Hey sales leaders: What do you think is the purpose of enablement? Allow me to confound that expectation.
Your answer probably includes sales onboarding — ramping new hires quickly.
It may include keeping reps abreast of all the changes — new releases, new campaigns, new processes, etc.
And some of you may include doing periodic training on your …
Hey sales leaders: Who does your enablement team report to? The answer reveals the value you place on enablement.
There’s plenty of lively debate here in LinkedIn about whether SDRs should report into sales or marketing. But I don’t recall ever having seen a discussion about where the enablement team should live.
So I’ll take a swing …
Hey sales leaders: Want to improve a specific skill among reps? The solution probably isn’t a training on that specific skill.
Imagine teaching someone how to grill a steak without also making sure they know how to choose the right steak, turn on the grill to the appropriate setting, choose the right utensils, and move the …
Hey sales leaders: You’re looking for ways to cut costs on the sales tools that aren’t delivering. Before you do, here’s an idea to squeeze more juice out of them than you thought possible.
You bought a sales tool to address a particular need — and it may or may not be yielding results on that …
Hey sales leaders: Competitive intelligence is not the same as competitive readiness.
If your company has more than a few hundred employees, there’s probably someone in marketing responsible for monitoring and collecting competitive intelligence.
They gather lots of info about your competitors: product releases, pricing, leadership, logos, and often even product differentiators.
This is all important and valuable …
Competitive intelligence vs competitive readiness Read More »
Hey sales leaders: Do you struggle to get customer win stories in the hands of your reps? Try this.
Reps love having stories they can tell about how your company helped Customer X to A, B, and C. These stories are powerful proof points for prospective customers that you can do what you say you can …
Hey sales leaders: The way your ops team creates reports and dashboards is probably fine for forecasting, but it’s mostly useless for improving rep performance.
The “official” reports and dashboards created for sales orgs are almost always snapshots for the current quarter or fiscal year. They show the static number for the pipeline generated, the current …
Hey sales leaders: Stop training your reps so much.
Many sales orgs treat training is the best and only solution to performance gaps.
Reps aren’t selling to high enough personas? Train ’em.
Reps are only sending quotes, not solution proposals? Train ’em.
Reps aren’t using the tools you’ve bought for them? Train ’em.
But here’s the rub: Training is often …
Hey sales leaders: Your enablement team probably doesn’t know enough about your reps.
You expect your sellers to intimately understand their customers — the customers’ priorities, challenges, incentives, etc. Do you similarly expect your enablement team to intimately understand THEIR customers — that is, reps and managers?
One of the significant limitations of many enablement orgs is …
Hey sales leaders: If you’re not seeing the kind of performance among reps that you think they’re capable of, your enablement org is probably partially responsible. But there’s an element of the blame that is squarely on you.
Let me explain.
Anybody who’s been around sales for more than 30 seconds knows that if you want sellers …
