In A Recession, Sales Enablement Is More Important Than Ever
In a robust economy, companies hire sales personnel hand-over-fist, often allowing them to overlook the low productivity levels of many reps. In that construct, the strong performance of the few can obfuscate the mediocrity of the many. But what happens when you can’t hire your way to sales growth?
Well, unless you’re one of the lucky ones, that time has arrived. Almost every major industry is reducing sales personnel. In Pharma, Amgen cut 500 from its staff in 2021, mostly from sales. The technology sector has shed more than 100,000 jobs this year, with a significant portion in sales. For sales leadership remaining, the news gets worse: Companies still demand they drive growth to lead them out of the recession.
In an era where revenue organizations can’t grow their numerator (capacity) with more sales reps, they must improve their denominator (conversion) by focusing on the ones they have. That means not just “supporting†the existence of the sales enablement and sales training functions at kickoffs and certification programs, but mandating that your management team makes sales enablement and readiness part of their everyday job.
Let’s examine a few immediate changes sales leadership can make.
Make enablement part of your management meeting cadence.
Sales readiness should be a weekly rigor of sales management—much like forecasting the pipeline each week. Middle and front-line management may balk at such a mandate at first, professing it’s the training/enablement team’s job. But if you’re not making rep productivity a front-and-center conversation, it will atrophy into dealing with rep deficits at a deal level.
The problem with relying on deal coaching alone is it rarely yields true changes to the rep’s long-term behavior or skill sets. It’s like giving directions to a hiker who went down the wrong trail versus teaching them how to read a map better or use a compass to avoid making the same mistake twice. In addition, if skill gaps aren’t identified, then any forecast you submit on that rep’s book of business is inherently incomplete. All you’re doing is pulling data from the CRM and getting incrementally better projections on top of it.
Gain a fuller portrait of your reps with skill data.
Most organizations only measure sellers in binary outcomes, not the full context of their experience or skill set. Metrics like closed won and lost, leads converted to opportunities, and sales cycle length are important for measuring productivity, but they don’t tell the recipe of what comprises a winning rep.
Here is the data you should pull into your management cadence:
• Skill data: Where did a rep score in progressing through key enablement or training programs? These exist in any sales enablement software worth its salt. Let’s say you build these on a scale of 100. Do they index high (95%) on discovery but low (70%) on communication skills? You should create criteria.
• Interaction data: Most organizations have some form of call recording and analysis. Begin looking at their ability to listen to customer needs and the resonance of their messaging with customers.
• Engagement data: What is the frequency of rep phone and email engagement and, more importantly, how much customer response do they receive?
Make sales coaching more than informal chats.
Many sales managers help their reps with deals; they don’t actually coach them on their skill sets. At Mindtickle, our own research—based on data from 1 million-plus users from over 350 companies in more than 190 countries—found that the majority (85%) of sales reps we surveyed said they’ve been coached on how to close deals, but only about a quarter (24%) of people we heard from said they’ve been coached on long-term skills.
No matter what enablement programs get designed, it’s ultimately sales management that can drive real behavior change with their reps. This requires providing sales management with a lightweight tool set in the flow of their deals to provide prescriptive feedback to their reps and document it. This will elevate the importance of this coaching in the eyes of the reps (and, more cynically, it can be helpful when you need to manage a rep for performance).
Consolidate tools for seller performance.
To create resilience, organizations also need to make achieving the ideas above easy for sellers. Right now, we ask sales to log into different tools to receive training, access call recordings, download content and interact with their manager for coaching sessions. There are new and emerging technologies in the revenue technology space to address these issues.
As the recession creates leaner spending, it’s critical you partner with your ops leaders to evaluate your current tech stack and look for tools that can deliver much of this functionality in one platform to drive savings.
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This article is written by Forbes and originally published here.
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