12
Sales Enablement Best Practices
PEOPLE USE THE term “sales enablement” in many different ways. Here we are focusing on some of the capabilities and best practices that deliver the biggest benefits for both frontline and senior sales managers. All of the capabilities described below can be implemented separately, or you can subscribe to a platform that offers some combination.
Micro Learning
Whether you need to change the tail-light on your car, tune a guitar, or change your pranked iPhone from Korean back to English, you can learn how to do just about anything on YouTube within about 5 minutes. We have all come to expect that, because it is on-demand and highly efficient. Sales training today should be just the same when deploying e-learning or video.
Video
We believe that the core of sales management is sales coaching. Much of this book talks about how to deliver skills training in face-to-face situations. It's about explanation, demonstration, practice, and repetition. Video is one of the most impactful technologies to have come out of sales enablement so far. If you have budget, you can subscribe to one of the sales coaching video platforms. If not, you can use a share site or even email.
If you attempt to implement a commercial video coaching platform, be aware of three ways in which it can fail: (a) sales leadership does not hold salespeople accountable to submit their videos; (b) sales leadership does not hold sales managers accountable for reviewing the video submissions and providing timely feedback; (c) sales managers cannot provide competent feedback because they don't know the skills themselves. Make sure you have those ducks in a row and your video initiative will be a screaming success.
We recommend using video in several ways.
Video Rehearsal
First, you select a skill and record a video of a top performer demonstrating the skill. Next, learners receive an email inviting them to participate in a video rehearsal. They view a demonstration of a sales skill and a job aid that displays the sales process at play in the video demonstration. Their assignment is to record themselves demonstrating the same skill. If they're unsatisfied with a take, they can delete it and do it over. We know that, on average, salespeople will record themselves seven times before submitting a final version. Seven times! Until now, the only way we knew of to get a salesperson to do 10 push-ups was if we were in the same room with them. This is a game-changer, because people practice their skills independently, but we have access to the end result. Upon submission, the video will be reviewed by the sales manager who will provide feedback via video. If the performance is suboptimal, they can do it again. The best videos can be put on a leaderboard to establish a reference library of top performers.
You can also use video to record two people conducting a video rehearsal remotely. The person who is submitting the video will record themselves as usual, but they will bring in a partner on speakerphone or video chat (on a separate device). Think about how precise the sales coaching activities are that we have described in this book. Everything is broken down into its parts and then reassembled. When rehearsal activities fail, it is usually because there was not enough precision in the sales process, the scenario, the instructions, and the amount of time allocated. Keep it crisp.
Assessments and Certifications
When using video for rehearsal, you can give the salesperson an unlimited number of attempts and they upload the version they're satisfied with. But you can also use it in a different mode in which they only get one chance. This is more suited to a certification or final assessment. If you have your sales process broken down effectively, you can certify your salespeople on every skill using video.
Sales Manager and Marketing Channels
Another way to use video is to give private channels to sales leaders so they can send out messages to the troops whenever they want to. Some managers send personal welcome/thank you videos to new customers. We also recommend using it for product and market updates.
Micro Learning Delivery
Because video is so fast and easy to make, it opens up the number of teachers and coaches you can leverage throughout the organization. Top-performing salespeople can demonstrate skills and share success stories and best practices. Product people can give the latest updates, and marketing people can let the salespeople know what they are doing to generate leads.
Web Conferencing and Video Chat
We take these tools for granted, but they are powerful sales management tools if you manage a remote team. Web conferencing can be used for huddles, team meetings, and goal-setting meetings. Video chat can be used for check-ins and remote skill development training. If your remote team is in the habit of using audio-only conference calls, consider making the switch to video conferences.
Competency Assessment Tools
Back in the horse and buggy days, we did not really use sales competency models, but they were implied in the learning objectives for sales training. In other words, if you could perform all the sales skills in the field or on the phone, then you were competent. It's extremely helpful, however, to document your competency model because it then serves as the single source of truth for the sales process and its application in different scenarios, quality assurance standards for contact centers, the sales coaching rubric, the ongoing sales training agenda, and sales readiness assessments.
Where do competencies come from? They are the behaviors known to drive optimal sales results. We typically look at competencies in terms of four buckets: our customers and markets; our company and products; sales technology and strategy; and sales skills. Each competency is broken down into five levels. The desired level of competence across the sales force is a three. Anyone scoring below three in any area will be assigned learning activities to close the gap. People who emerge at levels four and five are flagged as mentors.
Scoring takes place periodically, for example annually, biannually, or quarterly. Both the salesperson and the sales manager rate the salesperson on each competency and then have a conversation about the results. You can imagine that these conversations are impactful because they highlight the differences in perception between the salesperson and the sales manager, and they challenge the sales manager to be precise about what constitutes competence. Periodic assessments produce a heat map across the sales organization. You can use this data to drive the training agenda for regional or national sales meetings and for creating micro learning.
If you implement a competency assessment tool, be prepared for the fact that it will force salespeople and sales managers to calibrate. Let's face it, whatever sales process and methodology you promote at your company, there's probably a spectrum of adoption. In other words, some people use all of it, some people use none of it, and there are a whole lot of salespeople in between. If you're going to create a sales competency model, it is best to bring your sales managers and top-performing salespeople in at the very start to document those competencies. If you do it this way, you'll have less calibrating to do on the back end.
Field Coaching Tools
Contact centers use online quality assurance tools, and in this book we have pictured printed forms for documenting performance feedback. For field sales, we recommend using a phone- or tablet-based performance feedback tool that captures the scenario, circumstance, or type of sales call and the salesperson's performance through each phase of the customer interaction. The benefit of doing this electronically rather than on paper is that it brings all the results together in one place so that once again, as with the assessment tool described above, you can see the heat map of opportunities. You can compare your salespeople to one another. You can do some trend analysis and see if they're making improvements. Senior sales leaders get visibility into the quality and quantity of coaching that is being delivered by their sales managers. Once again, this forces a moment of truth in which the sales management team has an opportunity to calibrate on expectations.
Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence
Machine learning/artificial intelligence are in the early stages when it comes to analyzing and coaching sales performance, but very promising. Audio-analysis of telephone calls reveal factors that impact sales performance. For example, rate of speech, percentage of time spent talking vs. listening, verbal ticks, and even emotional analysis. You can also search recorded calls for keywords, so you can drill down into multiple conversations where specific topics were discussed. A sales manager can use this data to provide coaching, but a salesperson could also use the data to improve their own performance. For example, research from the Gong company across millions of calls reveals that lower-performing salespeople increase their rate of speech when they encounter an objection. In other words, they get nervous, they speed up, and they are less effective at overcoming the concern. Top-performing salespeople do the exact opposite. When the customer raises an objection, they go into slow motion because they are seeking first to understand, and they are confident in the response they will bring about once they have given the customer a chance to express themselves freely.
Analytics
How do you measure the return on investment for sales training and coaching? In a contact center it is relatively easy. Everyone is in one place and can be observed at any time. You can select a pilot group, train them, and coach them to competence with the types of activities we've described in Chapter 11 as well as throughout the rest of the book. In field sales it can be a little more difficult. Analytics dashboards provide the ability to plot learning activities against sales results. This allows you to analyze questions like: “Do salespeople become more effective when they receive more coaching? Which managers drive the best results from their coaching? What do they do differently in terms of the mix of coaching activities, and the manner in which they do them? What other learning activities (e.g. video rehearsals or watching top-performer best-practice videos) have the biggest positive impact on results?”