Teams are realizing their co-dependence, and actually beginning to embrace it. Sales teams need collateral and content generated by marketing to drive and convert leads. To better craft content, marketing needs sales to provide customer insights, objections raised, and competitive intelligence. Sure, there will always be finger pointing between sales and marketing, but it will be balanced with high-fives.

Trend #5: Org charts and reporting structures will morph.

As the alignment between sales and marketing becomes stronger, we’ll see new roles pop up – like sales enablement director – that bridge the gap between the two departments. Furthermore, roles will continue to shift, with more CMOs overseeing sales as well as marketing. Even in organizations with a dedicated head of sales, it will become increasingly common for inside sales teams to report to the CMO. These shifts reinforce the importance of establishing regular and open dialogue between sales and marketing.

With better collaboration, training, and technology, smart organizations set themselves on a path to capture market share in the New Year. The year 2016 is anyone’s game – and it can be yours.

Silent Revolutionaries: The Death of Field Sales

Today’s post is by Justin Roff-Marsh, founder and president of Ballistix and author of the new book, The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function. He is also the editor of the popular Sales Process Engineering blog, which can be found at www.salesprocessengineering.net.

 

The days of face-to-face selling are numbered for most organizations. Most customers don’t want it – and most businesses simply can’t afford it!

1. Customers are smarter: with instant access to whatever data they need.
2. Technology has rendered face-to-face meetings less necessary: there’s the phone, Web conferences and, yes, even webinars!
3. The market’s more competitive: customers might still like relationships, but they are less prepared than ever to pay for them.
   

Sales today is an inside endeavor, supported – in some cases – by discrete field activities.

Still not convinced? Follow one of your field salespeople around for a week. You’ll probably discover that your field salesperson spends less than 10 percent of his or her time in the field. The balance of the time will be spent in an office of some kind (your head office, a branch office, a home office, or a makeshift office in the back seat of a rental car). If my prediction is correct, you’ll probably conclude that your salesperson is not really a field salesperson at all, but an inside salesperson who performs occasional field activities.

Ask yourself the following: If you are making a purchase, is your default starting point to look for a person who can come and visit with you in the field? I suspect not! It’s more likely that your first instinct will be to turn to a medium that enables you to purchase with no human contact whatsoever. Today, customers are no longer isolated from their vendors. Vendors’ organizations are as close as the nearest Web browser.

If you need to communicate with a human in order to make your purchase, you’d probably prefer a phone conversation rather than a face-to-face visit. And, even when a face-to-face visit is critical, that’s not where the conversation will start. You’re more likely to start with online research. Then, at your leisure, you’ll have one or more conversations with telephone advisors.

Although it’s clear that, at some point, you’ll schedule one or more face-to-face meetings, you will likely defer these meetings until you absolutely need them.

If sales is a battle, the new front line is inside. And if we agree on that, then the only logical choice is to build a new inside-out approach to closing deals!

This requires:

1. The centralization of customer service and account management: the handling of simple transactions, quotations, and resolution of customer inquiries and issues. Under no circumstances is this done by the sales team (their only job is to sell!).
2. A shift from outbound to inbound marketing: the generation of inbound opportunities via online (SEM, SM, SEO, email, webinars, etc.) and traditional media.
3. A transitioning of most sales activities from the field to an inside team. An inside salesperson can comfortably have 30 meaningful selling interactions (including email) a day, whereas a field salesperson will work hard to average four meetings. If you insist each prospect accepts a field visit, you are turning your back on a number of potential selling interactions you would otherwise not get.
4. Add field resources only as they are required. Opportunities that genuinely require field representation should be performed by a field specialist or BDM. A field specialist is a person who supports inside sales by performing discrete field activities. These activities are likely to be technical or semi-technical in nature. As with inside sales, the BDM is responsible for winning new accounts and selling materially different services to existing accounts.  

It’s critical to acknowledge that, for this new approach to work, your inside sales team members must be viewed and treated as true salespeople – equivalent in every sense to the type of person you would otherwise have in the field. They are knowledgeable, ambitious, and engaging. And they are paid roughly what they would expect to earn if they were field salespeople. They can also be trained more easily because you have team members operating in close proximity to one another.

By eliminating or reducing the traditional role of a field sales team, you can better envision the kind of sales function that will support your (and most likely, your customers’) preferred approach to purchasing and, therefore, dramatically increase sales opportunities and results.

3 Sales Presentation Trends You Can't Afford to Ignore

Today’s post is by Julie Hansen, founder of Performance Sales and Training and the author of ACT Like a Sales Pro! and Sales Presentations for Dummies. Download two free chapters here. Connect with Julie on LinkedIn or email [email protected].

 

Kodak, Blockbuster, Blackberry. These are just a few examples of companies that chose not to react to key trends in buyer behavior. Each company suffered costly – and in some cases, irreparable – consequences.

If you deliver presentations or product demos, you’ve likely noticed some changes in your prospects’ behavior: increased number of distractions, unapologetic use of smartphones or tablets, and greater resistance to change. It’s not your imagination. A significant shift is taking place in buyers’ behavior today that is directly impacting your prospects’ ability to hear your message, remember it, or take action on it. If you’re still using presentation techniques that were developed before the words “smart” and “phone” became a noun, you may wake up to find you’re a Blockbuster in a Netflix world.

In my new book, Sales Presentations for Dummies, I explore several key trends you can’t afford to ignore in your presentation or demo today, including these three:

• Falling attention spans. The attention span of the average adult is half what it was just a decade ago. From texting to tweeting to getting their news, people consume information in bite-size pieces today. You only have to look at your own habits to recognize this behavioral change. Unfortunately, this new way of digesting information is at complete odds with the long, linear way most sales presentations are designed and delivered.

• Increased distractions. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. Tablets, smartphones, and wearables are here to stay – and they’re a major cause of distraction in your presentation. But it’s not just technology that’s the problem. Your prospect arrives at your presentation with a number of things on her mind – the least of which may be you! Winning the mindshare of your prospect is your first order of business today if you want to ensure your message lands on its target. 

• Competing with the status quo. Your fiercest competitor today is often not another vendor, but the status quo. As solutions become more complex and decisions produce greater consequences, prospects become more risk-averse. Change can bring up fear and anxiety – powerful emotions that are not easily cast aside by a parade of your best features and benefits.

Delivering a winning presentation or demo in today’s changing selling environment requires new strategies and skills. Here are some strategies for addressing these three trends:

1. Chunk your message.
   Instead of structuring your message around how your solution works, break it into small, bite-size chunks that align with the average attention span of 5 to 7 minutes. Attention isn’t constant, so you need to re-engage your audience at strategic points in your presentation to make sure key messages aren’t falling on deaf ears. I recommend having an engagement plan that defines how and when you’re going to engage your audience.
   
   
2. Cut to the chase.
   Give your prospect an immediate and compelling reason to put their smartphone aside. Dump the company overview and take a tip from the movies: start with the car chase. What’s the car chase in your presentation or demo? It could be a key issue, an insight, or a custom value proposition framed in a unique and relevant way that intrigues your prospect without giving away the entire plot.
   
   
3. Explore impact.
   A thorough understanding of what’s keeping your prospect from changing their existing solution – and the potential impact or consequences of sticking with it – is necessary when competing against the status quo. With that understanding, craft a message that addresses that fear or anxiety before jumping into your solution. Telling a spot-on analogy is a very effective method for shifting a prospect’s perspective and softening his resistance to change.

Your prospects are not the same as they were 10 years ago, so neither should your sales presentation.

Download two free chapters from my new book Sales Presentations for Dummies, plus get monthly tips and tactics on how to meet the demands of presenting today.