Shankar Ganapathy, Author at Mindtickle

6 Reasons Your Managers Need Sales Leadership Coaching

Shankar Ganapathy on November 16, 2018

We know that sales coaching is an important part of sales management. It helps your reps become better salespeople overall, improves their skills, increases their engagement with your organization and, of course, improves your topline revenue. Studies have found that effective sales coaching programs can improve sales reps’ performance by up to 20%. But many managers actually don’t know how to coach well. Despite their abundance of experience as a rep, the promotion to a management role doesn’t always come hand-in-hand with specialized training.

Effective sales coaching isn’t about occasionally auditing your reps’ activities, or giving some in-person feedback every once in a while, but about building a regular cadence to provide useful, insightful and specific coaching in areas where individual reps need help. After all, coaching sales reps can be tricky for management because each individual has unique areas that they excel and others where they need extra guidance.

Here’s the thing: Sales Development Reps (SDRs) are one of the fastest growing teams inside B2B sales organizations. But when you look at some of the data about these specialized sellers you find out that over 80% of them have less than 2 years of experience and their average tenure at companies is 1.5 years, according to the Bridge Group.

This presents a few challenges for sales managers. First, very inexperienced sales hires require a lot of information about industry, processes, methodologies and overall basic sales knowledge than your tenured salesperson, and their short tenures mean you will be constantly onboarding new sales development reps which may strain your onboarding program but most importantly, you need to ensure extremely short ramp times.

To best enable the SDR team you have to think of your enablement program as more than just onboarding. Having a great sales onboarding program is great and the best way to ensure quick success for the SDR but think of it more holistically including:

Ongoing knowledge reinforcement
Experiential training and practicing
Coaching and career development

For example, if your rep has five areas where they need coaching, how do you know if their sales managers can address every single one? And how do you prepare your managers to find these gaps in the first place? Perhaps they’re great at pipeline management but struggle when it comes to deal coaching.

Given the breadth of the role of sales manager, it’s simply not possible for them to know how to coach sales reps on everything. But, just like their reps, they need sales leadership coaching so they can fill their own gaps.

Look in the “too hard” basket

Another issue that all sales leaders deal with at one point or another is “avoidance”. If something is difficult to do, or someone simply doesn’t know where to start, it’s much easier to put it in the “too hard” basket and forget about it until something bad happens.

Trying to coach sales reps only in adversity, like when they’ve just lost a big deal, is hard for both the manager and the rep. After all, no one wants attention just because they haven’t done their best, and coaching isn’t about yelling at someone for not performing. It’s about encouraging and developing reps to be their best.

That’s why it’s sales leadership coaching is so necessary; it’s important to ensure sales managers are coached to provide their teams with the skills and behaviors they need, proactively rather than reactively.

So what exactly is sales leadership coaching?

Before we get into the detail of how to help your sales managers learn how to coach their reps, it’s important to differentiate between coaching, training, and managing.

Management is about overseeing things and making sure they stay on track.
Training focuses on learning new knowledge.
Coaching is about developing skills, improving performance and/or changing behaviors.

Sales coaching is the ongoing, one-on-one mentorship of each rep on a sales team. It is a conversation between the rep and a coach, where the rep does most of the talking while the coach listens, observes, and offers feedback.

It’s not about telling someone what to do, but about helping them look at different ways to achieve better results. When done well, sales coaching can drive sales’ productivity and effectiveness.

1. Develop a coaching framework

The first step in helping managers learn how to become an effective sales coach is to develop a sales coaching framework. But beware, there is no one-size-fits-all solution because every business is different. To work out what your coaching framework should include why not ask your sales reps what they need. Speak to your sales managers to find out what they would find useful, and ask your executives about the overall objectives.

This information can then be used to build your aX + bY + cZ formula for effective sales coaching. This framework is tailored to your organization’s needs while ensuring you cover the necessary aspects of sales coaching including knowledge, messaging, sales skills, process, and execution rigor and discipline. While no sales coaching program will be identical, it’s critical that each ensures that managers have:

The knowledge required to coach in all the areas
The skills to actually coach
The tools required to build a cadence for coaching
The discipline to execute the coaching framework consistently

2. Put the sales coach into training

Once you’ve identified the key areas that your salespeople need coaching, you’ll need to identify whether your managers have the requisite skills. The best way to ensure managers have the knowledge and skills to coach is to provide them with formal training. There are many ways this can be done, from formal in-class training to peer to peer learning.

Football coaches have to be certified before they get to coach players. In fact, the process for certifying a football coach is thorough, with several levels, depending on the experience of the coach and the level of the players they seek to coach. It should be the same for sales coaches.

One of the most effective ways to coach is to give both the reps and their managers the same information and knowledge and make sure they are certified in key areas. This ensures they have the same baseline knowledge, and the certification ensures they have absorbed the information and are able to apply it.

For example, one of our customers, a high growth tech company was launching a new product and wanted to ensure their sales team delivered a consistent message to prospects. To enable their sales managers to coach sales reps through this they first certified them on how to sell the product themselves. This ensured that they knew exactly what the reps had to do, and when combined with their own experience and skills were prepared to coach their teams effectively.

When this approach is complemented by guidance on how to coach, it can be powerful.

Provide live examples to managers on how to have coaching conversations. Help them understand what they should be looking for and what areas to focus in on for the greatest impact. Provide them with the opportunity to role-play their coaching so they can play it back and learn from it.

3. Leverage reporting and tools

All the training and practicing in the world won’t be of any use to a sales manager if they’re going into their coaching sessions blind. That’s where good reporting on the right things is critical. When determining what they should be coaching sales reps on, most managers just look at lagging indicators like pipeline activity and what deals reps have won or lost. But this doesn’t always provide enough useful data. That’s where efficiency and capability indicators are important.

