The Misunderstood & Underutilized Sales Readiness System
Mike Kunkle
??Improving Sales Performance: Modern Sales Foundations | Sales Coaching Excellence | The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement
Hey, Enablers, Happy Friday. Mike Kunkle here. Welcome to this week’s edition of Sales Enablement Straight Talk!
Today, I want to talk about The Sales Readiness System. It's a very powerful system, but I don't often see it fully maximized. In fact, due to the detail behind it, I believe it is often misunderstood and underutilized. In this episode, I'll share some details and nuances about it and share how this less-talked-about system can play a key role in helping you improve the performance of your sales force.
Let's dive right in.
Introduction
Before the term "sales readiness" was coined, I originally called this system The Sales Support System. I renamed it in the late 2015 or early 2016 timeframe, when the term sales readiness become a hot topic in sales enablement. And, of course, it is a fitting name for the system.
As with a few other of my systems, and in-line with systems thinking in general, there is more behind this system than is apparent on the surface, and it also contains another system (the Sales Training System), which has other embedded elements in it. Such is systems thinking - interrelated, intertwined - demonstrating the relationships and interdependencies of elements in support of the whole.
“A system is any group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent parts that form a complex and unified whole with a specific purpose.”
~ Daniel Kim, MIT Center for Organizational Learning
So, with that said, here is the Sales Readiness System at the surface level.
Let's take a closer look at each element in the system.
Buyer Personas
I've written a lot about Buyer Acumen, which includes personas and archetypes. Roles, goals, and COIN-OP are key parts of understanding personas (COIN-OP = Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Outcomes, and Priorities). The below chart is just one example of archetypes (across the top) and is not meant to represent the archetypes for your buyers. It's just an example.
Reminder: Persona research (including archetype creation) is both art and science. My recommendation is to outsource building them to trained experts who interview your buyers and others like them. Building them internally is a risk and unlikely to produce accurate and insightful results.
Buying Process & Exit Criteria
As an outgrowth of the persona research, you should also obtain your buyer's journey (their buying process), which should also include buying process exit criteria (BPEC). BPEC is whatever each individual decision maker needs to see, hear, feel, understand, and believe in each stage of their buying process, to feel comfortable moving forward to the next stage with you. It is the closest thing you will ever find to a magic bullet for effective opportunity management.
This chart represents a buying process with stages and exit criteria for two decision makers. Notice how in some stages the criteria is the same, while in others, it is different.
Marketing, and Sellers during the early stages, benefit from having documented generic exit criteria. Sellers, however, need to go far deeper, past the generic criteria to uncover, clarify, satisfy, and confirm satisfaction of the BPEC for each decision maker in each stage.
Buyer Engagement Content Creation
The reason that Marketing benefits from BPEC documentation, is that it tells them what questions that most buyers have in each stage, and what they need to see, hear, feel, understand, and believe in order to move forward in the process and eventually, make a purchase decision.
When you know this, you can design collateral to answer those questions and provide the needed information. That includes Content Marketing (to generate interest) and Buyer Engagement Content (to satisfy exit criteria).
Domain/Business & Solution Acumen
Domain, Business, and Solution Acumen are the ticket for entry, especially since Buyer Acumen has already been called out, but you can go deeper here. Buyer Acumen was already mentioned, Sales Acumen is coming soon, Industry Acumen is domain expertise, but Operational, Organizational, and as applicable, Ecosystem Acumen, are important, too. I refer to this grouping as the Sales Effectiveness Acumens, and they are foundational for an effective sales force.
Sales Effectiveness Acumens
Let's take a little closer look at what each means.
Buyer & Customer Acumen
As discussed, this refers to understanding general buyer personas (and perhaps archetypes), buyers’ journey or buying processes including Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Objectives, Priorities (COIN-OP), decision process, decision criteria, decision roles, desired outcomes with metrics/measures, emotional pressures, and consideration of both the decision makers’ Value Drivers (business, experiential, aspirational, and personal needs).
Sales Acumen
This is sales mastery, especially for whatever methodology(ies) you use. It includes but may not be limited to: sales research, sales call planning, prospecting/lead generation, digital selling practices, opportunity qualification, consultative selling using an adaptive sales methodology (including discovery/situation assessment, solution development/co-creating solutions, developing proposals, conducting demos and/or presenting solutions/solution dialogue, resolving concerns, and gaining commitment), sales meeting management, multi-threading to message appropriately to buyers with different interests, storytelling, insight selling, negotiating, influence skills, consulting skills, general dialogue and communication skills, team selling, and strategic account management.
