Sales Assembly’s Enablement At Work is a monthly collection of tips, trends, and tactics to help you navigate the “always in build mode” world of Sales Enablement – featuring yours truly, Foreman Jeff Rosset, CEO here at Sales Assembly.
Let’s Get To Work!
Enablement is not just one person/team’s job
Between workforces going remote + companies growing headcount & product features at an astonishing pace, some of the best B2B sales organizations we interact with have started to decentralize the responsibility of sales enablement. In addition to the actual enablement/training team (who will still play the most important role), these organizations are also looking to the following areas to assist with the enablement of their reps:
Sales Managers
Make sure your front-line managers and directors are not only advocates for the enablement best-practices of the organization but are fully educated on all the tools and processes your company uses. Make sure your managers are teaching, coaching, and holding reps accountable.
Communities
2019/20/21 has been the rise of the “community”. And no, this isn’t a plug for Sales Assembly. If your teams are not plugged into groups of peers outside of the 4 walls of your own company, you (and they) are missing out. There are so many good ideas & best practices being shared, and excellent training to be had out there – go get it!
Colleagues/Peers
There is a ton of knowledge hidden within your reps – extract it! Make sure you’re doing teach-backs, knowledge-sharing sessions, and deal post-mortems with the whole team. Help reps learn from other reps (and give certain people a chance to step up into a leadership role in the process).
Effective Virtual Selling in Q3 2021
Here are 3 quick & simple ideas to help your reps succeed in the here-to-stay world of virtual sales:
- Arm sellers with video. It helps cut through the noise, and frankly, recording a video can be more enjoyable & energizing for the rep than typing a bunch of emails. Look into Vidyard or other providers in the space.
- Call reviews – DO THEM! Most companies these days have a subscription to Gong, Chorus, or the like…but you HAVE to commit to the technology, and the process, to get the value. Identifying coaching opportunities for your reps has never been easier.
- Get the band back together, often. Monthly collaboration sessions between sales, product, enablement, CS, RevOps, and Marketing to discuss what’s working, what’s not, and where things are headed can be huge for the company. What’s that? Too hard to coordinate schedules or you don’t have the time? Erroneous! If it’s important, you’ll get it done.
Russell Wurth, VP of Sales Enablement at Showpad
Q: What are the traits that make up a “rising star” in sales enablement?
A: There are 3 things I always look for in people I’d like to hire onto the sales enablement team:
- A sense of urgency, but a mind for the important. Sales is always in the “now”, existing forecast and how to close it and then building pipeline. But what about long term knowledge and skills? Key software and tools that improve effectiveness? Along with Onboarding, these are the longer projects that are important that take time to build correctly and effectively to support business needs
- Broad perspective. This one is hard because enablement is a growing function. If you look at enablement practitioners, they come from various backgrounds: sales, product marketing, corporate training, sales operations, business development. There is a bit of all of these elements in the “modern sales enabler”. The way to success here is to partner with the different roles and backgrounds in your company and in various communities like Sales Assembly to get mentoring, advice and perspective for developing your own knowledge and skill.
- They sprint. This is where the power of working with sales comes in. Sales enablement sits close to the commercial edge that sales is on, celebrating the wins, and aggravated over the losses and how to overcome. Being empowered, aligning to impact, seeing success create a driving positive spirit to overcome some of the daily and weekly challenges.
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Stephanie Benavidez, Senior Director of Sales Enablement at WellRight
Q: Who should own content creation for sales reps?
A: Sales should be involved in identifying the content that needs to be created but not in creating it. Get input from your sales team regarding what assets they need and make sure it’s marked on your content generation calendar. Truly it can be a shared responsibility between sales enablement, product marketing, and marketing – especially in a scaling organization that lacks personnel. There are different types of content that need to be created internally and externally. Collateral such as presentations, white papers, case studies, blog posts, social media versus sales scripts, product sheets, and battle cards are very different. Additional types of content include email templates for cadences, one-pagers, videos, and more.
The importance of the sales enablement function is on the rise. According to Showpad’s 2021 Modern Selling Study:
- Since the pandemic, the number of organizations who report having a sales enablement function has grown by 17%.
- 28% of companies report not having enough training for reps to be able to sell remotely (they are now leveraging enablement to solve that problem).