While effectiveness indicators look at the behaviors that sales reps can demonstrate to drive lagging indicators. Coaching is about behaviors, not quotas, this qualitative information needs to be available to managers so they know what to coach on.

This information can be identified by bringing together information from several places, whether it’s from a CRM, sales enablement software or competitive intel. The key is giving managers the tools that can help them identify which indicators to look at and access to get the right information.

For example, if you’re looking at what the indicators are for salespeople who win deals, your sales enablement software can provide you with information on what content your best reps are accessing before a big meeting. This may provide data about what behaviors are correlative with winning deals, and in turn what behaviors may need to change in order to improve the results of some of your reps.

With useful data-driven reports in hand, managers are able to identify what specific areas individual reps require coaching in, and start working on improving their behaviors and results.

4. Mentor the coach

With the right tools, your sales managers will be much better equipped to coach. But they will still need to learn how to use tools to achieve the best effect. One of the best ways to learn coaching is to learn from peers. Your sales reps buddy up, so why not “buddy up” your sales managers? With role models to help mentor and demonstrate good practice, managers will be able to ask questions and share their knowledge with their peers.

While mentoring and buddying is usually a one-on-one activity, you can encourage collaboration and peer-to-peer learning amongst the management team by bringing them together. Some of our customers have organized manager workshops that give sales managers the opportunity to share what works and what doesn’t in a supportive and collaborative environment.

It’s also a great idea to encourage managers to share their coaching wins with the entire sales team. This has a dual impact for allowing the sales organization to learn from what works, and also demonstrates the value of coaching to any skeptics.

5. Provide regular feedback from executives

If your organization has a sales coaching culture then your sales leadership will want to know how your sales managers are performing. Rather than observing from afar, they should be encouraged to see how managers are coaching regularly and provide their own feedback and insight to the team or when appropriate, even individuals. By getting involved they can demonstrate just how important the sales coaching program is to the success of their sales team, and in doing so, boost engagement in the process.

6. Incentivize successful coaches

Along with executive buy-in, rewards and incentives are another good way to engage sales managers. While successful sales managers are incentivized when their team meets quota, how often are good sales coaches recognized or incentivized?

Consider adding in a coaching specific incentive to your KPIs for encouragement for those who learn how to coach well. When used as part of a structured coaching program, these six steps will ensure that you give your sales managers the knowledge, skills, and discipline to coach consistently.

Concluding thoughts

Ultimately, more than helping SDRs craft an email or hone their pitch, sales enablement training for a manager can help them coach their reps based on the competency model that was developed (or recruit the managers to help craft it). Part of the problem most companies face is not giving good guidance for managers on what to coach their teams on and ensuring all managers are consistently coaching their teams on an ongoing basis. While this can be tricky to implement initially, some organizations turn to Coaching Reports in the form of an Excel file, Word document or similar which although well-intentioned end up being a burden for the managers and makes it difficult for the enablement team when it comes time to compile information and glean insights from it.

Finally, technology here can help as well. With the ability to create electronic coaching forms that follow a competency profile and different online forms for different coaching situations you can ensure managers are all following the same guidance and the data collected can be analyzed and shared back with the managers to show them how their teams are doing in their expected competencies as well as guide the managers to where more coaching is needed.

The ultimate takeaway here is that it’s extremely important to treat your sales manager training differently from all others –making sure to tailor each program to the needs of your particular reps based on their experience, tenure, and skill level will help your managers’ coaching significantly both in the short and the long run.

5 Reasons to Modernize Sales Enablement

Shankar Ganapathy on November 9, 2018

As the pressure of digitization on sales functions has ratcheted up in the past couple of years, companies are taking another look at modernizing sales enablement – for good reason. Among them:

Selling is getting harder.

Fewer reps are hitting their quotas. According to a recent article by Forbes, 57% of sales reps missed their quotas in the last year – concluding overall that what’s truly hindering sales’ success is the lack of cohesion between departments and the way new sellers are being introduced to the product.

Onboarding is taking longer.

With today’s complex product lines and ever-changing business models, it can take as much as nine months to ramp up new reps.

Buyers are bypassing sales for the information they need.

Customers often complete as much as 70 percent of their journey from their own research, according to industry estimates.

Faced with these challenges, companies are increasingly seeing sales enablement as a strategic imperative that’s vital the sales organizations success. The stage is set for a new kind of sales enablement. For hard-pressed sales organizations, it can’t come soon enough.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is a catch-all phrase with many meanings. But more importantly, what is its purpose?

The idea of training new sales reps, or any other customer-facing employees, to align their objectives with the company’s goals and gain insight to be successful is not a new concept. Knowledge of product(s), brand, and the competitive landscape is imperative to their quickly becoming effective. In the search for continued revenue growth, companies have sought to better equip and prepare those on the front lines of revenue generation: sales teams.

The goal has been, and continues to be, to enable them to reach quota as quickly as possible and consistently, thus the creation of sales enablement. However, as the state of sales enablement constantly changes in scope, it’s needless to say that there’s yet to be a single, universally adopted definition.

Here are a few takes:

Search Google and you’ll find, “modern sales enablement is the enablement of sales teams with information, tools, and content that help salespeople sell more effectively.” A more visionary definition of sales enablement from SiriusDecisions explains, “Enablement’s purpose is to ensure salespeople have the skills, knowledge, behaviors, and tools needed to engage [buyers, team, other] in rich conversations.”
Forrester Research says, “Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer’s problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return on investment of the selling system.”

When Forrester Research asks, “What is sales enablement?” they characterize it with the idea that companies should put their customers upfront. Putting customers first is an excellent approach to creating your sales enablement initiatives. That said, it’s just as important to determine whether your business needs a dedicated sales enablement manager, a big decision for any company.

No matter its current definitions, sales enablement has come a long way in the last five years towards helping sales teams perform better. Reps today are more comfortable in competitive environments, as well as those which sometimes require more complex strategic sales motions.