Solution Acumen
This is a deep understanding of your products and services and how they solve customer problems. It includes critical thinking and problem solving, force field analysis, how solutions tie to Industry Acumen, Financial Acumen, Customer Acumen, and Ecosystem Acumen. This is the culmination of acumens, used to create value for customers (and differentiation for the company) to achieve buyers' and customers’ desired outcomes. Includes an understanding of competitive offerings and how to position against them, as well as against DIY and the status quo.
Business Acumen
This is understanding business models, financial acumen, operational metrics/outcomes such as key performance indicators and critical success factors, pricing, how customer organizations make money, and how to build a business case and calculate ROI.
Industry Acumen
This is domain expertise. It's understanding the industry challenges, opportunities, technologies, regulations and legislation, business practices, current events/news, and the general state of the profession.
Organizational Acumen
This is how to plan and organize effectively. For sales this includes territory planning, account planning, sales call planning, leading sales meetings, task management, using CRM, sales enablement tools, other technology tools and performance support, action planning, calendaring, project management, change management, and personal productivity practices.
Operational Acumen
How to get things done: how to make things happen in your own organization and in others – includes an understanding of processes, political savvy, culture, collaboration, consensus-building, and the ability to execute on all the above plans effectively.
Ecosystem Acumen
This doesn't apply to everyone, but as applicable, it's an understanding of vendor and channel partners and how to most effectively build relationships and engage with them to uncover, manage, and win opportunities through the effective co-creation of solutions for customers. This could mean going to market together or simply working opportunities together in the most effective way possible.
Sales Process & Sales Methodology
It doesn't get much more important than this.
Companies with high adoption rates of a formal sales process and sales methodology consistently outperform others. They have higher revenue plan and quota attainment percentages and higher win rates. The differences are not minor - they're significant.
The above statement has been confirmed in multiple studies over multiple years. It should be an earth-shattering wake-up call for all CEOs, heads of sales, and sales/revenue operations and enablement leaders.
Sales process should be aligned to the buying process and larger customer lifecycle. Sellers do have some of their own exit criteria (qualifying opportunities, as just one example) but part of their exit criteria for each stage should be uncovering, clarifying, satisfying, and confirming satisfaction of all individual decision maker's buying process exit criteria.
The sales methodology should support both the seller's tasks and the buyer's journey, and should be modern, buyer centric, consultative, value focused, and outcome oriented.
Cautions:
If you'd like to explore a full-cycle sales methodology that is buyer-centric, consultative, value focused, and outcome oriented -- that you can be proud of (and that works!) -- you can explore Modern Sales Foundations here:
Sales Enablement Technology
This one should be no surprise. It includes whatever sales enablement software supports the sellers in going to market, managing opportunities, or managing accounts. "Sales enablement" is a broad, inclusive heading in this case, and can mean other sales and sales engagement tools, as well.
Analytics
Analytics can include whatever diagnostics exist, as well as reporting, dashboards, competency assessments, and any leading and lagging indicators for both learning metrics and performance metrics.
Sales Training System
It'd be difficult to envision readying a sales force without training, so the Sales Training System is part of the Sales Readiness System. Yet, as you know, the training system is important enough and detailed enough to break out into its own system and also contains the embedded 5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change.
The Sales Training System Detail
The 5 Stages of Sales Mastery & Behavior Change Detail
How Tools & Services Can Support the 5 Stages
How tools and services can support the 5 Stages could just as easily fall into the Sales Enablement Technology bucket, but in either case, supporting the 5 Stages is what matters. And the three major parts of the Sales Training System that:
Readiness: Onboarding & Everboarding, For the Win!
So, what do you do with all of these moving parts of the Sales Readiness System? Well, you ready your sales force and keep them ready. And in our world, that often translates into sales onboarding and everboarding. Those are big separate topics that are beyond our scope today, but I will provide some resources for those who want to dig in further (including Amber Watts?? book).
Read more:
Closing Thoughts
I hope you can now see some of the depth in the Sales Readiness System and how it can be used to improve sales effectiveness. It can help you maximize most of the things you do in enablement, from buyer enablement content, to training, to sales support content, and more. Its entire purpose is to help you ready your sales force to go to market in the most effective way possible, and then to keep them updated over time, constantly improving their effectiveness. And that's what good enablement is all about.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR THE WEEK
MY NEXT WEBINAR:
The Impact of Process, Methodology, and Coaching on Performance!
Join me on SMM Connect for this webinar on March 19 at 2:00 pm Eastern.
COURSE:
The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience
The preeminent course on sales enablement has been updated! There are three tracks at various price points, including a certification.
RESOURCES
I posted some resources throughout the newsletter this week. Here are some additional resources you may find helpful.
Well, that's it for this week, Enablers! Did you learn something new reading/watching 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. For other courses and content from Mike, see: https://linktr.ee/mikekunkle
Until next time, stay the course, Enablers, and #MakeAnImpact With #Enablement!