A Blueprint to Saving the Drowning Parts of Your Sales Team

20% of your salespeople are producing 80% of the revenue.

So any sales leader interested in training, coaching, and enablement, would inevitably ask the question: what do I do with the 80% of sellers who aren’t producing most of the revenue?

Reaching peak sales productivity hinges on the optimization of people, processes, and technology through sales enablement.

As the new Global Head of Sales Enablement at Board International, that’s my whole job — to increase the productivity of our sales reps.

What I learned in my 15+ years of selling enterprise software, closing multiple 7-figure deals, authoring several books, and teaching collegiate sales courses is the foundation of my enablement framework: all reps need to become masters of the buying process.

Whether you’re new to a sales enablement leadership role or a start-up founder looking to scale, you need a sales enablement approach that empowers your team at the rep level.

Here is my blueprint for how you can start.

What is “rep-level” sales enablement?

“Rep-level” sales enablement is more than generic trainings and whitepapers. It’s a term I coined to refer to enablement that provides highly-targeted support, resources, and training to sellers at an individual level.

To successfully reach the sales rep, I prescribe a ground-up revision of sales management that always starts by fully enabling the leaders directly involved with reps

Each one needs to be a sounding board of the enablement content, a coach of the preferred sales methodology, and an advocate for collaboration.

Keep this in mind as you work through the framework below! 

My Step-by-Step Framework for Sales Enablement

Step 1: Define Success

When I became the Global Head of Sales Enablement at Board, I knew first we had to agree on the definition of “productive”. The simplest definition is more revenue, but leaders should get more specific — starting from the company’s top-level goals and working downwards.

Is the company’s priority market penetration? Product expansion? Acquisition? Retention?

Once I understood how the company was measuring success I developed the KPIs around the following:

• Pipeline growth rate
• Pipeline value
• Opportunity time in stage
• Revenue attainment

Leveraging our own software and its connection to Salesforce, our sales operations team created individual dashboards that not only allowed us to track performance, but to get a gauge on whether or not our enablement endeavors are working.

Step 2: Create an Inventory of Enablement Lessons

Now, it’s time to build the meat of your sales enablement program.

Before rolling out enablement and building up champions internally, one must first measure the current state of the business and create materials that reps can learn and refer back to.

Let’s look at how you might build an enablement lesson around how your reps should talk about price: 

1. Get your arms around meaningful data.

What does the data reveal? Are your average seller’s deals sold with higher discounts than the top? Is the mean discount varied by region? Deals are too small? Too long to close? Not enough SKUs per transaction? Customer expansion, presuming it’s desired, is low?

2. What are the key questions that enablement can address?

What’s your pricing positioning? Is it resonating with customers? In closed-won deals, when are reps bringing up price? 

3. Identify the enablement medium. 

Now is when you choose the proper technology, tools, and enablement materials. In this case, I may choose:

• Webinar (30-60 minutes): Reveal the data, announce the impact on the business, and explain how to discuss the price to mitigate the issue.

• Video (5-8 minutes): A quick and concise step-by-step on how to discuss price

• Regional meetings (15-30 minutes): Attend the weekly sales meetings for each region and lead a discussion about the issue and the training about discussing price. Take notes of the questions and challenges as knowing the pulse of the sales teams will help you improve the enablement writ large.

4. Roll out the materials.

Now, to share what you've built! 

Schedule the enablement sessions, record any training videos, and create any slides. Find the experts in your company who can help create the collateral you need and make the changes to technology (e.g. Apollo.io, Salesforce, your CRM) to track and launch.

One of the most important things you can do during this process is to keep and ensure an “open-door policy” for sellers and sales leadership. Make yourself available for any and all questions and feedback.

Below is a list of other enablement items I recommend every enablement team offers:

• Understanding the buying and selling processes 
• How your sales methodology works
• How to pitch your product or service
• How to run a meeting and secure the next step
• How to ask great questions
• How to prep for a QBR 
• How to tell a compelling story
• How to build pipeline
• How to communicate with buyers
• How to handle objections

Step 3: Secure Rep Buy-In

One of the biggest challenges practitioners of sales enablement face is getting buy-in from the salespeople themselves.

Great leaders get their reps to listen by doing precisely what we all tell our sellers to do with their buyers: earn trust and be liked. That means: 1) showing empathy 2) listening carefully 3) and demonstrating value. 

For example, any new enablement may create doubt or resistance with sellers. Make them feel heard, ask them questions on their hesitancies, then give them a reason to see things from your perspective. Play them a sales call where you yourself tried the approach and it worked. Walk them through a customer success story. Find an individual on the sales team who has a positive experience with what you're proposing and can speak to it.

Step 4: Identify and Leverage Allies

As your enablement program scales, you’ll need to identify and leverage the right “allies” at every stage.

Allies are the various people throughout the org that will help with: 

• Developing enablement success outcomes and taking ownership
• Measuring and tracking leading indicators from the sales enablement program
• Providing feedback on roadblocks and successes of the sales enablement program

For example, as you develop your sales enablement program, look to Marketing to help you develop messaging and scripts for your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Lean on Product to fill you in on updates and launches and on Executive Leadership to shape desired outcomes and timelines to consider. 

Through deployment, use sales managers and their knowledge of active deals to understand:

• Objection handling: Does the seller demonstrate competence?
• Value qualification: Are we using metrics and data to demonstrate how our services can help our buyers realize their desired outcomes?
• Collaboration with others: Are reps talking to pre-sales, customer service, delivery, etc.?
• Content usage: Are our assets being leveraged to help buyers define their needs and map them to our capabilities?

And finally, don’t forget about your customer experience team! I recommend the use of customer feedback/reviews and post-sales surveys/interviews to learn if the buyer felt the seller was competent and demonstrated value and what you can do better in the next iteration.

It would honor me to hear how the use of these initiatives, and others, have shaped your organization. Do not hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn.