Cory Bray, Hilmon Sorey: The Sales Enablement Playbook

Sales Enablement Is an Ecosystem

Sales Enablement is the concept of extending a prospect-centric mindset to all departments within an organization.

Sales enablement is meant to be applied as an ecosystem — not a technique, a role or a technology platform exclusively, though each of these plays a part.

Additionally, “sales development rep” (SDR) refers to someone who prospects and starts a sales conversation (opener), whereas “account executive” (AE) is a closer.

The Evolution of Sales Enablement

In 2010, research firm Forrester published a 20-page analysis that announced “Sales Enablement Is the Bridge Between Go-to-Market Strategy and Tactical Execution”.

The Internet rapidly changed B2B sales. Where a trusted adviser relationship, expertise, and availability won the day previously, sales reps now had to adapt to a nimble and well – informed buyer with access to many options.

The sales enablement position in most cases is like the “Special Projects” role in large organizations, and often it devolves into “Director of Broken Things”—without influence, without budget, without accountability and without charter.

Create a culture that views sales enablement as a company-wide ecosystem. Develop specific goals for each department related to how they can enable sales and avoid “sales disablement” activities. Define metrics that will track the success of enablement activities.

Sales Process

A sales process is a set of clearly defined steps and methods of communication between a company and its prospects. Too much process kills sales teams BUT Sales teams die without process.

Here’s what most sales teams need:

Clear Stages
A CRM
Tech Stack
Tech Stack Integrations
Product Editions
General Messaging
Demo Scripts

The sales process is always in one of three states: humming, experimenting and thrashing.

Experimenting – If the process isn’t humming, the best way to get it there is to run rapid experiments and continuously improve.

Thrashing – If process improvement is a constant point of discussion, you might be a start – up climbing the revenue ramp or you might have a culture problem.

Three different types of sales: transactional, advanced and complex.

Stages for a transactional sale might include the following:

Qualification
Evaluation
Proposal

Stages for an advanced sale might include the following:

Qualification
Evaluation Setup
Evaluation
Proposal
Closing

Complex sales. An example of this process might be:

Qualification
Preliminary Evaluation
Executive Presentation
Proof of Concept
Proposal
Committee Review
Closing

Another key tactic to enable a sales team is to implement stage exit criteria, which are requirements for a deal to move from one stage to the next.

Actionable intelligence includes:

Competitors
Pain

Decision Makers Actionable intelligence does not include:

Street address
Fax number (yes, some people still enter this data)
Anything else that a salesperson has not specifically acted upon in the last six months at your company

Aside from adding too much complexity, two behaviors that destroy the ability to analyze data are overusing free-form text and changing fields too frequently.

Onboarding New Hires

When it comes down to onboarding, there are two critical variables: Are your new hires experienced or junior? Is your sales process transactional, advanced or complex? There is an actual expense in the form of salary, opportunity cost and management overhead as sales reps take longer to onboard for reasons out of their control.

Do not park your salespeople in a room with product development, marketing or HR to watch someone give PowerPoint presentations.

We strongly recommend that companies hire experienced salespeople who can learn the industry instead of industry – knowledgeable practitioners who can learn sales. Subject matter experts inherently possess some attributes (feature/benefit proclivity, desire to educate the prospect, fear of rejection) that harm the sales process.

The ultimate test of product knowledge is the “whiteboard demo”, which highlights what salespeople need to know as they talk to prospects about their product or service.

Salespeople: Knowledge of how the product works. Competence around product highlights, value, and feature importance. Ability to weave relevant customer success stories and use cases in a conversation.

Good Demos: Uncover more pain by talking about how other people like your prospect have created substantial value by using your product. All buyers care about this topic!

Sales Training

Your sales process covers the steps that must be followed for each opportunity, including high-level guideposts such as qualification, demo, proposal and close. The methodology prepares salespeople to navigate the different events that occur within that process.

Methodologies – Our favorites include:

Sandler
MEDDIC
Miller Heiman Strategic Selling
Solution Selling

When it comes to training, understanding what the salesperson thinks they heard is much more important than the words that were spoken.

The lowest-risk way to simulate a deal is via a “serious role play”.

Training That Doesn’t Work:

Recording a Pitch
Role – Playing with Peers
Reading a Book

Refusing to Disqualify: They are called pregnant pipelines. The problem is that they never give birth to sales. Buyers use “send me more info” as a stall or a polite no to get off the phone. Good salespeople are skeptics. Bad salespeople brag about “positive meetings” all the time. Everyone is a referral source. Watching others perform a similar function (sales) in a different context (as a vendor) can be a powerful learning tool. The rep can then present what they have learned at a team meeting to teach others and further reinforce their training.

