4-Day Work Week, CSO Challenges, Better Product Training and More | This Month In Sales Enablement (Mar 23)

Enablers! It's time for yet another edition of This Month In Sales Enablement a.k.a. "The Monthly Habit of Successful Enablers" with all the resources you need to stay up to fast-track your journey to Sales Enablement mastery including insights, reports, jobs, and more! Brought to you by?Devon McDermott ?and?Felix Krueger .

• Listen to the?podcast
• Watch the recording of?the TMISE March live stream
• Keep on scrolling for a list of this month's resources

ATTENTION!

We'll move from LinkedIn to an email newsletter format next month so please make sure to subscribe here to keep receiving this resource!

Insights

“…while product training will always be needed, Level 4 [ or the best-performing] companies realize that prospects typically conduct significant online research before meeting with a salesperson, and, as a result, are no longer reliant on the salesperson for information. So, the primary focus of these companies’ training initiatives is on improving the selling skills of their salespeople, so that they can have meaningful business dialogues with prospects.”

- CSO Insights’ Sales Performance Optimization Study

Listen to the full episode on scenario-based solution training

Do you want to take your Sales Enablement business impact to the next level? Make sure to watch the on-demand webinar:?7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business Impact .

Research

The 2023 Value of Enablement Report (Seismic)?

Are you building or defending a business case to support the procurement of essential enablement tech? If yes, this report is for you.?

Seismic’s 2023 Value of Enablement Report is full of insights on the what, why, how and impact of supporting (or not supporting) your teams with a stellar tech stack to drive organisational efficiencies.?

This report covers a lot–from the generational confidence gap to the staggering reality of what happens if you don’t have a strong tech stack to empower your customer-facing teams with the resources and support needed to deliver an exceptional customer experience–it’s quite insightful.

In a world where customer centricity and retention is everything when it comes to business success – enablement tech such as content management, automation, analytics, training and more should be considered an essential foundation for any business. Check the report to learn more about how the right tech stack drives positive business results, boost customer team morale, and enable organisational efficiencies across the board.?

You can read the full report here.

The Chief Sales Officer - First Quarter 2023 (Gartner)

Top trends and challenges affecting CSOs:

1. Drive revenue growth in a digital sales environment: CSOs must create orchestrated customer engagement strategies where sellers and digital channels work together to deepen customer learning. This can be achieved by investing in dynamic personalization and new seller skills, which cater to hybrid buying experiences involving digital channels and human-led interactions.
2. Improve sales effectiveness amid perpetual uncertainty: CSOs should build adaptive and resilient organizations by helping sellers understand how uncertainty impacts customers, equipping sellers with resources for valuable customer engagements, and creating a buyer-centric operating model that emphasizes visibility, collaboration, and coordination across customer-facing functions.
3. Attract, retain, and motivate high-performing sales talent: CSOs must focus on reducing seller "drag" by diagnosing issues and addressing them, creating attractive growth opportunities, and empowering sellers to solve customer problems and innovate business processes. Additionally, they should redefine the seller role by updating deployment models, sales force composition, and enablement resources to adapt to the changing sales landscape.

You can read the full report here.

Resources for Job Seekers

Are you looking for an Enablement job??Check out the latest?Sales Enablement job board ?(brought to you by?Steffaney Zohrabyan and SES) or add yourself to the?Enablement Squad Talent Directory .

Communities for networking:?WiSE ,?SES ,?SEC ,?Enablement Squad ?

Recruiters specialised in Enablement talent:?Enablematch ?

Article:?My 59-Day Career Search Advice ?(by Mike Kunkle)

Understand which industries have been affected by layoffs:?https://layoffs.fyi/

Did you know that job seekers receive a 50% discount when joining?The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience ??Check out?this post ?for details.

Resources for Hiring Managers

Are you looking for top Enablement talent??Message?Steffaney Zohrabyan ?to add your job to her job board or check the?Enablement Squad Talent Directory .