At the same time, engaging with today’s highly informed and ever-more scrutinizing customers requires salespeople to retain and effectively use ever-more knowledge, skills, and behaviors.

While sales enablement is designed to help sales turn more opportunities into revenue, most traditional sales enablement solutions cannot show how programs correlate to individual outcomes.

What most don’t realize is that there are huge, previously untouched areas where enablement solutions (tools, platforms, and best practice methodologies) can bring more value and revenue to companies.

What Gartner has to say about sales enablement

Companies, both purposefully and accidentally, are missing some useful and obvious strategies. This short-sightedness also applies to sales consultants and training or learning tools vendors –all of whom have implemented or offered otherwise great technology for sales enablement. Let’s take a look at some numbers behind these pain points. Here are some key statistics Gartner recently shared at their conference about the complex reality of most salespeople today:

Customers are more complex: over 6 people are typically involved in B2B purchases with over 3 different functions represented.
Product complexity: the product portfolio that sellers represent have increased in size by 2.3 times, and only 37% of sellers find it easy to customize their offerings.
Internal complexity: sellers have reported that 16.4% of the sales cycle is spent on internal approvals and only 24% of sellers can easily calculate their variable compensation.

What the figures above tell is a story of increased difficulty and complexity for the salesperson in your average B2B company. Now add the picture above with the new reality of how salespeople develop their skills, according to Gartner:

58% of sellers develop their skills through their colleagues
35% of skills sellers use today were acquired in the last year
66% of sellers expect most learning and development to occur outside the classroom
60% of sellers expect to learn and develop just-in-time

Traditional training programs and methods are falling short of the expectations and needs of sellers today and leaving much to be desired. The facts presented by Gartner point in a few different directions as well:

Managers are more than ever required to be involved and help drive sales learning and coaching
Onboarding programs have to adapt to the new realities of today’s sellers and better enable them to help buyers during their journeys
Manager enablement is a critical need to help managers have better conversations, give feedback, identify seller skills gaps, and have career conversations with their reps

Most sales enablement teams would agree that the biggest problem or obstacle they face when rolling out programs is getting managers to spend time with their sellers and with the programs.

The key takeaway? Working with managers to show the impact that their actions can have in sales performance is one of the most important action items in your next sales enablement playbook.

If you have a platform that allows you to measure your sales team’s “readiness” and you can show managers the skill gaps identified through the different initiatives rolled out, you’ll have a much easier conversation when it comes to implementation of a new sales enablement strategy. Regardless of technology, the first step is changing the frontline managers’ mindsets and presenting them with a strong case for enablement.

What modernizing sales enablement programs can do for you

The goal of modern sales enablement is straightforward: to help you and your team win more and bigger deals.

“Sales enablement optimizes the selling motion in order to increase pipeline, move opportunities forward and win bigger deals more efficiently to drive profitable growth.” – Sales Enablement Society

It helps achieve that goal through three its three core capabilities. In short, sales enablement:

Helps sellers build out skill sets to deliver phenomenal customer experience. It personalizes, gamifies, coaches, and provides micro-learning modules to deliver resonant and memorable experiences that help sellers master and operationalize new skills.
Combines a modern enablement platform with best-practice methodologies. Sellers need a digital solution that they can access anytime, on any device. Modern platforms’ design is informed with industry-leading insights on how acquired skills translate into revenue production and customer engagement.
Shows the connection between actions and outcomes. Modern sales enablement platforms harness artificial intelligence and data-driven analytics so you can see how your programs are improving sellers’ capabilities. You can identify knowledge gaps where you might want to do some coaching. The platform provides a clear picture of how sales capabilities impact sales performance and business outcomes.

So without further ado, here are the top five reasons you should consider modernizing your sales readiness programs.

1. Business is in a high growth phase

Many businesses experiencing high-growth tend to deal with business challenges that are right in front of them. Usually when business is booming it’s easy to forget about the longer term future. This short-sightedness can cause major headaches down the road, particularly when there are no streamlined processes in place to track personal or business performance.

Referring to an HBR blog Science of Building a Scalable Sales Team, Mark Roberge from Hubspot points out the importance of taking a disciplined approach when training salespeople so that everyone has good foundational selling skills. According to Mark the result at Hubspot stated that “our salespeople are able to connect on a far deeper level with our prospects and leads”, a process that has consistently resulted in high growth.

2. New sales reps take a long time to meet quotas

Hiring new sales reps is a significant investment for any company, and the longer they take to onboard and ramp up, the more money burned.

“According to Aberdeen Research, companies that adopt best practices across their sales teams had double the quota attainment of their peers. Each sales enablement program that gives a rep more time for core selling nets more revenue. Each best practice program that makes reps more effective translates into topline improvement”.

Modernizing sales readiness programs will help each member of the sales team achieve peak performance. Therefore, sales enablement programs should always include finding ways to improve sales reps’ efficiency and effectiveness with prospects so they can meet their quotas and keep on performing into the future.

3. Sales reps spend too much time on non-selling tasks

The primary job of any sales rep is to continually work on their sales process, generating and qualifying leads, conducting sales demos and closing deals. If Anytime they’re not on these selling tasks it’s usually unproductive, and a poor use of a valuable resource.

“To increase sales productivity, you have to reduce or eliminate tasks that aren’t productive.”- Nancy Nardin

Modernizing the sales readiness programs with a data driven sales enablement platform will help your organization have vision into the sales process and identify how it can help reduce non-selling tasks and increase efficiency across the entire process.

4. Need to increase individual sales quotas next year

According to CSO Insights, 94.5% of firms they surveyed said they were raising quotas. If you too are planning to increase quotas, then you’re going to need a new strategy and a new set of sales enablement tools to get more out of your sales team. A dedicated sales enablement manager should help to ensure that your sales reps be well trained regarding your customers’ needs, be up to date with industry and product news, have the necessary tools and information available with them when they need it. As CSO Insights discovered.