Here are some ideas where up-and-coming salespeople can spend their professional development time:

Microsoft Excel – A rep who spends 50 hours in Excel this year will be a pro.
Contract Review – An experienced CFO or general counsel will be impressed if a rep can professionally talk their way through contract issues without asking ignorant questions.
Coaching – If a sales rep can help others around them get better, they will be viewed very favorably by executives.

Who’s Your Buyer?

Most companies will start with product training before getting to educating reps about buyer personas.

The whole point of asking prospects questions isn’t to go through the motions of asking questions. Challenger tactics work when used properly, but salespeople who do not know their buyers inside and out will fail!

Product Training

Training salespeople how to talk about their product in the context of pain diagnosis is much more important than training them on what the product does.

Bad: Describe what feature X does.
Good: Describe how customers A, B and C used feature X to realize Y value.
Bad: Walk the prospect through a comprehensive demo.
Good: Listen for triggers indicating the next logical step in the demo (which could include ending it).
Bad: Start with background or marketplace slides to “set the stage” (they’ll fall asleep).
Good: Start by focusing only on the features that address this specific prospect’s unique pain points as articulated on a previous call.

Teaching product basically just requires converting the documentation that’s already been developed by the product development teams into customer-facing language.

Quantify the Pain: How much does it cost the company?
Quantify the Risk: If the pain is not solved, what else happens? Do people miss promotions? Lose jobs? Nothing?
Rank the Pain: For each persona, of all the things they need to do, where does solving the pain fit in the rankings?

Demos are not presentations; they are conversations.

Tools

When buying tools, the sales process must provide you with:

Relevant Demos
An Out Clause
Engagement with an Executive
End User Buy – In

The person administering sales tool enablement should be monitoring usage of each product on a monthly or quarterly basis.

If usage is much lower than it should be, then: Investigate and find out why. Common reasons include:

hard to use in workflow,
doesn’t work as expected,
stopped being helpful,
was not properly implemented,
a better tool came along,
personal preference.

Content

Sales content no longer consists of “collateral” in the form of brochures, PDFs and PowerPoints. Today, “sales-ready” content is primarily made up of keywords, relevant phrases and pithy sentences.

Forcing irrelevant case studies or customer stories into prospect conversations is a red flag to buyers.

Sales enablement means delivering specific content to salespeople in real time: a keyword for a persona, a phrase describing how a customer used a specific feature or a question that can move a selling conversation forward or disqualify.

The biggest problem with sales content is that it doesn’t have a home. Content could be in many places, including:

People’s Heads
E – mail
Chat Applications
Document Management System
Playbooks
Training Materials
Colleagues
Sales Enablement Software Tool
Post-its

Here’s the framework for making content both relevant and easily discoverable:

Collect – we are not looking for thesis material here; the goal is to find words, phrases and sentences.
Structure
Tag
Enable Searchability
Deliver

Automated content delivery inside of the CRM with advanced search capability is best practice here.

In sales, second place is the most expensive. All the effort and none of the reward.

An objection is an opportunity to uncover more pain. You don’t learn anything from answering their question directly, and–worse–you can make unfounded assumptions.

Sales enablement must allow for a closed loop of communication between the sales rep collecting the objection, sales leadership and marketing providing relevant responses and sales reps endorsing their effectiveness.

Customer Story: An informal story about how your company helped a customer.
Case Study: A document that has been formalized and approved by the customer.

Build out a Persona>Pain>Feature>Content matrix.

Prospecting

There are several buckets of prospects out there, including those who:

Have Already Bought from You
Will Buy from You
Will Buy, but Not from You
Might Buy from You. Here’s the only area where sales reps should focus.
Won’t Buy

Once the research ends, it’s time to be aggressive with outreach and go after each lead.

As soon as someone engages, they’re now no longer in the prospecting phase and enter the qualification phase.

There’s been lots of talk in the last several years around specialization.

“Sales versus Sales Development”.
“Inside Sales versus Field Sales”.
“Inbound Sales Development versus Outbound Sales Development”.

Researching:

Vertical Integration: Have a single human being do computer-based research and reach out to prospects.
Insourced Research Function: Develop a “research desk” where support staff conduct the research, then your salespeople reach out to prospects.
Outsourced Research Function: Take the “research desk” offshore.

When thinking about research, also think about the specific job to be done. One way to help your team cope with constant rejection is to focus on “negative goals”.

