Building Blocks, Close Up! Series on Business Impact (Part 1)

Happy Friday, Enablers! It's time for another edition of Building Blocks, Close Up! This week, I'll be offering thoughts on making a business impact with enablement. This will be the first in an ongoing series, which may not be sequential, but will be recurring. Over time, we'll discuss the challenges and best practices to help you:

• Plan for Impact
• Execute for Impact
• Evaluate for Impact

Note: If you've been following this newsletter, you may remember that Felix Krueger and I recently delivered a webinar on the 7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business Impact . This edition will not be a direct repeat of that content, but there will be some overlap.

Let's dive in.

"Everything you want is on the other side of fear."?

~ Jack Canfield

"Fail fast" has always been good, if counterintuitive, advice. While I’d rather avoid failure, when possible, it’s an occasional inevitability, especially when solving adaptive challenges or even when addressing large-scale technical problems across an organization, such as improving sales force performance. (For more about technical problems vs. adaptive challenges, see this page .)

The fear of facing, admitting, and addressing failure is a known executive derailer. Some enablers are hesitant to measure for impact, for fear they won't see evidence of one. Work cultures that are low on psychological safety or fraught with political positioning tend to heighten this fear. I can’t control the environment where you work (you can, though, through wise career choices), but trust me on this:

The only things worse than not making an impact are not knowing whether you did or hiding from failure.

Over the years, I have seen highly popular initiatives with positive anecdotal evidence fall flat when measured for results. I've also seen some grueling, very unpopular programs deliver phenomenal results. (And frankly, probably more of the latter. Watch for a future newsletter on this topic.)

If your initiative (or combined initiatives/program) is not making a business impact – meaning to move the needle on the metrics that matter most: things such as sales productivity, sales velocity , revenue plan attainment, quota attainment, win rates, revenue, and profitability – you have some choices to make.

First, you need to decide whether your lackluster initiative is still the right initiative, needs to be done, and should continue. Continuing a non-impactful initiative that can’t be saved or turned around is just throwing good money after bad and makes little business sense. But at the same time, stopping an initiative that could be very impactful but just needs to be tweaked, is equally misguided. I can’t tell you the number of times I have seen a company stop doing the exact right thing too early, usually because of poor execution, more so than a poor idea.

If you believe the initiative (or series of initiatives/program) has value that hasn’t yet been realized (for rational, data- or experience-driven reasons), then you need to analyze why it's not producing results.

• Should this initiative, on its own, be able to produce an impact? Have you been too myopic or set improper expectations? We work in an ecosystem. If you upgrade your onboarding but your hiring practices are substandard, your impact will be constrained, at best. If you train a key sales competency that is not reinforced and coached by front-line sales managers, adoption will be limited. Look at the broader ecosystem, conduct a root-cause analysis, and assess where and why the breakdown is occurring.
• If it's a skills-based initiative, have you guided the team through The 5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change (Learn, Remember, Practice, Apply, Master)? Did you implement the rest of The Sales Training System, as well?

• Is it an execution issue on your side, or a quality of skill-usage issue with the team that requires assessment, field training, and sales coaching to improve adoption and mastery? Or, is there some other barrier in the way of performance, such as misaligned consequences, unrealistic expectations, lack of feedback, or lack of belief and buy-in from the performers or their managers? Reminder from above: Look at the broader ecosystem, conduct a root-cause analysis, and assess where the breakdown is occurring.

This is a performance consulting mindset and approach and, in my opinion, is where we need to evolve our profession.

We may have finally reached a tipping point, where business impact will be required in our roles as enablers. If so, it’s going to cause consternation for a while, for some, but this is exactly where we need to be. If you follow my work at all, you know I’m not a fan of the “renaming of the week” that we tend to do. But this is more "performance consulting" or "commercial excellence" than just “sales enablement.” It’s the culmination of The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement with systems thinking, taking a “diagnose first, then prescribe” approach, with linkages between performance issues and solutions, and with follow-up measurement to gauge impact or to allow you to pivot and adjust to deliver one.

Performance Consulting

So, what is Performance Consulting? It’s a systematic and holistic approach to improve workplace performance and achieve business goals.

Performance Consulting:

• Is grounded in analytics, diagnostics, and root cause analysis.
• Considers a broad array of factors that influence human and organizational performance.
• Includes the selection, design, and development of the most appropriate solution to solve an identified performance problem or enable an opportunity to improve performance.
• Involves the implementation of these solutions following proven-effective practices for the selected intervention, and using accepted change management practices, including deep and effective communication, follow-through, measurement, analysis, evaluation, and adjustment, as needed, to ensure the intended results are achieved.

