The Sales Enablement Playbook by Cory Bray and Hilmon Sorey
Chapter 1 The Evolution of Sales Enablement
- Define metrics that will track the success of enablement activities.
Chapter 2 Defining a Sales Process
- Most sales teams need:
- Clear Stages
- Tech Stack (incl. CRM, etc.)
- General Messaging: Empower your reps with messaging for each situation, including different industries, personas, competitors, product features, etc.
- Demo Scripts
- The number of steps (or stages) in a sales process varies from company to company depending on the complexity of the sale: transactional (T), advanced (A), and complex (C).
- Qualification (T, A, C)
- Evaluation Setup (A)
- Evaluation (T, A, C)
- Executive Presentation (C)
- Proof of Concept (C)
- Proposal (T, A, C)
- Closing (A, C)
- Each stage should have Exit Criteria = requirements for a deal to move from one stage to the next.
- Think hard before adding too much to the CRM; restrict field to those providing actionable intelligence, for instance: Competitors; Pain; Decision Makers; etc.
- Two behaviors that destroy the ability to analyze data are overusing free-form text and changing fields too frequently.
- Sales process metrics:
- Conversion ratios (stage-to-stage)
Chapter 3 Onboarding New Hires
- The biggest impact people with sales enablement titles within their organizations have is onboarding salespeople in rapidly growing companies.
- 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?
- If…
- Junior + Complex, then: Don’t hire
- Junior + Transactional, then: Focus on sales training / boot-camp
- Experienced + Complex, then: Focus on ramp, esp. by having them speak with existing customers and sit in on sales calls.
- Experienced + Transactional, then: Start them selling on Day 2. All they really need to know is: (a) The three best-use cases for what they sell (b) Names of a handful of customers and how they were successful (b) A good next step after their first conversation
- No matter what, closely monitor progress of new hires salespeople and adjust hiring strategy as needed
- Onboarding requires setting outcome-based milestones = signs of success AND signs of failure by specific dates
- Onboarding Metrics:
- Time to first deal or conversion (SDRs)
- Time to quota attainment
- Time to consistent quota attainment
- % of team who can competently conduct a whiteboard demo
Chapter 4 Sales Training
- Our favorite sales methodologies include: (a) Sandler (b) MEDDIC (c) Miller Heiman Strategic Selling (d) Solution Selling
- Aggressively annotating discovery notes can accomplish in minutes what generic sales training conversations might not be able to accomplish in tens of hours.
- Reps should be able to write a job description for your target persona on a whiteboard off the top of their head.
- Limit peer-to-peer role-play. Instead, have AEs sell to either (a) a person in your org with the target persona, or (b) external people who hold the role you sell to
- Develop reps non-sales skills
- Creating Urgency: Did the AE create urgency in a credible way without prematurely discounting?
- Training metrics:
- All reps demonstrate sales methodology adherence and competence
- Sales methodology is integrated into the CRM
Chapter 5 Who’s Your Buyer?
- Personas should include:
- Job responsibilities
- Qualifications
- Measures of success
- Address (a) how much it costs (b) what happens if not solved (c) how it ranks in terms of overall priority. Also, share how product features solve the pain.
- Triggering events
- Parallel solutions (ex: use Salesforce for CRM)
- Knowing the buyer inside and out is much more important than knowing the product inside and out…
- You’re trying to: *Find pain *Drill down on the pain *Highlight that the pain is so strong that the prospect needs your product…NOW
- For each buyer persona, each salesperson should have rock-solid stories to use as social proof. Reps must know specifically how they can win with each buyer persona
- Buyer Persona Metrics:
- Each salesperson can fill out “what they do”, “their pain,” and “how we win” for each buyer persona
Chapter 6 Product Training
- Sales Enablement Goal: All salespeople are demo certified for each persona and use case in their market.
- Good product training links features to solutions to a given persona’s pain:
- Start by focusing only on the features that address this specific prospect’s unique pain points as articulated on a previous call.
- Describe how customers A, B, and C used feature X to realize Y value.
- Listen for triggers indicating the next logical step in the demo (which could include ending it).
- If someone with decision-making authority hasn’t given a strong indication they are going to buy, or they haven’t confirmed that the only thing left to do is review a formal proposal, don’t send a proposal.
- Demos are not presentations; they are conversations. As always, identify common signs that a demo isn’t going well (apathy, a lack of engagement, complete silence, liberal platitudes without context.
- Product Training Metrics:
- % conversion from demo to next stage
- % of reps who are demo certified *Gross Profit Margin
Chapter 7 Tools
- If the team who will use the tool isn’t committed, competent, and incentivized (directly or indirectly) to putting effort into implementation, training, and utilization—don’t buy
- Identify needs across the team that could be addressed with tools.
- Develop a tool buying process.
- Create a system to monitor usage and determine when to cancel or renew contracts.