As CSO Insights discovered that the key to achieving higher quotas with the same sales team is to keep your sales team well trained and ready with a new set of skill.

5. Marketing efforts aren’t helping sales sell

If you are increasing your marketing budgets but that’s not translating into helping sales sell more, then having a sales enablement manager could be the reason. A significant part of marketing’s role is to create sales collateral for each persona for every stage of the buyer’s journey, so, it’s crucial that both sales and marketing are aligned and work closely together.

A sales enablement manager can help bridge the gap between marketing deliverables and what the sales team needs. Working with both sales and marketing can make a difference in sales ability to provide valuable content and collateral to customers. For example, the HubSpot sales enablement team sits with the sales reps but reports through to the marketing.

Why change?

To sum up, moving in a direction of a revamped, modernized sales enablement program has the potential to completely turn things around when it comes to your team and their sales readiness. A comprehensive and collaborative approach to sales enablement just might be that secret ingredient when it comes to revamping the way your organization tackles – and wins – sales deals.

Ultimately, here’s what a modern sales enablement platform do for your organization:

Accelerate and enhance onboarding to telescope time-to-productivity
Coach sellers in the exact areas where they need help
Energize your meetings and kickoffs to propel profitability
Build sellers’ confidence and effectiveness through guided role-play
Track and accelerate business outcomes through reporting and analytics
Build reps’ skills through tailored, highly engaging learning and development activities
Help sales leaders to make their skills go viral, company-wide.

The Missing Link in B2B Selling: Prescriptive Selling

Shankar Ganapathy on October 15, 2017

While buyers have access to more information, this doesn’t necessarily mean they’re equipped to make better decisions. In fact, all this information has the potential to overwhelm them, making it even harder to make a decision about a big purchase. The result is a prolonged decision making process and an elongated sales cycle.

Research by Corporate Executive Board has found that more information just means customers have more questions, with 65% spending as much time getting ready to speak to a sales rep as they’d anticipated the entire purchase process would take. When coupled with an increase in the number of decision makers – up from 5.4 to 6.8 people in the past two years – it’s even harder to get a decision.

This brings current selling techniques into question. While reps have been focused on responding to customers by giving them more information to help them make decisions, this reduces the ease of purchase by 18%. Whereas reps who are more prescriptive in their approach actually increase the purchase ease for their customers by 86%.

What is prescriptive selling?

Prescriptive selling involves making a recommendation to customers backed with reasons why it’s the best solution for them. This approach involves the rep demonstrating their understanding of the customer’s pain points and needs while offering a valuable solution. It’s proactive and makes it easier for the customer to purchase. It may even reduce the chances that the customer will regret the purchase later on.

And here’s the clincher – a supplier is 62% more likely to win a high-quality sale if they make purchasing easier for their buyers.

The key to prescriptive selling isn’t just about giving the customer a clear recommendation – it’s actually in the organization’s approach to selling. Sales organizations need to be more prescriptive in how their reps can convey these messages in their customer conversations.

So how do you start?

The starting point for any prescriptive selling approach is the customer’s journey. This journey must start before the customer is even aware of your organization or product. Because it’s at this early stage when they’re first bombarded with information and need a prescriptive approach to help guide them through their decision. This means each piece of content across all channels should have a prescriptive lens.

This approach then flows onto all aspects of the sales process. How reps approach conversations, how they articulate the value proposition, and how they deal with objections, should all be more prescriptive. They should all focus on how to help customers make a decision, rather than why they should purchase your product.

This approach also requires a more prescriptive approach to how your reps sell. While formal scripts are rarely appropriate in many complex sales situations, sales organizations should be more prescriptive about how their salespeople should approach different sales situations.

Don’t worry, consultative selling still has its place

While it may seem like prescriptive selling is moving away from the consultative approach to selling, and towards a more rigid sales process, it actually brings together the best of both approaches. Customers won’t respond to well something that feels like a hard sell. Rather they want a solution that meets their specific needs.

But salespeople can rely on more prescriptive content and diagnostic exercises that help customers pinpoint their needs. By providing reps with access to information and real-time training that helps them respond to a customer’s questions they can be more prescriptive and more consultative in how they sell.

The end result is a consistent sales approach. All reps sing from the same songbook, and the way they guide customers along their purchasing journey is similar. With everything tied to the customer’s own purchasing journey, it should also make the process easier for the customer. And as the research shows, the easier the purchasing journey the more chance of a positive decision.

While marketing content is one important part of this process, sales reps also need to be enabled with the tools and information they need to be prescriptive. That may include role plays to practice their messaging, on-demand feedback and coaching from their managers, success stories and examples from their peers, and up-to-date information that they can apply in their customer conversations.

This is a fundamental shift away from the traditional sales approach. No longer can reps just focus on how to get a customer to buy their product. Their role now is to help customers make a decision, full stop. Their customers will thank them for it, and so will their leaders.

How Does a Sales Readiness Solution Differ from an LMS?

Shankar Ganapathy on August 15, 2017

Just the mention of the phrase “sales training” usually elicits a groan from sales reps and managers alike. That’s because it’s traditionally been expensive, time-consuming and may offer little visible benefit. While technology has automated and improved almost every business area, from Finance to Marketing, sales training seems to have been left behind.

While good old learning management systems (LMS) have had an important role to play, in a dynamic and agile world they now seem a bit outdated. Content creation and delivery are still important, but the emphasis is now on how we deliver content and the outcomes they produce.

For forward-looking sales enablement leaders, the traditional LMS just doesn’t help them make the impact on the sales organization that they need. And without the desired impact or outcome, they’re left struggling to elevate the role of sales enablement within their business.

That’s why many are now turning to sales readiness technology. Sales readiness shifts the focus of sales training away from imparting knowledge to delivering real outcomes.

While traditional LMS enabled sales training, sales readiness technology enables sales effectiveness. Sales readiness platforms also enable sales training, but they also actually help your sales reps become better at selling by focusing in on improving their skills and execution.