Recruiters specialised in Enablement talent:?Enablematch ?

Social Buzz

EnableMinutes

The team at Allego created EnableMinutes for busy enablers who want to continue to level up via skill building and learning from peers.?

It’s designed to cut through the noise and deliver high-impact insights and tips from experts in the space. Featured speakers include, enablement practitioners, CROs, marketing experts, sales people, customer success managers and more!??

The best part about EnableMinutes are the unique perspectives, topics, voices, and experiences. It’s also available everywhere you are including Linkedin , Instagram , TikTok and YouTube !

Articles

A four-day workweek pilot was so successful most firms say they won’t go back

With a renewed focus on work-life balance and personal wellbeing post 2020, companies are exploring moving to a 4-day work week and the results are exceptionally promising!?

Here’s the scoop - in a pilot organised by advocacy group 4-Day Week Global - almost 3,000 employees across 61 companies in the UK explored different methods to shorten their work weeks, aiming to reduce working days to about 32 hours per week. During this time employees still received 100% of their pay.?

During this pilot a number of benefits came to light, including:

• Improved employee mental health
• Reduced stress levels
• Enhancements in employee personal lives
• Increased productivity
• Elevated job satisfaction
• Better sleep??
• Reduction in resignations

The pilot was so successful that 56 of the 61 companies engaged in the trial said they would continue to run 4-day work weeks after the pilot ended.??

Check out https://www.action.4dayweek.com/pilot to learn more about the pilot program and results!

You can read the full article here.

Down-Time Resources

This Month In Sales Enablement is brought to you by The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience

Are you still trying to reinvent the wheel?

The?underlying principles of Enablement ?have been around for decades. Yet a lot of Enablers are still developing approaches from scratch making the same mistakes others have made before them. Over and over again.

Think about it...

Tens of thousands of professionals have attempted to solve the same challenges you're dealing with right now. Some of them failed. Some of them succeeded. Very few of them succeeded multiple times AND captured their proven approach to share it with the world.

Mike Kunkle ?is one of these very few.

He's been an Enabler for 30+ years (he's old, he says, and cites dinosaurs as enablement stakeholders) and has captured his proven approach in an extremely successful framework called?"The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement." ?

"The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement is rooted in a deep understanding of the messy reality that confronts today's sales enablement leaders: complex, interdependent systems that govern today's modern commercial organization, and the chaos that is the customer buying experience. Mike Kunkle's intimate understanding of these dynamics delivers a clear and actionable framework that will propel growth for all revenue leaders."

• Nick Toman , Co-author of The Challenger Customer and The Effortless Experience, and President of the Growth Accelerator at?SBI, The Growth Advisory

How successful has this building blocks framework been, you ask?

Here are just three (of many) sample results:?

ENTERPRISE, PUBLIC, B2B FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRM

• Result:?Achieved a $398MM accretive revenue increase in one year from final project completion.

MID-MARKET, PRIVATE, MANUFACTURER

• Result:?Improved average profitability per sales rep by 11% in only 4 months.

SMB SaaS, PRIVATE, CONVENTION MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

• Result:?Increased sales productivity (revenue per rep) by 47% in 9 months.

Mike and I have now translated?The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement?framework into a learning experience that helps a new generation of enablement teams fast-track their journey to sales enablement mastery and business impact.

Our combination of group coaching sessions, actionable video lessons, materials, resources, networking opportunities, and templates makes mastering sales enablement best practices faster and easier than it has ever been before. And, you'll will learn things are?not?taught elsewhere that have been proven-effective at delivering business impact!

So if you want to stop reinventing the wheel, maximize business impact, and fast-track your career, consider joining a growing community of enablers at?The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience .

By the way, we don't suggest that you commit without trying it first. We offer full refunds within the first 30 days of your membership if you don't believe this resource will allow you to increase the impact of your enablement function. No questions asked.?