Performance Improvement Models

You may have seen this Human Performance Improvement Model from ATD or the one below it, from ISPI. Click on the links to view larger images, and take a moment to read through them.

The Big Moving Parts of Performance Improvement

While most of these models are a bit unique, there are some general commonalities. Each has steps or stages of:

• Diagnosis and Gap Analysis
• Root-Cause Analysis
• Problem-Solving and Solution Design
• Solution Development
• Solution Implementation with Change Management
• An “Execute, Measure, Evaluate, and Adjust” Loop

If you become a student of performance consulting, human performance technology (HPT), and organizational performance improvement in general, you will come across other models , most of which follow a similar “diagnose first, then prescribe” methodology and include various factors to explore.

Tools for Solution Design

Just as there are many models for performance improvement, there are multiple available tools for determining the best solution. Two that I have used frequently include Mager and Pipe’s Performance Analysis Flowchart from their book, Analyzing Performance Problems , and a chart I adapted from the work of Ferdinand F. Fournies that I dubbed The Solutions Chart and included in my Sales Coaching Excellence program. Here are links to both:

• Performance Analysis Flowchart (if you like it, please buy it from Mager Consortium )
• The Solutions Chart

The Nuanced Decisions Behind Making an Impact

Even with all of these tools, it’s the dot connection between the performance issue or opportunity and the selected intervention, and then the quality of the solution design and the execution, that will determine the impact on performance.

I recognize that this is hard to convey in writing (one-way communication), but this is the thing I see people struggle with the most, as they try to shift to performance-oriented work: knowing exactly what to do to move the needle.

I can’t teach a 3-day course in performance consulting in a single newsletter, but I will try to offer some examples to illustrate what I mean.

The Situation Assessment

Start here to assess your own sales force.

Ensure that your ELT’s and senior sales leader’s perspectives are baked into the Gap Analysis and Impact Analysis between your Current and Desired Future States (especially Outcomes and Priorities - the Needs are the output of the Gap Analysis, or what it will take to move from the Current State to the Desired Future State). The inclusion of your senior leaders' perspectives is critical because it defines the business impact you need to make.

The inclusion of your senior leaders' perspectives is critical because it defines the business impact you need to make.

Whether it’s an increase in overall sales productivity or sales velocity, revenue plan attainment (or making up a shortfall), the successful launch of a new product (with associated revenue targets), a 10% lift in new business development (be sure to quantify and dollarize what exactly that means), or an increase in average deal profitability (how much), these Needs, Outcomes, and Priorities (and the associated financial and operational KPIs), become your mission.

The Building Blocks Gap & Impact Analysis

Next is the gap analysis of the building blocks, to assess which are GEFN (good enough for now) and can continue as-is, or what you must start, stop, or do differently, to deliver the results documented in your Situation Assessment. You can use the same Current State/Desired Future State on a sliding scale, as pictured, or any rating system of your choosing.

You want to ensure a strong correlation between the blocks you choose and Needs, Outcomes, and Priorities identified above. This tells you which “performance levers” you need to pull.

The Nuanced Decisions

Now, you must use your best judgment (or as needed, seek good counsel from a mentor, coach, partner, consultant, or internal expert) to do a deeper root-cause analysis and the resulting solution design. This is where the context matters and the nuanced decisions you make will support your desired outcomes (or not).

Here, I recommend a Force Field Analysis to document the driving forces that are nudging you toward you desired outcomes (factors in your favor) and the restraining forces holding you back (factors working against you, including missing information or things you don't currently know). You do this by building block (just the ones you've selected to support getting the results you need).

Force Field Analysis - Part 1

Force Field Analysis - Part 2

With that done, you can ask two questions to turn your analysis into a plan:

1. What can I do to reduce or eliminate the Restraining Forces?
2. What can I do to strengthen or add Driving Forces?

The most common challenges here are making the prioritized decisions on which actions and which combination of initiatives will yield the best results.

This bring us back to the nuanced decisions, where the rubber meets the road, as you align your plan to the outcomes you need to deliver.

