Sales Enablement Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for successful sales enablement?

First: Be clear about what sales enablement means. To some, sales enablement comes from information about products and services being sold. What are their features and functions. How are they different from the competition. How do they add value.

To others, sales enablement may include soft skills - presentation training, sales methodology training (Solution Selling, for example), negotiation role play etc.

And for others still, sales enablement comes from knowledge sharing with peers, particularly tapping in to the skills and anecdotal experiences of top performers.

Different companies apply different variations of these - some include all three, some just one or two.

Second: Don't assume you know what training a sales team needs - and don't believe that all sales reps need, or will benefit from, the same training. Sales reps with strong sales skills may be less inclined to get to know a product in intimate detail because they work by getting to know the essential details and then applying their stronger selling ability. Sales reps with stronger inclinations towards the technical side of a product will be inclined to spend more time getting to know those little details which, hopefully, will off-set their, perhaps, weaker sales skills. Technical training is best delivered by product managers or product marketing managers. The marketing influence will help a sales person understand key messages, differentiators, and unique selling points, while technical product managers will be able to articulate unique features and functions, as well as competitive weaknesses.

Third: Help the sales team by delivering sales enablement tools that align to common sales cycles. As a sales cycle progresses and matures, different sales support is required. A presentation that introduces a vendor is not that big a requirement when an opportunity is rated at 75%. At that stage, a sales rep is more likely to need help with negotiation guides, objection handling, and some recent case studies to help keep the momentum going. At the same time, help the sales team be all they can be by discouraging poor practices. Example, a first sales meeting with a prospect is, for some, an excuse to setup a laptop and projector, and go through that inevitable introductory presentation, where the meeting is more about the vendor than about the customer. Help sales teams stay away from that trap by feeding them best practice sales tools aligned to each stage of the process. A first meeting should be exploratory, more about the prospect than the vendor. Support the sales team with the appropriate training for this, a list of questions to ask, up to date information on the industry being sold to, likely questions from the prospect, and the best answers to give.

I probably sneaked in more than 3 best practices here, but I hope this is useful. Certainly, I support everything said by Tamara and Paul, in this thread.

For the purpose of this Q&A, I will work from a very literal definition of sales enablement. That is: enabling sales to achieve success and revenue growth. Three best practices sugesstions are:

1. Outfit Sales Wtih Buyer Personas: To be effective, sales needs a deep understanding of target buyers and their goals. An organization can best do this by investing in qualitative research on buyers and readily understanding the goal orientation of their buyers and align sales accordingly. Very much different than profiling, buyer personas, archetypes of targeted buyers, allow sales to have a true understanding of buyer's goals and how to help buyers achieve their goals.

2. Alignment with Buying Process and Buyer Experience Journey: Sales enablement is essentially a "reinventing" exercise of aligning sales interactions with that of the buyer's own buying process and their buyer journey they undertake. Enabling sales to provide the right level of engagement and content at the right "goal" moments for buyers. Insight into a specific buying process and buyer journey allows sales to know when to help a buyer along the journey and how best to enable a buyer to a decision point.

3. Relevant Communications: More and more, sales is needing to become more astute at communicating with buyers with the communications means that best enables buyers along their buyer journey. Enabling sales with content, that doesn't need to be re-worked, that allows for sales to speak in the language and terminology of their targeted buyers is critical. Investing in educating sales with the right conversational means of engaging in a dialogue with their targeted buyer personas is becoming more important then ever since buyers will be informed to a high degree when they are ready to engage sales. Improving the communications and conversational expertise of sales will lead to an improved overall buying experience for buyers.

The overarching point in these practices is that enabling sales with a deep understanding of who buyers are, how they buy, why they buy, and the goals that drive the buyer journey will enhance the effectivenees of sales performance.