Sales readiness is an outcome-oriented approach that identifies the capabilities your reps need to win more deals and enables them to develop these. It provides tools that enable your reps with the right knowledge and helps them develop their selling skills so they can use that knowledge in real life scenarios. It also helps sales managers and subject matter experts build a regular cadence to coach sales reps, and gives them the analytics they need to monitor how their reps are improving.

LMS only focuses in on one aspect: providing knowledge through training. An LMS focuses on learning management, while the objective of sales readiness solutions is to achieve learning outcomes. They do this by honing in knowledge, skill development, execution discipline, and analytics.

Sales readiness solutions are a natural evolution from LMS. In an agile world, outcomes become even more critical, and sales are all about outcomes. So anything that can help your reps improve their sales performance is business critical.

Sales readiness tools help your reps improve their capabilities whenever they need to. It’s like when you’re preparing for a marathon. All those weeks and months in the gym help flex your muscles and prepare them. But your barbells aren’t going to help you on the day of the big race. That’s when you need all the little things that make you agiler and keep you performing at your best – great shoes, plenty of fluids and little bursts of energy.

While LMS have traditionally helped do the hard yards in the gym they don’t have the same agility and just-in-time capabilities that sales readiness solutions have. In this day and age, having the right information and tools just when you need it can make all the difference between closing a deal or losing to a better-equipped competitor. Which outcome would you prefer your reps achieve?

Why Sales Enablement needs to work with Sales Ops

Shankar Ganapathy on August 8, 2017

There are many functions powering modern sales teams, Sales Enablement, and Sales Operations are two examples. As a company grows each function evolves and roles are more clearly defined, it will become easier to identify the organizational structure. But organizational charts don’t always reflect the dependencies that different roles have on each other.
While Sales Enablement and Sales Operations may solve different problems in your organization, they need each other a lot more than you may realize.
Sales Enablement is focused on ensuring reps are prepared and effective at selling. They are often responsible for a broad range of deliverables from sales training, coaching and onboarding to communication, sales process and even performance analysis.
Sales Operations is the data engine room that is constantly looking for ways to improve the sales execution, optimize processes and report to sales leadership on any gaps that need to be plugged. Their role may include managing the CRM, process design, and management, territory planning, deal routing, contract management, optimizing and overseeing sales incentive plans, forecasting and performance analysis.

Sales Ops bookends Sales Enablement

As Sales Ops is responsible for much of the data analysis that supports the sales function, they are often the first port of call when management is searching for insights. For example, Ops may identify that certain reps get stuck at a particular point in the sales process, like just after they’ve given a demo. While they may be the first to alert sales leadership that there is a problem, further investigation will be required to determine what the problem is and how to fix. That’s where Sales Enablement steps in.
Sales Enablement can take these insights and investigate to identify the core problem and determine the best way to fix them. By working out what’s causing the sales cycle to stall at that particular point, Sales Enablement can determine what their reps need to speed up the process and get them closer to closing the sale or moving onto a new prospect. The quicker this problem is resolved, the more revenue your sales engine can potentially generate. By relying on Ops to help detect issues at the start of the enablement process, Sales Enablement can identify business issues and fix them. This gives them the ability to be outcome-oriented and create a measurable impact on business results.
At the other end of the enablement process, Sales Ops also plays a crucial role in measuring the impact of enablement initiatives. With all that data at their fingertips, Ops have the ability to identify the right indicators to determine if enablement initiatives are having the desired effect or if reps are still stuck at the same point. They can also track these metrics so that Sales Enablement can demonstrate that their enablement initiatives are working.

Together Ops and Enablement are stronger

Sales Enablement and Sales Ops have the potential for a perfect partnership. Their roles complement each other and they have the same overriding objective – for the sales organization to be more effective and efficient.
There is another key benefit for Enablement to collaborate with Ops, by combining forces the two functions can have a much greater impact and a stronger voice. While Sales Enablement may rack up some spectacular wins, it can be challenging to ensure they get the management attention they deserve. That’s where partnering with Ops can help.
As Tamara Schenk points out, collaboration is key to a productive relationship with Sales Ops. To facilitate this collaboration the business will require a defined interface that ensures their process, messaging and communication is consistent and connected. To achieve this collaboration, an alignment framework is helpful.
Sales Ops is typically involved in the front and back-end processes that create the strategic framework, forecasting, and analysis. They are also responsible for managing sales automation processes that often improve the efficiency of the sales organization. Sales Enablement’s role is focused on the reps and their capabilities. Building knowledge, sales skills, execution discipline, and effectiveness.
While the two roles do not overlap, they rely on each other to play integral roles in improving the sales organization. Sales Ops on its own can improve the efficiency of the sales machine, but it’s Sales Enablement that ensures it is effective.
By backing up Sales Enablement wins with metrics from Ops, together you can demonstrate how much more effective the sales organization is operating. Enablement and Ops share common goals, which means they can leverage each other’s strengths to achieve even more.

What Separates your Top 1% of Sales Reps from your Bottom 5%?

Shankar Ganapathy on June 29, 2017

Imagine if only one in every hundred Big Mac’s had that special sauce that gives the burger its deliciously sweet and savory flavors. You’d probably be less likely to buy one, opting for another option. It’s the fact that every single burger, everywhere in the world, has the same secret sauce that drives sales of Big Macs from New York to New Caledonia.

Now imagine if all your “C” Players, wherever they’re located, had the same secret sauce that keeps your A Players would closing deals? It would instantly transform them from sub-standard performers into predictable selling machines. The key is identifying what ingredients separate your top 1% of sales reps from the bottom 5%.

So how do we break down the secret sauce?

We know that that being a good sales rep is about being outcome driven. It’s about closing more deals, bigger deals, better deals.