- Tools Metrics:
- Daily active users of each tool
Chapter 8 Content
- Sales Enablement Goal: Develop a closed-loop content creation process where salespeople have the specific content they need at the right time to move deals forward; they can request new content if there are gaps; and anything created is instantly pushed to sales reps at the specific time it’s needed.
- Take a proactive approach and schedule periodic content audits.
- Content should be tagged to ICP (esp. industry) + persona + pain/use case
- Salespeople need words, phrases, and sentences instead of PDFs, PowerPoints, and other complex documents.
- Automated content delivery inside of the CRM with advanced search capability is best practice here
- Great companies do, however, know their competitors better than their prospects do. Ideally, this information is captured in a competitive battlecard for each competitor, which is updated frequently and easily accessed by all salespeople. The battlecard shows (a) where you win (b) where you battle (c) where you lose.
- An objection is an opportunity to uncover more pain. Codify objections with responses, generally in the form of clarifying questions.
- There is a difference between customer stories and case studies:
- Customer Story: An informal story about how your company helped a customer. You might name the customer directly or simply say, “A large insurance brokerage worked with us to….”
- Case Study: A document that has been formalized and approved by the customer that typically includes their challenge, selected solution, a measurable impact on their business, and possibly a return on their investment.
Chapter 9 Prospecting
- Prospecting has two major components (which should be completed by different people)
- Research: Determining who to reach out to and what to say (strive to outsource, for example, with upcall.com)
- Outreach: Physically reaching out to prospects
- Keep at it until the prospect says yes or no or hits some number of touch points where things get weird.
- Personalization is over-rated: Activity matters a lot more so that you engage prospects when your solution addresses one of their top priorities
- In addition to positive goals (ex: qualified opportunities), try negative goals (ex: completed cadences)
- Prospecting metrics:
- Each salesperson has enough qualified leads to keep their pipeline full
- Referral asks are measured as a prospecting activity
Chapter 10 Closing
- Reasons deals get stuck:
- Wrong company profile (ICP)
- No intense pain for which your solution fits
- No compelling event to close by X date
- Lack of authority (economic buyer)
- Legal/procurement block
- Competition
- Points that can be negotiated
- 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: Some type of money-back guarantee or mid-contract opt-out clause
- Support
- Legal Terms and Conditions
- Price
- In some markets, however, it makes sense to “price high and discount.” If that’s the plan from the beginning, discounting is fine, as long as the plan is being followed and reps aren’t dropping the price more than they should.
- Closing Metrics: *
- Win rate
- Quota attainment
- Gross Profit Margin
- All salespeople have been formally trained in negotiation skills
Chapter 11 Customer Success
- A referral is not a recommendation. Here’s the difference: *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.
- Customer success metrics:
- Upsell quota attainment
- Cross-sell quota attainment
- Net churn
- Referrals are measured as a prospecting activity
Chapter 12 Hiring + Career Paths
- Use hiring assessments (recommended: Objective Management Group; Devine)
- Offer Significant Referral Fees to Employees
- Hiring & career metrics:
- Employee retention
- % of jobs filled by internal candidates
- All employees have written goals
Chapter 13 Channel Partners
- Why sell through a channel instead of direct? There are several reasons, including:
- Preexisting Relationships
- Geographic Diversity
- Lower Overhead
- Focus on Core Competencies: If your product requires setup, implementation, or other types of professional services, channel partners can carry this load while allowing you to focus on making a better product.
- If you can’t sell your product, your channel can’t sell your product.
- Channel partner metrics:
- % of partner organizations meeting revenue goals
- Net churn of partner-generated customers
- Partner generated revenue
Chapter 14 Sales Manager Enablement
- Sales enablement has the greatest opportunity to multiply its impact on the organization by fortifying strong managers.
- Highly effective managers are adept at five core competencies:
- accountability and administration, esp. by expecting and inspecting on activity-based KPI targets to challenge performers and manage out non-performers
- coaching, esp. on the sales process, methodology, and tools
- mentoring, esp. on professional development
- hiring and training, esp. on interview methodology
- leadership and motivation
- Managers should rarely step in to close deals for quota-carrying reps
- Sales manager enablement metrics:
- Team performance against each KPI
- Employee retention
- All team members have regularly scheduled and attended coaching meetings (1-1’s)
- Team is able to close typical deals independent of sales manager
Chapter 15 The Sales Enablement Position & Chapter 16 The #1 Sales Enablement Tool
- EVERY SINGLE PERSON in the company should be meeting actual customers and prospects AT LEAST quarterly but, ideally, more frequently.
- If you’re not farming your vendors for referrals, start now!
Summary of Training Areas
- ICP & Persona
- Process (esp. stages & exit criteria) & methodology (ex: Sandler; MEDDIC; etc.)
- Technology (esp. CRM)
- Product: New hires must deliver standardized messaging to link features to use case specific customer value by sharing relevant customer success stories. Test new hires by having the whiteboard the demo screens, talking while they draw. Product training also includes pricing & discounting.
- Non-sales skills: (a) Excel (b) contract reviews (c) coaching (d) communications skills