Untapped Potential

What can we do each day to get closer to our full potential? When thinking about human endurance and performance, there are many paths to getting the most out of ourselves. It may be focusing on excellence in one specialized area or skill, or a set of skills that set you apart. Lately I’ve been thinking about it from another angle of the whole self - small habits that help boost performance in different areas, and when taken together create a better version of the whole. It's not drastic in any one area, but the intentional connection and conversation between parts leads to something special.

Applying this to the business world, every organization has teams that own different elements of the overall picture. They’re delivering results, but many miss their full potential because they haven’t effectively bridged those areas together in an ongoing way. Each team is building incredible things in their respective areas, and it isn’t until we connect the pieces that we get the most out of them.

This article explores this theme from the lens of connecting sales enablement, training and enrichment.

Success is a process, not a destination.

A thoughtful training and enablement approach involves:

• Defining a framework for training and rollout (Looking at the full scope of needs with the end goal in mind, anticipating hurdles, and leveraging the training and enablement approaches at your disposal to form a cohesive journey for your team.)
• Communicating the value (Product built a thing! Product Marketing has developed positioning and messaging! Now let’s get our team up to speed so that they can go help customers benefit from it.)
• Maximizing connection points for feedback and evolution (How are we tracking success? Have Product Marketing and Product heard the intel we’ve gathered from customers? How are we learning from it?)

Let’s look deeper into each of these. For the sake of keeping this article a reasonable length, I won't go into too many details, so think of the below as introductory ideas.

Define a framework: get the most from your internal training

Let's say you want to train your team how to present a story in a compelling way that feels authentic, including how to tailor the base narrative to their particular circumstance when discussing with a customer. The first step is a clear, concise internal training session to:

• Spell out what will be covered and for what end goal. Articulate why a product or a partnership exists and the value it brings. Define what teams should be able to do with the information by the end of the session.
• Distinguish what's being shared as internal background knowledge, and the external-facing version that's applicable to customers.
• Acknowledge the skills needed to complement the tactical information, such as how to present the story in a relatable way, or how to adapt the materials to a variety of situations.

It’s helpful to think of training and enablement materials as a restaurant menu. For example, speaking with a prospect will require different points than meeting with a longstanding customer who is already familiar with a company’s offerings. By creating a menu of enablement collateral around an initiative and training internal teams to make use of these, you create capability across an organization to land in market with greater impact. You save sales and account teams time out of their day, allowing them to focus on customers.

Going further:

• Skills training and development programs can accelerate the impact of product-specific training. For example, Sales Enablement could hold workshops on objection handling, storytelling, and presentation skills. While these skills are broadly applicable, there's an opportunity to make it more impactful by having Sales Enablement work with Product Marketing to build on the materials being released. The result: a development session turns into an opportunity to reinforce product-specific content. Think about where teams could get stuck and host office hours or workshops to proactively address those areas.
• When training content is almost ready to be released, have a group of power users test it. If it’s a pitch deck, get feedback from some of your talented sellers and account managers, incorporating their feedback. By giving them an early view, they can get familiar and present as an example during the training, empowering them to shine while serving as a go-to resource for the team.
• The team responsible for leading rollouts should conduct a pre-mortem (similar to conducting a post-mortem after a project, but in this case it’s a proactive step to think through potential challenges and get ahead of issues). By asking what could go wrong, you get ahead of gaps in communication and execution at the outset and build them into the training plan.

Communicate: tell the story

When communicating a solution to the market, it’s essential to tell the story in a way that remains customer-centric. What does it mean to me as the customer and why should I care? But first, when rolling out information to internal teams, it's important to communicate in a way that resonates with the team learning the information.

After Product Marketing has crafted the positioning and messaging of how a product is communicated to the customer, this narrative needs to be shared with Go To Market teams such as Sales and Account Management in a way that empowers them to integrate the new information into their day to day.

Why it matters: Teams need to be trained not only on what the narrative is, but also how to make the most of it in situations they’ll encounter. Much as a product isn’t 'delivered' once it is simply live, a rollout isn’t 'done' once a pitch deck or materials are shared. The potential is in how you communicate and train. While internal documentation in the form of detailed Confluence pages, pitch decks, one sheeters, and deeper dive materials are all important, it's crucial to think about the packaging and delivery of these to the GTM team.

Maximize connection points: use feedback to inform action

Once conversations with customers start, it’s an opportunity to understand the market reaction and provide feedback to internal teams (Product Marketing, Product Management) to refine the product and narrative. This ensures customer feedback is heard and keeps the customer at the center of the process.?

How:

• Set a sustainable process for customer-facing teams to gather intelligence, along with a central point to aggregate that feedback and identify trends.
• Establish bi-directional feedback loops for Product to hear customer feedback, as well as for customer-facing teams to understand what Product is doing to act on that feedback.
• Keep an internal, team-facing view of the upcoming training calendar and roadmap, refining as needed. If you’re seeing roadblocks, adjust the following month or quarter’s session to include office hours or workshops to address those hurdles as a team.?

Establish the baseline.

The ideas discussed so far in this article assume you already have a robust process in place. At some stages, you may want to overhaul the approach or re-baseline your focus areas. In that case, there are a few foundational steps that can be helpful.

Determine where to focus

• Hold listening tours with leaders and teams in order to hear the biggest areas of opportunity and gaps. It’s amazing what trends and insights emerge by hosting conversations and then stepping back to see the trends. I've found it helpful to hold anywhere between 10-20 conversations at various levels of the org across roles, and build on those regularly.
• Start with the goal in mind - what it is you want the customer to understand and do? What does your team first need to be able to do before that's possible? Work backwards from the desired outcome when designing enablement materials and internal training.?

Elevate your team

• Even with seasoned teams it can be helpful to do a series of trainings to cover 'Product 101’ sessions. Whether you have newer team members, a tenured team, or a mix, I’ve consistently seen that people are hungry for a level-set so that everyone is telling the story in the same way. Be thorough in re-baselining the technical, internal background knowledge, and how you publicly speak about the solution in market as the environment shifts.
• Check that everyone is articulating the narrative and value prop from the same base of language. Are you using simple, straightforward terms? Will it gain your audience’s attention and be relatable? Establish the themes you want to come across loud and clear.
• Development and enrichment (such as internal comms best practices, exec presence & presenting skills, how to run an effective demo, conversational selling) are a key piece of a well rounded training program. Rather than being separate, these development-focused sessions can be paired with product trainings and rollouts to reinforce skills. This way, you build a program that includes readiness training across all types of knowledge (product solutions, industry, persona, skills, processes). Think of training as driving the growth of an individual and helping support them along their journey.

Drive accountability

• Document a 30-60-90 day plan. Where do we want to be by the end of each month and quarter? Write down those goals and return to them to measure progress. Use that progress to inform the next iteration of your plans.
• Create structure to drive accountability and measure progress. This could mean using a project management framework to map out a formal project plan, or more loosely using this mindset to document objectives and desired impact. It can be helpful to state “we’ll know we’re successful when...”
• If it’s a more complex project, you can visualize the phases on a page and use a RAPID or RACI chart to note the stakeholders you’ll need at each step. If using RAPID decision making framework for instance, you’d show who will Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, and Decide at each major phase. Defining these roles at the outset saves valuable time later.
• Where possible, make the objectives visible to the team and regularly (monthly often works well) return to keep it up to date.?

The takeaway

By creating connection points and internal communication pathways to support sales enablement and training, you build a stronger organizational foundation that will support future iterations of growth. In a future week, part 2 will share a playbook for nailing the basics - the small habits that seem intuitive, but are easy to forget when going at full speed.