I agree with much of what's already been shared by the contributors. We work with B2B companies who have a complex sales process that frequently involves need creation. Here are three tangible activities that seem to work well in this environment:

1. Establish "Ideal Prospect Profiles" for each of your core target markets. These profiles should go beyond the classic demographic factors and embrace structural, environmental and behavioural elements. They can be created with inputs from the sales organisation and a careful assessment of the qualities of recent sales wins and losses and the common characteristics of your most valuable customers.

You'll find that many of these characteristics can only be uncovered through conversation. We find that equipping sales people with "conversation maps" that enable them to uncover these structural, environmental and behavioural considerations are extremely valuable in helping them qualify early and accurately.

2. Uncover the key phases your prospects go through in their buying decision journey, and based your pipeline management on these buying phases, rather than sales activity. Seek to understand the evolving motivations of key stakeholders as this buying decision process unfolds. Design your sales tools with the specific goal of advancing the buyer's journey from one stage to the next in mind. Never create a piece of collateral without first defining its' role in advancing the buying process.

3. Crowdsource your sales enablement tools. Observe what your top sales performers do and what materials they use at each stage in the buying decision process. Uncover the stories and anecdotes they use to help make their point. Encourage them to share the tools and tips that have worked best for them. Refine the ideas as necessary and share them with the rest of the sales organisation. Make sales enablement a team sport rather than something marketing does for sales.

Bob Apollo
Inflexion-Point
www.inflexion-point.com

Lot's of good answers here. Here's my cut:

1. Sales enablement starts with customer enablement: A lot has been said about the customer buying journey. This is critical, make sure your sales people understand the customer's buying journey and have the skills, knowledge,and capability, and problem solving mentality to facilitate the customer on their buying journey. Typically, at least in B2b, customers don't know how to buy, sales people can create tremendous value in helping the customer in this buying process.
2. Sales enablement needs to be more about business acumen and helping the customer imagine, dream, then make the dreams real. It is about helping the customer realize they should be on a buying journey, that there are new possibilities for running their business, for growing. It's about helping customers understand and realize new possibilities. Hiring sales people that have both the business knowledge, skills, and capabilities to put provide leadership to their customers is critical. Providing training and experiences to further develop their understanding of how businesses work what drives their customers, and what drives their customers' customers s critical to any 21st century sales enablement program.
3. Ultimately selling is about change. We ask our customers to change---whether it's the way they run their business, a business process, a vendor, a supplier. We need sales people to understand they are change agents. We need to train them on change and how to facilitate their customers's abilities to be comfortable with change, embrace and manage change. Sales enablement programs must include change management and change facilitation.
4. And because I was coached on always overachieving my quota, I'm offering a 4th. No sales enablement program will be successful without the active engagement by management at all levels. Leaders must set the example, they must incorporate these principles into their normal review process, into their coaching. There should be metrics that support this. Without sales leadership demonstrating, coaching and showing the way, sales people will not embrace what the sales enablement programs are trying to achieve--nor should they.

My best practices for successful sales enablement are based on a holistic view on sales enablement, as I already pointed out here:
http://www.focus.com/questions/sales/sales-enablement---its-not-all-same-what...

1. Make crystal clear what the problem is - your relevant executive level has to get these highly important “light bulb moments” - don't start before!
The reason is that a lot of people have first of all a functional, organizational view on sales enablement (based on a well established “functional-silo-thinking”) and incline to see only “isolated” marketing, sales or portfolio problems to be resolved in these functions. Make sure that people really understand the whole challenge, that selling is a system and not a function, that these problems are all related to each other. Show in pictures how it looks like to have e.g. dozens of different sales portals or to have a variety of different sales training initiatives mostly driven by functional view points. Whiteboard how this landscape appears for a sales person, make sure that the problem is really understood and ask the question “how do we want to ensure valuable conversations with our customers?”