While it’s critical to stay competitive and not be OK with losing, if losing is the norm 90+ percent of the time, companies need to find a way to keep morale strong. Earning a “point” each time someone says no helps people keep pushing instead of getting dejected.

Social selling creates synergies between a company’s brand, its product, and the individual strengths of its employees. Due to social’s ability to impact revenue, it’s a core component of the sales enablement ecosystem.

Anyone engaged in social selling will eventually come across the opportunity to argue on the Internet. Here’s how to win these arguments: Don’t engage in the first place.

Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/web. This website has archived over 250 BILLION web pages.

Connect with salespeople at your competitors on LinkedIn and then use Sales Navigator to filter to your specific buyer personas within their connections.

“Planting seeds” simply means subtly informing others of what you’re up to without overselling them. Tactics include:

Update Your Network
Talk About Vision
Write a Book

Create content that is valuable to people in your market. Three specific tactics include:

Uncover Pain

Show How You Solve the Pain

Teach People Something

Closing

Most things in life are multivariable equations and closing a deal is no exception. In closing roles, there’s rarely a single action item that can lead to a deal closing right now and if there were, it would have already happened.

What set of terms and conditions are both my company and my buyer willing to accept?

In any negotiation, the buyer and seller both have:

An Aspiration Price
A Reservation Price
A Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA)
A Starting Bid

The area where the distance between the Aspiration and Reservation prices for both the buyer and the seller overlap is known as the “Negotiating Zone”.

Here are a few points that can be negotiated when selling a software product:

Length of Agreement
Payment Terms
User Count
Implementation/Delivery Timeline
Right to Use Logo
Agreement to Participate in Case Study
Access to Users for Feedback
Guarantee
Support
Legal Terms and Conditions
Price

if someone important has enough pain and a compelling reason to do something about that pain, price is one of the last things that matter.

Professional buyers care about quality, risks and service more than nominal pricing differences.

Customer Success

One misconception a lot of companies have is that expansion sales and renewals are “farming” activities.

It’s critical to ensure that your customer success team understands that a referral is not a recommendation.

Referral: You should talk to Taylor at Alpha Corp. I’ll make an email introduction right now!
Recommendation: You should talk to Taylor at Alpha Corp.

With a lot of products, it’s smart to complete a low-friction first sale, then upsell your way to larger contract values. This strategy (also known as land-and-expand) is smart for a number of reasons:

You Can Sell Low
Results Are Results
Total Cost of Effort Is Reduced
Less Risk

Hiring + Career Paths

If the market for talent in your industry and geography is competitive, recruiters are key.

Sales enablement is uniquely positioned to identify future rock stars as part of the hiring, onboarding and training functions.

Here are some common signs that someone has one foot out the door:

Missed Quota Without Increase in Effort
Aggressively Asking for Money or a Promotion
Stopped Asking for Money or a Promotion
Stopped Updating Salesforce (as much)
Overprepared for Meetings, Yet Aloof
Quietly Investing in Their Personal Brand
Different Work Hours

Channel Partners

Why sell through a channel instead of direct? There are several reasons, including:

Preexisting Relationships
Signing up partners who can sell your product into their existing customer base reduces sales friction
Geographic Diversity
Lower Overhead
Focus on Core Competencies

if you can’t sell your product, your channel can’t sell your product.

Sales Manager Enablement

Sales managers are a multiplying force that coaches reps to success without having to jump into the activity themselves. Sales managers are often the most reactionary individuals in an organization. They are constantly sucked into meetings dropped on their calendar by executive management.

The highly effective managers we have evaluated are adept at five core competencies:

accountability and administration,
coaching,
mentoring,
hiring and training
and leadership and motivation.

Many sales managers aren’t even managers. They have a team of salespeople taking deals to certain stages and then they jump in for the close. That’s not management.

The Sales Enablement Position

While each department and team should do their part, as they do with financial responsibility and talent sourcing, the case for a centralized sales enablement function is very strong. The challenge is determining whether a sales enablement role is different from the chief customer officer (CCO).

The #1 Sales Enablement Tool

Vision is good. It’s important. Companies should have it. If you want your sales team to be successful, however, you must pay attention to the three-legged stool of product development, which includes vision, qualitative feedback and quantitative feedback. Doing so creates a product that’s easy to sell, which is the best way to attract and retain a great sales team.

Hearing feedback directly from customers and prospects will do more to align sales, marketing and prospects than any internal meeting could.

There are several ways to make a sales team better with technology: