Must Enablers Have Firsthand Sales Experience to be Successful?

Hey, Enablers, Happy Friday. Mike Kunkle here. Welcome to this week’s edition of Sales Enablement Straight Talk!

Introduction

Today, I'm going to tackle a very controversial, volatile topic. It's truly an emotional one, for some people. I've been sworn at, called names, and told I'm an idiot, over this topic, right here on dear ol', professional, peaceful, LinkedIn.

Ding, ding, ding! Let's dive right in.

Does Sales/Sales Management Experience Help?

Does sales or sales management experience help in sales or revenue enablement? Yes, of course it does, to a degree. (Assuming the candidate has the other mindsets, traits, and skills needed for enablement success.)

• Understanding the Profession: Sales experience allows an enabler to grasp the intricacies of the sales world. It provides firsthand knowledge of what sellers and managers go through, which can be invaluable.
• Credibility with the Sales Force: And probably most of all, because of the deep-set cognitive biases surrounding this topic, it does help with establishing credibility with sales leaders and the sales force (initially – credibility can also be earned in other ways, as well, albeit over time).

But sales enablement pros do not need to have "carried a bag" (sold or managed sales) to be highly successful in their role. Enablement and selling are two very different roles with very different competency requirements.

Different Roles, Different Competencies

Surprising Parallels

At the same time, there are a surprising number of parallels between sales, sales management, and sales enablement roles.

I wrote about this in a past newsletter, titled, "The Surprising Parallels Between Sales, Sales Management, & Enablement!"

Of course, to my point above with the watch graphic, each of these roles also carries their unique signature and mindsets, beliefs, knowledge, skills, and competencies, due to the differences in the roles. But these overlapping competencies do help an enabler who possesses them to better learn and understand the other two roles.

The Difference Between Experience & Understanding

So, do enablers need to deeply understand sales, selling, and sales management? Absolutely!

Is front-line experience the only (or even the best way) to gain that understanding? No, it's not. The path to gaining that understanding isn’t limited to front-line experience alone.

Here’s how they can expand their understanding:

• Engage with Professionals: Reach out to colleagues in various roles within Sales, especially within your own company. Conversations with salespeople, managers, and other stakeholders provide valuable insights - but especially those doing the job and managing that job.
• Hold Focus Groups: Gather input from different perspectives. Focus groups allow you to tap into collective wisdom and identify common challenges.
• Continuous Learning: Read extensively. Join communities. Attend conferences. Stay informed about industry trends, best practices, and emerging technologies. Knowledge evolves, and enablers must keep pace.
• Analyze Top Performers: Conduct Top Performer Analyses to learn what sets high-performing salespeople apart. Their strategies, mindset, beliefs, knowledge, skills, competencies, and approaches can inform enablement efforts.
• Field Immersion: Step into the field alongside both sales representatives and managers. Observe firsthand how they operate, face challenges, and interact with customers. Today, with conversation intelligence and call recording technology, you can accelerate your expertise faster than ever before. But that doesn't replace live ride-alongs and call-alongs where you interact with the rep and develop a relationship and trust.

Post-publication Edit: Successful enablement pro, Paul Petroski , reminded me about this excellent leadership move, which he's done:

• Hire to Close Your Gaps: Don't have sales experience personally? Hire someone for your team who does. This is a great strategy in general and can be applied in other circumstances, too. New to content management? Hire someone with that experience. New to large-scale change management? Hire someone who's done it. Of course, budgets and resources are often limited, so you can also rent the expertise (consultants) as well, or occasionally find it internally, elsewhere, and borrow someone short-term (or pick their brain and give them credit). Bottom-line, for the topic of this newsletter, you can shore up your lack of sales experience by hiring someone with it. Thanks to Paul for the great reminder, and see his thoughts, here: Thoughts from Paul Petroski on LinkedIn

Parallels with Onboarding

We onboard and teach new reps, don’t we? Sometimes straight out of college or from different industries. This is no different. Build on strengths. Close developmental gaps.

Is Sales/Sales Management Experience Required?

The band, The Zombies, has the answer in this video: The Zombies, "Tell Her No".

Does it hurt to have the experience? Again, no. Of course not. It's just not required, like some think it is. (And many who think so are very adamant. So much so, as I've mentioned, that they will swear at you and call you names when you disagree with them. Trust me on this.)