But being a great salesperson involves more than just closing deals. The ability to close a deal actually starts a few steps back in the process. So if you really want to know what makes a good salesperson, have a look at what your best reps know and do to actually get their deals over the line.

It’s this knowledge and execution that drives closing rates. And this comes from their selling skills and how they execute the sales process. Essentially, the secret sauce is made up of competencies that your A Players use to deliver revenue. If you can replicate in the rest of your reps then you’ll be able to bridge the gap between the top 1% and the bottom 5%?

Five competencies make all the difference

Research

by The Objective Management Group looked into the competency disparities between salespeople. They identified five competencies that account for over a third of the biggest disparities between the top 1% and the bottom 5% of reps.

These are all skills that can be identified, solved for and managed through coaching and development initiatives. By actively addressing them, the majority of businesses can improve the capabilities and revenue generation opportunities of their entire sales organization.

What makes your “A” Players tick?

While it’s helpful to understand what competencies drive most businesses, what will really provide the biggest bang for the buck in your business is identifying the specific competencies that are making a difference to your reps.

To do this you will first need to identify which competencies make your A Players tick. These are the skills that come together to create the secret sauce that sells your product. Isolating these competencies gives you the recipe that will improve how all of your reps sell.

This could include a range of different competencies, for example, some hold themselves more accountable to their quota; they see it as their responsibility. Others take a systematic approach to the sales process, while others have bought into the company’s message and leadership – they’re inspired to perform.

Once you’ve honed in on the behaviors that really drive sales performance you can then look at how your A Players leverage these skills to achieve. How do they negotiate difficult pricing conversations with conversations? How do they incorporate the company’s messaging into their elevator pitch? How do they manage themselves and their quota so they can track how they’re performing and make adjustments when necessary?

By defining how A Players behave and operate, you will then be well-positioned to impart this knowledge to your other reps. This can be done in a variety of ways; from success stories to structured coaching.

As the knowledge is imparted and reinforced to your reps, it needs to become an integral part of your ongoing learning and coaching initiatives. That’s because it’s the secret sauce of how your business sells. It’s how you meet and smash your revenue targets.

Over time, your recipe will improve and evolve, and your initiatives to impart this knowledge will also evolve. In this day and age, there’s nothing stays the same for long. But as things change you’ll be starting from a very different base, one where the gap between your top 1% and the bottom 5% is much smaller. By narrowing this gap you’ll have a stronger more agile sales team and more predictable revenue. So no matter what your industry or competitors throw your way, you’ll be better equipped to manage the ups and downs.

Coaching Quotes to Inspire your Sales Coaches

Shankar Ganapathy on March 21, 2017

Coaching is often proffered but not performed. Being able to execute it right is one of the biggest challenges faced by sales organizations. Managers put it in the too hard basket leaving them, and their sales reps, behind the eight ball. Companies that understand the impact that coaching has on their sales managers invest more and see greater top-line revenue. In fact, they prioritize coaching with frontline managers spending up to

70% of their time coaching

and mentoring their reps. Some businesses even attributed an

increase

% in their win rates to their focus on coaching.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here are six quotes from successful sales coaches on the power of coaching.

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” ~ Timothy Gallwey, Author

Coaching is not about telling someone what they should be doing, it is about helping them develop so that they get there on their own. Even the most self-aware rep might find it challenging to see how far they can go, that is where a good coach steps in.

“Big things are accomplished only through the perfection of minor details” ~ John Wooden, former basketball player and coach

While coaching will lead to transformative change in your reps, the devil is in the detail. Helping reps make small behavioral changes can actually have a huge impact on their performance in the short, as well as long-term.

“The most important thing in coaching is communication. It’s not what you say as much as what they absorb.” ~ Red Auerbach, former basketball coach

While giving feedback is one part of coaching, the coaching process as a whole has an important role to play. If your reps are coached in a structured manner where they have visibility of their progression path, the coaching is likely to have a greater impact and drive behavioral change than if they’re just given ad hoc feedback. This is also where coaching tools that enable role play and watching peers can help reps gather insights into their own behavior that they can use to improve their performance.

“What do you coach? You coach the gap. Build a bridge that takes your people from where they are today to where they want or need to be” ~ Keith Rosen, Author and CEO Profit Builders

Gap identification is the foundation of effective coaching. Having a structured process in place to identify gaps is crucial for coaching to commence. Once a comprehensive plan is designed to fill the gaps, reaching your target objectives will be relatively easy.

“When you’re coaching your sales reps, make sure your feedback is timely, consistent, objective, accurate, individualised and relevant.” ~ Barry Trailer, Research Principal CSO Insights

In order to be effective, coaching needs to be contextual. This helps reps understand how to put it into practice and be their best in their customer conversations. Unless you’re sitting next to your reps it’s impossible to provide feedback that meets each of these objectives all the time, but it can be achieved by leveraging sales enablement technology that enables structuring coaching.

“Everyone needs a coach” ~ Bill Gates, Founder and CEO Microsoft

Even when you’re at the top of your field, there is still scope to be better with effective coaching. Here’s what Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, have to say about corporate coaching

Don’t you think it’s time to take coaching seriously in your sales organization?

New Hire Orientation Template – What Every New Hire Should Know

Shankar Ganapathy on December 5, 2016

New hire orientation, sometimes called employment orientation, is a chance to make a positive first impression that will have a long-lasting impact on your employees. According to The Wynhurst Group, “22% of staff turnover occurs in the first 45 days of employment and the cost of losing an employee in the first year is estimated to be at least three times salary.”

This means that dropping the ball on orientation for new employees can be a major factor in terms of whether employees hang around for the long term or treat their job as simply a stepping stone to something bigger and better.

A stellar employment orientation program is a chance for you to really make your new employees feel welcome, happier, and more productive. Happy employees lead to customer happiness and more top-line revenue impact! The question is how do you get them there?