2. Define what sales enablement means in your company based on your whole product, solutions or service portfolio, which problems should be resolved first, which business results do you want to achieve. And don't forget to define the design point of your initiative and to ensure a cross-functional view:
Considering the whole portfolio is important to ensure the right foundation when it comes - sooner or later - to cross-selling. As cross-selling capabilities are one of the top drivers for profitable growth in a wallet share approach – the challenge will appear on your sales enablement agenda! To tackle cross-selling successfully you need the full portfolio scope to work on how to address cross-selling capabilities, from a portfolio and a sales point of view, which means from a content and messaging point of view and a sales training and coaching point of view. It's easier to focus in the beginning of one prioritized sales channel – but keep the whole portfolio view from the very beginning.
Use the customer as design point – for two reasons: First, the customers too often feel that sales people don't understand their roles and their business. That's a challenge a lot of tech companies are facing right now – especially if they want to be recognized as strategic vendors. It means to change the view point to an “outside – in” view – consequently! Design all your approaches backwards from the customer in an outside-in mode. You can find details here: http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/technology_buyer_insight_study_how_execu...
Second, it's much easier to align a cross- functional team if the design point is not one of the internal groups but the customer.

3. Based on your definition – set-up a cross-functional team, define a road map from your first steps to your big picture, start with your main pain point to ensure quick wins, focus on business results (not on deliverables), work permanently on your internal agreement network, test everything you want to roll out with a small group of sales key users from the field and communicate, communicate...

And...
4. Don't forget to share lessons learned!

3 Tips for Successful Sales Enablement

1. Learn your audience

Learn your sales teams’ strengths, best practices, challenges, weaknesses and stated needs. Know why you win, know why you lose. Call reps, take reps and sales managers out to lunch, conduct interviews, one question surveys and questionnaires, run or learn the conclusions of win-loss programs and get invited to weekly sales team meetings. This also means knowing your stakeholders so that you know how they will determine success, what is a satisfactory return on investment/return on sales enablement effort and how they can contribute to enablement efforts. Lastly get a great understanding of your company’s customers, ideally going on ride-alongs, sitting in on customer executive briefings, participating where customers are gathered (trade shows, promotional events, online groups, special interest groups) and attending strategic account planning sessions. These activities will help you prioritize projects, focus your time, determine what to communicate, decide what tools during which part of the sales cycle demand the most urgent attention and how to align to how your customers buy and what is on their minds.

2. Integrate

Ideally a sales enablement specialist or team is well integrated with sales leadership as well as marketing, sales operations and all key stakeholders. A holistic, well planned sales enablement program is designed from the beginning with a common definition and organization structure that affords easy integration. The reality though is that most companies will host sales enablement in one specific department. The most effective sales enablement operations, no matter where they are hosted within the company, have frequent communication with sales reps, sales managers and sales leadership, are part of most key sales leadership meetings and work to bring different silos together to help the field.

3. Be a sales performance consultant

Diagnose the patient and come up with the right cure/solution. Sales performance consultants look at (1) the skills and knowledge (2) motivation and (3) environment. Often sales enablement gets anchored to the background of the sales enablement team or the department where it is hosted thereby failing to treat the root cause or becoming too attached to a single treatment such as automating content, sales training, or sales tools. Research shows that 70-80% of the time under performance is due to environmental rather than individual factors yet most of the time, sales enablement solutions focus on improving the individual. For instance I have worked on several sales enablement programs to address issues that could have been fixed more simply, easily, and probably cheaply by tweaking the compensation or incentive program. I’ve seen enablement teams develop outstanding content that was wonderfully accessible for programs and products that the sales force had no motivation to learn. Really successful sales enablement looks at the bigger picture and earns the right to make both a strategic and tactical contribution.

First, let's define Sales Enablement: Sales enablement is the process of arming an organization’s sales force with access to the insight, experts, and information that will ultimately increase revenue, according to Wikipedia - here's the link to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_enablement

But let's cut to the chase, what we're really talking about is Improving Results of the sales process, something that any owner or CEO can understand. In my view, businesses need a formal plan to improve sales results, otherwise nothing will change. Here are three key steps to develop a plan to improve sales results:

1. Find Most Valuable Customers (MVC) - your best customers may not be the ones you think they are. Try the following exercise with your sales team - list all of your customers for the last three years by total sales, draw two columns and label one Margin and the other Hassle. Now grade each customer on a 1 - 3 scale where 1= excellent + 3 = poor. Now look at all of the customers that scored 1s in both columns. This is your preliminary Most Valuable Customer list, which needs to be further researched and analyzed for common traits, target market segments, sizes, etc. The goal of this exercise is to Find More customers like your Most Valuable ones.