Let's think through some comparisons:

• Instructional Designers: Otherwise, an instructional designer would have to personally master every job they develop training for. (They don't. They develop a good understanding and reply on Subject Matter Experts or SMEs for content. They follow a proven process to develop great training to help others perform well in a specific role or for a specific task.)
• Sports Coaches: Not every sports coach was a star athlete in their own right. A few never even played the game that they coach, or at least not at a professional level. Their expertise lies in understanding strategy, psychology, and team dynamics.
• Tim Galway and the Tuba: Tim Galway (the author of The Inner Game of Tennis) once helped a professional tuba player get better at something that he was struggling with. Note that Tim doesn't play the tuba. His insights came from a deep understanding of performance psychology and coaching.
• Neil Rackham's Expertise: Neil Rackham, author of SPIN Selling and other sales books, founder of the sales training company, Huthwaite, and supporter of the Sales Education Foundation) wasn’t a sales practitioner. He was primarily a researcher who deeply studied the profession. Would you hire Neil to help your sales force improve?

Authentic Confession & Lightbulb Moment

In a moment of authentic confession, I will tell you that:

• Experience did greatly help me in my very first sales training role, inside a company where I previously sold and managed, but mostly because I had no idea what I was doing! My experience caused me to develop training using rote learning, rather than developing sellers who could think for themselves. In a sense, in hindsight, the depth of field experience I had, compared to the lack of true instructional design or training experience, actually held me back from being even more successful in that role. Fortunately, I did produce very good results - but in hindsight, now, 33 years later - it pales in comparison to what I could have done. Great lesson learned.
• In my next sales training leadership role, I worked for a company where I had not previously sold nor managed, and never worked with their specific solution set. That's when the lightbulb went on for me, along with what I had been reading and learning, that I needed to study top performers, in that company, and compare them to the bottom and middle, to seek out differentiating mindsets, beliefs, knowledge, behaviors, and skills. At this company, we bought an off-the-shelf sales training program, but I was able to deeply customize it, based on the Top Performer Analysis I completed. The program was widely accepted, got great feedback - and, better - got great results. Even senior management was surprised how I was able to talk about the various sales roles, the challenges of each, share examples, and articulate what they could do differently, to get better results. It took about 3 months, but the Top Performer Analysis made all of that possible.

Is There a Risk to Having Sales Experience?

This will likely be a stretch for some, but I do think there are some risks to be aware of and prepared for. Let’s explore these challenges and how to address them.

Sales-experienced enablers may:

• Think they already know everything they need to know to develop effective solutions (training or others).
• Be overwhelmed by the sudden number of disciplines they are exposed to, such as product marketing, sales messaging, sales roles outside their personal experience, how content gets developed, how to conduct a training needs analysis, diagnostics/problem-solving, measurement and initiative evaluation methods, market research and how to incorporate Buyer Acumen, facilitation and coaching expertise, communicating with cross-functional leaders and executives, and more.
• Stay in their comfort zone rather than tackling the real root causes and organizational issues that would improve performance across the sales force.

In fairness on these points, enablers entering the position from other roles could still face these challenges, unless they have prior experience in performance consulting or other performance improvement disciplines. But these are especially real risks for those entering enablement from a sales role.

I think one of the other very real downfalls of emphasizing sales experience over the other aspects of the enablement role, is that it can easily perpetuate Random Acts of Enablement, versus a strategic approach that moves toward the Formal Maturity Model. I've seen sales leaders put someone in the role that the sales leader can fire off commands to, who will simply carry out the orders like a good solider. And in the end, that doesn't truly serve the sales leader, other executive stakeholders, the sales force, the customers, or the enabler.

Closing Thoughts

So, let’s finally remove the artificial constraints and end this myth.

Sales experience, while very valuable, is not an absolute requirement for excelling in the role of an enabler.

Enablement pros would be better served, in my opinion, with backgrounds in analytics, decision science, organization development, organization effectiveness, organization behavior, business process management, performance consulting, systems thinking, lean and six sigma, change management, and other problem-solving and performance improvement disciplines.

It often takes more time to build business acumen and learn organizational performance improvement principles and methods than it does to learn GTM motions and selling skills, inside one company.

Firsthand sales experience can be helpful for sales enablement roles, but it is not required.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

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 earning Experience. Felix Krueger and Mike Kunkle are both Building Blocks Mentors, and we hope to see you there! For other courses and content from Mike, see: https://linktr.ee/mikekunkle

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