New hire orientation programs are no longer about filling out forms and signing policies. Pushing the envelope means moving beyond merely completing a new employee orientation checklist or hosting death by PowerPoint marathon new hire training events.

Today, onboarding managers need to conduct a well-designed, centralized, and cohesive orientation program, well beyond the scope of a new employee orientation checklist.

Don’t be shy about leveraging technology to facilitate your orientation program. Thanks to a tech-savvy workforce, organizations are using technology as an integral part of their new hire orientation programs.

To get you started, we created a new hire orientation template with all of the foundational topics required to bring in new hires in a way that makes them feel welcome, fully briefed on expectations, and poised to succeed.

Use this template to include all the key topics that are important to cover for new hire onboarding. With the basics nailed, you can focus on putting the icing on the cake!

Topic 1: Welcome

Greet new hires with an enthusiastic reception! Make sure that the orientation for new employees process starts with a warm welcome and don’t wait for Day 1 to get started! You can put together a welcome kit and ensure that it reaches the new hire before their start date.

The first days can be exhausting and overwhelming for new employees, so don’t overdo it. Instead, focus on reassuring the new hire that they have made a great choice, they are where they belong, and as a company, you are happy to have them there. Beyond the initial welcome, you should also provide some high-level information on the business including its mission statement and where the company is going.

Also, help your new hires start to build the relationships that will be critical to their success and productivity. Introduce new hires to their colleagues and allow time for them to observe and ask questions. The more familiar a new employee is with her department, co-workers, and job expectations, the more likely she is to be productive right from the start.

Topic 2: Company history

Highlight the positive history of the business. Every company has a lot of history behind it and everyone loves a good story. Even start-ups have stories they can draw from. Offer background on how the company made it to the point where it is today. Provide linkage between the past, present, and the future by telling stories about the company from the past and where the company is investing for the future. Explain WHY you do what you do.

This is also a great opportunity to bring out employees that have dedicated their careers to the company, to show what longevity and commitment truly means. Your best employees have the potential to be your best trainers. By utilizing your top employees, you can grant your organization access to the most efficient and successful ways of serving customers!

Topic 3: Leadership

Introduce the leadership team. The leadership team of any organization is going to make or break what employees think of the company that they work for. When your leadership team is able to connect with and inspire new employees, the company is going to be better off for it in the long run. Ensuring that the orientation process provides employees with a chance to connect with senior management will help them better understand the organizational structure, culture, and overall management vibe.

Time-strapped and/or geographically distributed teams can streamline the onboarding process for leadership by codifying the key messages into videos and engaging the team in the content production process. This is particularly practical when you are dealing with a higher volume of new hires. A video is an excellent way to communicate the excitement and passion that is driving the organization.

From a personal touch standpoint, you can create social forums and discussion boards and let the entire team participate in the assimilation of a new hire. This also allows leaders to focus on important things like strategy and vision with a personal touch while ensuring that employees are supported for success.

Topic 4: Culture

Provide information regarding business culture. No two companies are the same from a cultural perspective. Some companies are going to be more formal, while others will be very laid back. It is important to inform your new hire for company traditions such as casual Friday or where people all go to lunch together on Tuesday. No one wants to be the new person that has to figure these things out on their own as they go. Teaching new hires about traditions and culture is often overlooked in the onboarding experience!

The type of culture that a company has should be highlighted during orientation so that new hires can have an understanding of the work environment. The more that they know of the culture, the better they are going to be able to fit in and grow with the company.

Topic 5: Documentation

Address formalities from a document perspective. Documentation is required as part of any new job. Now is the time, during orientation, where you can have your new hires come prepared with all of the documents that they need. Getting these formalities out of the way in a strong pre-join program can make for an even easier onboarding process.

Topic 6: Compliance

Offer information about compliance. Providing information to new hires regarding what is expected of them to maintain compliance will help your new hire avoid confusion down the line as well as costly legal problems. The new hire orientation coverage of compliance should start with a talk about information security. Things such as the law regarding competition and anti-bribery are also important areas to focus on. Health and safety precaution concerns should also be addressed. Be sure to do adequate research on any applicable compliance laws that may be specific to your organization.

Topic 7: Policy

Highlight company policies. Every company is chock full of policy and it is usually more than one can memorize. It is important to at least go through key policies at a high-level during new hire orientation. Consider touching on topics such as leave, sick time, and vacation time so employees know what to expect. Also, show new employees how company policies apply to their departments and their specific job functions.

The other areas of company policy to cover should include travel policy, expense reporting, and reimbursement policies. There may also be policies regarding internet usage, rewards, and recognition opportunities, as well as employee referral opportunities. When it’s all said and done, the most beneficial information on policies will be where the new hire can go to find answers to their policy questions.

New hires have an uphill climb to productivity. With all the information they are expected to absorb they can easily feel overwhelmed.

A good employee orientation program answers your new hire’s initial questions while giving them a structured runway to become familiar with their new role. Having a welcoming and informative new hire orientation will set up your new hires for success in the short and long-run! And if you’re still looking for more resources for when it comes to new hire training and onboarding, take a look at the sales onboarding checklist here.

What Is The Future of HR?

Shankar Ganapathy on November 12, 2016

There has not been a better time to work in HR.

What we do quite literally makes or breaks a company. If we can’t attract, train, and retain the best talent, then the company will lose ground rapidly.

HR is undergoing change. Not just small-scale change, but a fundamental seismic shift. A change that will see traditional HR falling behind and be replaced by new, skilled HR, ready to change the future of HR. In particular, everything from technology to social media and distributed workspaces has a major impact in the way we hire, train, and retain the millennial workforce.

According to Deloitte, 91% of Millennials expect to stay in their current job for 3 years or less, with 45% of companies reporting higher turnover rates among this group vs. other generations. When looking at the future of HR, it is critical to understand that Millennials behave differently and need different types of solutions to stay engaged at work.

What are the top 3 trends that you see shaping the HR landscape?