2. Focus Your Message - never let a customer Say No because they're confused about who you are and what you can offer. Three key pieces of your message should be:
- Overt Benefit - what's in it for your customer do hire you for their job? Be crystal clear and think from their perspectives
- Reason to Believe - why should customers believe your company can deliver?
- Dramatic Difference - what is dramatically different about your company's products or services when compared to competitors or other alternatives customers have?

3. Improve Sales Processes - the most important metric here is Genuine Selling Time (GST), which measures the amount of time a sales person actually spends in front of customers selling your products or services. Gallup studied this and found that the typical sales person's Genuine Selling Time is less that 10% of their work time. An initial goal should be to actually measure what your company's GST is today and increase it by 50% next year, which should directly improve each sellers activity level, behavior and ultimately their results.

Weave all of this into a Sales Improvement Plan and reap the rewards.

1. Align the way you name and structure your portfolio of products, services and solutions across all your regions/countries as well as audiences. This doesn't sound sexy but it is crucial. The bigger your enterprise is and the more mergers & acquisitions it has been involved in, the more likely you have confusion amongst your different audiences: Regional teams who translate stuff into their respective language, partners/channels who you might have a somewhat disconnected portal for, new hires vs. experienced staff in your sales force, the rest of your workforce or the workforce of companies you merged with, and the public/customers/media/analysts. All these different audiences might use different (old) names to refer to the same product, service or solution, they might not be up to date on portfolio/company restructuring, they might try to sell or buy things you have discontinued etc... You might never get to a point where you present the same single one taxonomy to all audiences but at least align and update!

2. Make sure all your sales people and partners/channels have visibility to all cross-selling, up-selling, and other relationships between products, services and solutions in order to make sure no opportunity to sell more is overlooked. Most enterprises fail at providing this kind of data in a complete way because they try to do it in (multiple) Excel files which just aren't multidimensional and only show a (rarely updated) small part of the highly matrixed organization based on which line of business authored it.

3. Make sure that no piece of collateral and no product/service/solution ever exist without a clear way to contact different experts (product marketing, CI/MI, pricing expert, training expert, etc.) in each region/language. Are you sure everyone in your organization would know who to call for expertise of the kind A for product B, sold in industry vertical C, in language D, in country E, to global account F... Most corporate phone directories and intranets cannot be drilled down into like this. Can yours?

One thing I have noticed about a number of responses here, and in other areas of Focus, is that suggestions are given to do something, but there is no hint about how to do it.

It's all well and good to say that a sales person should enter in to a sales process at an earlier stage, for example, but what would be valuable is to know how a sales person might achieve that.

I sense that the Focus community is looking for pragmatism rather than idealism.

Bravo, Michael!

Your observations are important and deserve consideration by all who consult.

As many have written above Sales Enablement can mean different things in different contexts and to different companies. Since I work mainly with the sales force I will try to aswer this from a salesmans perspective.

1. Sales Training: Like any competitor we have to practice and hone our skills if we are to be successful. No athlete would dream of only "practicing" at their games, they practice every day on different parts of their sport.

The same should be true for sales professionals, though we often believe that we are training by talking to customers, just like for sports stars; the game isn't practice.

2. Leads Nurturing: Many companies don't have a smart way of nurturing leads, they let every salesman find out their own way to take care of their leads and grow them into potential clients.

The danger of this is that for some it will go very well, whilst others who might have the potential to be great just don't find a good method. By setting up a unilateral system for all you can use the knowledge from the successful sales people and use it to benefit everyone in the organization, this way everyones sales will increase.

