Six Boxes Sales Enablement White Paper 2020

Optimizing Sales Performance Defining, Supporting, and Managing Your Best Practices Sales Process with The Performance Thinking ® Approach A White Paper from The Performance Thinking Network Carl Binder © The Performance Thinking Network www.PerformanceThinking.com Sales Enablement: How do we do it? The phrase sales enablement has become a standard term in the language of those who support sales performance. In 2012 there were 37 LinkedIn groups with this phrase in their titles, in 2020 there are 233. There are countless software companies, products, consultancies, and online resources that include sales enablement in their names, descriptions, or value propositions. It’s a great phrase for marketing products and services, but, like many such catch phrases, means different things to different people. The term first came to our attention during the 1990’s when my former training and consulting firm, Product Knowledge Systems, Inc., was a pioneer in the field of sales knowledge management, performance-based training, and sales performance support. In that era, many sales and marketing automation products, books, conferences and experts exploded into the marketplace, most claiming to be the next big thing. There were many flavors-of-the-month (or year). Often the marketing messages obscured an underlying question: How do we do sales enablement in the most cost- effective way? Beyond Sales Training: Optimizing ROI The good news about the phrase sales enablement is that it points beyond sales training to a more holistic, combined set of factors needed to support or enable sales success. It counters the knee-jerk assumption that training is a sufficient intervention for improving performance, an assumption that virtually never holds true. While companies have always invested large sums, year in and year out, to educate and train their sales people, they have not always reaped the best possible return on those investments. That ROI depends to a large extent on how well they set expectations for their people and on what combinations of interventions, other than training, they put in place to support sales success. Those enabling factors come from sales organizations themselves, from product and marketing groups, sales training, IT, field operations teams, and sometimes from other sources within and outside the organization. Perhaps more than most business functions, sales organizations recognize and actively fund all kinds of interventions intended to accelerate results, including online tools, coaching and manager development, aggressive incentive and reward systems, customer materials, outreach programs, and more. For this reason, it’s often much easier to bring sales trainers, sales managers, executives, and field operations groups together with a focus on the same business results: sales revenues, sales efficiency, customer retention, and so on. However, what we’ve noticed over several decades is that, despite such efforts to coordinate different groups and functions across silos, the parts don’t always fit together to produce desired results in the most cost-effective way. While companies have always invested large sums, year in and year out, to educate and train their sales people, they have not always reaped the best possible Challenges for Sales Enablement There are at least three challenges that any organization responsible for sales enablement must address, and the success with which they address them will determine ROI: Challenge 1 – Defining expected sales performance: It’s remarkable how many large companies lack a documented, consistently implemented sales process based on what their most successful people do. Many sales organizations adopt what I would call “generic” models of the sales process, describing either face-to-face interactions or enterprise-level account management. Such classic sales books as SPIN ® Selling and Solution Selling are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sales effectiveness literature. And the models described in those books have become standards for countless sales organizations. While such models provide helpful guidelines for sales training and coaching, they are seldom sufficiently detailed nor specific to describe the milestones that sales professionals must achieve to successfully close deals with their particular products in their particular markets. Most companies lack such detailed “maps” to sales success. Sales automation and customer relationship management software usually require sales operations groups to define stages in the pipeline from unqualified sales leads to closed deals and repeat business. Even many small companies nowadays have sales pipeline management software that supposedly steps sales representatives and sales managers through the process. Upon closer inspection, however, such pipeline definitions might not always be as helpful as they appear. One of the most common areas of weakness is that sales pipelines, as defined in many companies, comprise a series of completed activities, not defined outcomes or accomplishments. For example, we often see such activities as customer meeting completed or demonstrate personal capability rather than list of verified customer needs or decision-makers who seek our advice. In these examples, the first two are descriptions of activities, while the second two are accomplishments produced by those activities. Sales automation systems often encourage this approach of reporting on activities rather than on accomplishments or achievements. But sales activities are costly, while sales accomplishments have value because they mark progress toward sales revenue. Thus, one key for optimizing ROI in the sales process is to focus sales people on achieving valuable accomplishments, not merely on engaging in costly activities. In the sales literature there is a classic distinction between sales calls that “advance” the sale, versus those that merely “continue” the process. This is the same distinction that we’re making here between achieving important milestones or benchmarks that represent progress, and engaging in activity that might or might not be making a difference. One of the most common areas of weakness is that sales pipelines, as defined in many companies, comprise a series of completed activities, not defined accomplishments. © 2012, 2020 The Performance Thinking Network, LLC Bainbridge Island, WA USA www.PerformanceThinking.com 2 One of many problems arising from descriptions of sales processes based on activities is that it is often difficult to determine unambiguously when one activity is complete and the next one has begun. A metrics specialist from the National Sales Operations group in one of our client companies expressed his frustration over the fact that different sales people and managers in his company define activities differently, so that indicators of pipeline progress become subject to wide interpretation, thus are not easily measured. What we need is an unambiguous description or map of the process that sales people, sales managers, and sales enablement groups can use to monitor progress from one milestone or achievement to the next, and coordinate efforts in a consistent, efficient way to help sales people move toward closed business. Challenge 2 – Identifying and enabling best practices strategies and tactics: In organizations that define sales performance, or process, mostly as a series of activities, it is tempting to focus on best practices sales behavior – those strategies and tactics that the most successful people use. We’ve seen many organizations with long documents or PowerPoint decks that describe key activities thought to comprise effective sales in those organizations. These organizations deliver training and coaching focused on behavior. However, without clear milestones that define the end of each set of activities (e.g., qualified lead, request for proposal, contract ready to sign), it is often difficult to see when a given activity is being successful, or how it can be improved. Activity itself becomes the focus, rather than the results or accomplishments produced at each step along the way. To define best practices, we need to have a crisp understanding of what they are “best” at producing, what outcomes they achieve more efficiently or effectively than other possible strategies and tactics. Simply reporting the activities of sales people who exceed their numbers is unlikely to capture true best practices because even the very best sales people usually have strengths and weaknesses across the full range of activities and milestones in any relatively complex sales process. Before we can identify best practices, we need to understand what each practice is trying to achieve, who more consistently or more frequently achieves that milestone, and what tasks and tactics distinguish their performance from average performance in achieving each milestone in the sales process. Many sales organizations talk about best sales practices, and try to emulate them. But few have effective ways of identifying them for their sales teams in their particular competitive sales environments. If sales organizations are to keep up with the competition in today’s fast-moving business environments, they must have a way of identifying new best practices as they emerge, to take advantage of what their more innovative sales teams and individuals learn through winning and losing day-to-day. Activity itself becomes the focus, rather than the results or accomplishments produced at each step along the way. © 2012, 2020 The Performance Thinking Network, LLC Bainbridge Island, WA USA www.PerformanceThinking.com 3