Turn down the distractions to turn up sales

Sales professionals have to juggle a lot. They need to stay up-to-date with the latest trends, have a clear understanding of their company’s products and services, and know how to close deals. But sales enablement, the very programs intended to get them prepared for this ever changing world, doesn't provide enough value.

Traditional sales enablement misjudges success, emphasizing high school-style curriculum benchmarks over practical results. As a result, many sales professionals face too much enablement noise, which overwhelms the sales process and takes away from precious selling time.

What value is there in measuring the number of courses taken, content consumption, and quiz scores? Is that how you measure sales results? Then why do we measure Sales enablement this way?

Let’s instead measure sales enablement along axes that businesses actually use to define sales success: Here are 5 metrics to get you started Deal Size ($), Sales Cycle (duration in days), Win Rate (%), Number of Deals (#), Ramp (weeks).

Move to Outcome-focused Enablement

It is high time we shift the focal point of sales enablement to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio for individual sales professionals and accelerate progress for the entire sales team. Creating more outcome-focused enablement opportunities starts with identifying desired business outcomes and establishing the ability to connect sales enablement tools to business impact and ROI.

For sales enablement to thrive, sales leaders first need to accurately diagnose and benchmark their own KPIs (from the list above), which will help them align sales enablement to business priorities.

Step1: Pick the outcome (e.g you want a program to increase deal size, or you want a program to decrease cycle time). Start with an outcome in mind and include vital milestones and quantifiable behavior changes on the journey to achieving the desired goal. Be agile. Pick only 1 or 2 key outcomes for each program.

Move to In-context Enablement (coaching)

How sales enablement is delivered to sales professionals matters. Instead of more training courses, let’s embed more capability in their primary sales platform in order to directly impact the effectiveness of day-to-day sales processes. Real-time coaching woven directly into the sales workflow can train reps in everything from closing a deal to learning best practices. This approach to enablement makes every customer conversation more impactful.

The key is to embed sales personnel in a functional environment rather than removing them from the sales cycle and asking them to translate later what they’ve learned into something practical. A properly implemented growth platform will actively advise sales pros with actionable prompts to apply directly to selling rather than detouring them to time-consuming, theoretical training scenarios. We need to think less about traditional training and more about just-in-time guidance and coaching at every step of the sales cycle. Ideally, sales professionals will apply what they learn just seconds after learning it.

Step 2 : Choose technology that will help you embed Enablement in-context of the Sales execution workflow as thats the only way you can connect programs to outcomes

Make every Rep your best Rep

The future of enablement lies in clearly showing the impact enablement programs have on business outcomes and KPIs that matter to executive stakeholders. To close the feedback loop between enablement and outcomes, we need tools to measure the impact of training. That means if a sales rep is being trained to nurture leads better, we need to evaluate the impact of the training in real-time in terms of outcomes . Traditional testing is far less interesting or meaningful than measurable results expressed in familiar business terms.

The idea of Outcomes focussed enablement delivered in context of the sales workflow drove us to build and launch our new enablement product.

Launch programs fast with clicks-not-code program builder, personalize at scale by targeting the right program to the right rep, embed milestones in programs, tie enablement to revenue, and maximize manager’s time and focus on the skills reps need to ramp quickly and drive revenue results. Check it out