3. Product Knowledge: Especially when selling a complex product it is important to know as much as possible about it. What is important though is to learn to explain a complex product without complex words.

You have to be able to sell me a copying machine without using any high tech words or comparisons, because I won't understand it.
But you also need to know enough about the product to be able to answer the tech savvy customers.

Having knowledge of your competition is equally important since you cannot position youself against a competitor if you do now know what they are offering.

There are a lot of really good answers here. I especially like those from Tony Zambito because he reminds us that success will not come from helping our sales people to sell, but in helping them to help our customers to buy. From this premise, I add my three points.

1. make sure that your sales enablement is built and delivered with real world experience at the core. Across your sales channels, you will have many different types of sales people, many different types of customers and many different types of engagements between the two. However, if you get into the trenches with your sales people, you will see that there are common threads that run through the stories of success and failure. You will hear common objections, you will spot common buying personas and their requirements. Use these as the bedrock of your sales enablement.
2. Make sure that your sales enablement is not just product and sales process training and tools. Help your sales teams to tell stories around what they are offering to their prospects. Provide the tools that allow them to map those stories to their prospects reference points. This will help them to feel more comfortable in moving away from features, functions and price to speaking about how they can help their customers solve their particular problems.
3. Map your sales enablement to the sales process that you use. Be specific about when to use certain tools or approaches. Work through a typical sales cycle, showing how tools, material, techniques etc. can be used at each stage. Build certain documents or sales enablement elements into the sales process; e.g. "to go from stage 2 to stage 3, you work through the solution design document with the customer."

Don't get too hung up on what the definition is or who owns sales enablement. There are many moving parts and multiple owners. In the end, the sales people need help, tools, training, processes etc. in order to close deals and generate revenue and happy customers. Make it real and specific and adjust it as the market, customers and sales force evolve.

Michael Fox - Thank you for your comment. I completely agree. Focus needs to offer more pragmatic help and less theory. So I'll make an effort here to provide a few pragmatic tips.

Sales people need help understanding their customers' business problems/goals, the capabilities needed, and how their products provide those capabilities.

1. The business problems/goals:
Sales needs to be trained in what business issues your clients experience; how these issues affect the organization; which roles are impacted; what the root causes of these problems are; how to uncover those problems in prospect organizations, and how to evaluate the cost of the problem. To get these answers, talk to your happy customers and ask them to tell you what compelling issues led them to the buying decision, how they justified the cost, and why they bought your product/service.

2. Your product/service capabilities:
How does your product or service provide capabilities that address the root causes for the business problems uncovered above? Most companies teach sales all about features and benefits - but your clients are buying "capabilities." If I buy your product, I'll have the capability to do XX to help fix YY root cause and address my broader business problem. Find out how your clients use your product to address issues, and you'll get a sense of what they view as your capabilities.

If your product/service is technical, then most of your sales people will need sales engineering support that is effective in helping uncover needs and root causes and in casting vision for how the prospective firm can use the product. Sales engineers often resort to canned demos, but customers are smarter than that and want to see how their unique problems will be solved. Sales engineers need to be trained to probe and ask effective questions.

3. Stories to illustrate:
Give your sales team a series of stories that explain how those capabilities were put to use to solve business problems. As you gather the information in question 1 and 2, you'll collect stories from your clients. Re-work these into stories your sales people can tell to help prospects get a vision of how they can use your products to solve their business problems. Equip your team with tools to help reinforce these stories. A well-designed sales deck will help, but sales also needs training in how to white board the stories, case studies to leave behind that further illustrate and reinforce the story, and product sheets and white papers that go into more detail for customers that are ready to dig in and learn more.

Candyce Edelen
PropelGrowth
www.propelgrowth.com

Sales enablement is really buying enablement. Using the analogy of a 3 legged stool, there are 3 legs.

Leg One comprises the 3 Buying Rules (http://processspecialist.com/increasesales/sales/buying-rules-increase-sales)
Leg Two contains the 5 Buying Objections (http://processspecialist.com/increasesales/sales/increase-sales-objections)
Leg Three holds the Sales (Buying) Process

To switch from being a crazy busy salesperson to the buying partner for your ideal customer or prospect is what separate sales success from sales failure.