Let me provide an example:

Scenario

• Your turnover is very low, and you have no hiring plans this quarter.
• You need to improve lead generation and pipeline size and quality, to improve win rates.
• You must prepare to make a big splash with the new product launch in 8 weeks, which will be supported by marketing, but will require outbound prospecting to reach targets.
• Recent win-loss analysis shows that buyers are not feeling educated or supported by what your reps are sharing (content is not satisfying their buying process exit criteria). ?

Responses

• As much as it might be helpful at some future point, or as much as they may need improvement, The Sales Hiring System and upgrading your sales onboarding program are not focus areas for the short-term.
• Scenario-based solution training for the new product, combined with problem/outcome-centric value stories (product marketing), a targeted ICP list (rev ops), collateral that will satisfy your buying persona’s common exit criteria in each stage of their journey (content marketing team), will be required. Preparation and practice with feedback and coaching (your team and/or training, with front-line sales manager engagement) will help springboard your reps to success with the launch.
• Extending the above content plan from the new product to a broader solution set to hone the collateral for current products, based on buyer feedback, the creation of problem/outcome-centric prospecting approaches with the same practice/feedback/coaching loop, should improve lead generation in general.
• Based on the current state quality and consistency of coaching (not mentioned above, but always worth considering), you may want to consider investing in helping managers learn to diagnose and coach effectively, to support the above changes and plans to impact performance.

That example probably couldn’t be more oversimplified, but I hope you can at least see the logic path and dot connections between the Scenario and Responses.

This is what a performance consultant does. This is how you align your work effort to make a business impact and move the needle on the metrics that matter to your ELT and senior sales leader.

And even so, it’s still reactive, to a degree. You will want to get to a point, over time, where you have something GEFN in place for all the building blocks, at a minimum, and put systems in place for sales hiring, sales readiness, sales training, and sales management (including sales coaching).

Then, in the future, when you identify a specific need that will enable a desired outcome, you will already have the systems in place – a way to execute to deliver in replicable, repeatable, scalable ways to produce predictable results. This will shorten Time-to-Value, after you create the solution needed to address the performance issue or opportunity at hand.

We’ll continue to come back to this business impact topic, in future newsletter editions, but hopefully this has been helpful for today.

RESOURCES

• Webinar Recording: 7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business Impact (Recording, Slides, Q&A)
• Website: HPT Manual
• Website: HPT Manual 7150
• Book: Handbook of Human Performance Technology
• Book: Analysis for Improving Performance
• Book: Improving Performance
• Book: Performance Consulting
• Book: Serious Performance Consulting According to Rummler ?

AND NOW, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR…

Felix ?says...

Have you seen this look lately...?

Enablement's reputation as the key to hypergrowth?made it the darling of VC/PE firms and revenue leaders in recent years.?

But in 2023, at a time when many technology companies are sliding into survival mode, slashing budgets, and only retaining the most essential?functions, Enablement's ability to make a business impact has been called into question by many.

While we recognize the irrationality of some of the decisions being made and do not place blame at the feet of all impacted enablers, you know the old saying... "Where's there's smoke, there's fire." This is a sign, and it's one we must collectively join forces to both heed and address.

This is why Mike Kunkle and I have recently joined forces to share proven best practices to win the hearts, minds, and respect of senior?executive leadership in a webinar called?7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business Impact.?

Some of the topics covered include:

• Assessing the maturity level of your sales enablement team to identify where you are and where you need to be
• Using a diagnostic framework to identify current shortfalls and desired outcomes
• Managing stakeholder to gain alignment and get more done with less
• Reviewing the sales performance levers you can pull and determining which will deliver the outcomes your leaders want
• Analyzing all the factors to formalize a plan that builds momentum quickly and ultimately delivers business impact

Here's what some of the attendees had to say (unsolicited):

If you want to take your business impact to the next level in 2023 (or use what you learn to gain an edge in interviews), make some to watch the free, 60-minute recording of the?7 Steps to Maximizing Enablement's Business Impact?webinar.?

>>> Watch it here:?https://bit.ly/3S9Q9r1

____________________

Well, that's it for this week! Did you learn something new reading this newsletter? If you did, or if it just made you think (and maybe chuckle from time to time - bonus points if you snorted), share it with your favorite enablement colleague, subscribe right here on LinkedIn, and check out?The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience .?Felix Krueger ?and I are both Building Blocks Mentors for the weekly group coaching sessions, and we hope to see you there!?

Until next time, stay the course, and?#MakeAnImpact ?With?#Enablement !