Nisha: I’m seeing a shift where HR is getting transitioned into a true business partner who not only understands HR implications but also the core business operations as well. HR is now more connected to how the whole business is functioning, how the business is making revenue, and why the organization works the way it does. Knowing this, HR can more effectively manage the human capital needs of the organization. In fact, human capital is one of the top three challenges for CEOs globally. So HR professionals who have a phenomenal knowledge of what’s happening at the bottom level can manage human capital needs based on business needs.

The other trend that I wanted to highlight is that HR is becoming more data-driven. Using data and analytics, HR is able to make accurate projections and take front decisions to lead the change that helps the organization achieves success. In fact, while we’re talking about HR transformation, one of the key competencies for transforming HR is the ability to analyze data effectively, find answers to those key business questions, and then manage people to achieve success.

When Google initially launched People Analytics as a tool to make their human capital decisions, it was an alien strategy for most of the companies out there. Now, more and more companies are using workforce analytics to predict the future needs and make decisions accordingly. For example, you can find out if there are any talent shortages that are going to happen in the future and if so, what type of talent or what type of skills would the organization require in the future. Can that talent be trained in the organization? If not, where we can we find them? All these questions can be answered by using data and analytics, and HR is becoming more data-driven.

The third trend is that I’m now noticing is that HR is becoming more specialized. Because, as we’ve seen, more and more new roles are emerging in the HR industry like recruitment marketing, employer branding, and HR analytics or data analytics. I want to highlight one of the recent studies conducted by Bersin Associate, which is a Deloitte company. They say that ‘ 7% of HR’s real value comes from its role as an internal people operations team: more than 5 times its value comes from its role in supporting, developing, and identifying leaders’.

So in the future, business leaders want HR professionals to be specialists who have in-depth knowledge in data analysis, who know how to assess talent and how to build compelling employer brand, and who can handle the HR technology as well.

What is the role of technology in HR of the future?

Nisha: That’s a great question. As we all know, technology is an enabler, right? Being in the HR industry, I know it’s impossible to run an HR function without multiple technologies. When it comes to HR technology, the good thing is that all the new technologies are highly integrated into letting the HR professional see the trends and insights. This is really crucial going forward for HR to be able to make decisions and manage human capital.

From identifying talent to handling the employee lifecycle management, maintaining workforce data to analyzing the talent trends and facilitating online training, technology is playing a great role. An organization with the right type of talent who knows how to make the most of HR technologies are bound to succeed. That being said, as an HR person I should definitely say this, technology cannot replace the human element.

There are some particular areas where HR interaction is a must have. For example, the one-on-one interaction between the employee and the manager. It is also needed during retention issues or if there’s any conflict resolution needed.

But as a whole, HR is evolving and technology has and will continue to impact the way HR drives business outcomes from employee onboarding to continuing skill development and beyond.

How has social media, social conversation, and digital in general influenced HR leadership and how will this continue to evolve?

Nisha: Social media, in general, has influenced the way HR attracts, hires, and engages talent. It is a competitive advantage to build a compelling, authentic, and genuine employer brand and attract talent. The greatest impact that I see right now is organizations can have some control over how their organization is perceived as a workplace, by providing content on social media.

For example, from a tweet that talks about how excited to work at the organization, to an employee sharing a photograph of their work desk, or an employee letting their audience know how they have fun working at your organization.

For instance the employer branding approach of Zappos. They have actually created a separate Twitter handle for employer branding. If you haven’t checked it out, you should check it out – it’s @InsideZappos. Their ultimate goal is to let everyone know what life is really like at Zappos. How cool is that!

They do a fun weekly tweet-chat where Zappos employees and HR team are available to talk to everyone and let their audience know how it’s like to work at their organization as well as what are the current possibilities that they’re exploring at their organization. This gives an opportunity for potential talent to interact with Zappos HR professionals and even employees.

Let me make it clear. Social media is not just a tool to broadcast. Use it as a way to engage your audience – it’s a two-way communication.

The use of social and digital will continue to evolve. As HR professionals, we’ll have to collaborate with marketing and learn some marketing skills to come up with compelling recruitment marketing techniques. We need to know how to make employer branding message reach our target audience in general.

Companies are using social media as a tool to identify cultural fit as well. Going through candidates social profiles now recruiters know what the candidates are like. For example, going through a Facebook feeds of a candidate, you can get to know a little more about candidate’s interests and passions. All the data is exposed on social media and that’s what recruiters are really looking for. What type of person is this candidate? Is he going to be a right fit for the organization? Is he going to mash up with the culture of the organization? That’s going to be an initial key in choosing a candidate. After that, once he comes for an interview, the recruiter or HR will be able to ask him behavioral and technical questions to identify the cultural fit and competence.

How can HR leaders prepare for the future?

Nisha: One of the top talent issues that is keeping business leaders up at night is the widening skills gap among HR professionals. One of the things organizations should do is to have a professional development or career advancement program for all employees across business functions. When it comes to HR, it’s not that prevalent out there. I really wanted to shout out to all the HR leaders out there to have a professional development program for your HR team in order to prepare them for the competencies that are going to be required in the future.HR is about the intersection of people with business, strategy, and technology. Keep your fingers on the pulse of these three factors and Understand what is important for your company in terms of HR are be open to all the changes that are happening in your industry, you’ll succeed for sure. crypto and blockchain media source https://cryptofingers.com/news provides trending crypto news and latest updates on Bitcoin, ETH, Solana and trading

Thank you for your insight Nisha!

Nisha Raghavan, Founder & host of India HR LIVE, is a Global HR professional with extensive experience in handling Talent Management, Employee Engagement, and Cultural diversity in the workplace. After having worked in Corporate India for a while, she moved to The United States and talks about her Global HR experiences on her blog.

5 Tips for a Successful Pre-Join Program

Shankar Ganapathy on October 31, 2016

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