Three best practices I'd recommend:

1/ Measure Return-on-Effort: measure what's working + what isn't in B2B sales, based on the actions of sales people + reactions of buyers. Show which Reps' efforts + activities provoke what buyer actions. Calibrate the craft of engaging with buyers.

2/ Enable Return-on-Effort: give Reps feedback that helps them invest effort with impact. Give action alerts which help Reps create added value for buyers. Shift from a focus on what Reps are DOING to a focus on what Reps are ACHIEVING. Automate away non-selling tasks. Give Reps more selling time; more time in which to practice their craft.

3/ Provoke Improved Return-on-Effort: encourage curiosity + learning. Deliver Return-on-Effort metrics in real-time. Let Reps own their own success. Let them see that what they do matters. Make it easy for them to detect + fix mistakes, fast. Help them see how their small changes, day-to-day, start adding up, over time, to big impacts on deal volume + velocity. Give them feedback with which they can hone their craftsmanship.

I believe that 'sales enablement' is a newish expression to denote technology-driven sales tools that go beyond conventional selling skills and practices. That said, here are three necessary steps:

1. Start the 'sales' process earlier than is typical: enter earlier in the buying decision journey, when buyers are putting together their buying-decision teams, and developing their criteria for choosing to resolve a problem.
2. Prior to gathering data or discussing your solution (i.e. before you begin selling) help buyers manage the change they must address before they can make a purchase. They must do this anyway, so instead of sitting and waiting while they do (and potentially losing them), help them do their off-line work.
3. Find whatever tools work best for you - playbooks are being developed by many sales enablement/sales 2.0 companies - and use them diligently. Make sure the entire sales team is using them also, to give you consistency of approach.

And always remember: if you aren't serving your buyers by helping them manage their buying decision process, someone else is.

Sales enablement is about clarity and empowerment. There needs to be a clear message about expectations and consequences. That, combined with providing the resources and training that the sales force needs to be successful will move the effort forward.

1. Clarity of expectations – nothing is more important to success than clarity. The leadership must provide clarity of expectations and consequences to the sales staff. In other words, What, exactly, do you expect of your sales force and what are the consequences, both good and bad, when the salespeople meet (or fail to meet) those expectations.
2. Clarity of Product/Service Capabilities – the entire sales force must understand the value of the product or service. Why do others need or want this thing? There doesn’t have to be a lot of fluff here. As a matter of fact, this is one place where specifics are king. Salespeople must have a very clear idea of the value so they can also understand who the target market is. It can’t be all things to all people. It has a target – a specific market that needs/wants it.
3. Resources and training – providing the sales team with the adequate level of training is critical to sales enablement. Without the proper level of knowledge about the product or service the salespeople will not be able to communicate effectively with prospects and clients. This is one of the greatest resources you can give your staff. The other resource is whatever they need whenever they need it. And I mean it. The best way to enable your sales force is to be available to them and provide them with the assistance THEY say they need. The rest of the time, get out of their way!

When you communicate clearly with your sales force and provide them with the tools they need to succeed, you empower them to succeed. Getting out of their way and letting them do their thing is possible when you communicate well; and when you believe in them. These are the key elements of sales enablement.

1. Define sales talent.

2. Measure sales talent.

3. Hire for sales talent.

HINT: We can't discern sales talent from resumes or interview notes or college transcripts and not even from IQ scores. Measuring sales talent is easy but measure it we must.

Sales enablement is about enabling yourself. About being the "best you" possible.

Here are a few ideas:

1. LISTEN -- to your high performers, your gut, and the words no one wants to say out loud...
2. LEARN -- from the deals you've lost, the whiners who annoy you, and the lessons you learn when life gets hard...
3. LOVE -- your people, being different, and leading when no one is running to follow you...

Dan Waldschmidt