Sales Enablement 2.0

The state of sales training

Harvard Business Review reported that organizations spent $359 billion globally on sales training in a single year, and asked, "Was it worth it?" In most cases, businesses did not achieve a high ROI from their sales training investments. Today, many companies face the same question: did you achieve success from your sales training investment? Few companies can say yes.

The two leading reasons for this lack of success with traditional sales training programs are faulty strategy and faulty execution. If you don't start with the right sales strategy, you may spend months training your salespeople on the wrong sales plays. A faulty strategy occurs when you don't fully understand who your ideal customers are and how they buy. To create a truly effective sales strategy, you need to align your sales process with your ideal customers' buying process. You also must identify the critical sales skills your salespeople need to optimize your sales process. Having these skills gives them the power to guide buyers through every stage of the buyers' journey. Without a robust strategy guiding your process, no amount of sales training will uplevel your sales team.

When it comes to sales execution, too often companies think that a one-time or short-term training event will fix their sales shortcomings. But studies have found that this never works. If you're lucky, one in ten salespeople will improve their sales skills somewhat. The reason these programs don't work is that learners retain almost nothing from a short-term training event.

So what does work? Deploying a strategic process designed to improve salespeople's sales skills on multiple levels. This requires each company to deploy its own customized, robust, and long-term sales enablement program. The goal of the program should be to embed best practices into your salespeople's muscle memory. They must be able to execute the right sales skills at every stage of the buyer's journey.

A best-in-class sales enablement program begins with training your frontline sales leaders, who are the ultimate owners of sales enablement. Then they train, coach, and reinforce your salespeople, not just one time, but consistently over time. The entire program needs to be supported by stage-appropriate marketing content and the right technologies. This defines sales enablement done right. Yet, too often, it's the critical missing piece of a company's sales strategy.

Insights from sales enablement research

According to a LinkedIn study, nearly 74% of companies now have a sales enablement function in their organization, which represents 19% year-over-year adoption growth. Having a dedicated sales enablement function correlates with a significant business impact.

An Aberdeen study found that companies with successful sales enablement programs achieve the following.

A Highspot study found that companies gain these improvements when they execute robust sales enablement programs.

Insights from industry leaders

Most sales leaders realize that when salespeople are given the right knowledge and skills, they perform better and help companies reach their revenue goals sooner. However, many of today's sales training programs are simply not effective. Several industry leaders point out the factors critical to sales enablement success.

While working with a wide range of portfolio companies, we noticed a common gap in their sales organizations. Their salespeople did not have the knowledge, systems, and technologies they needed to excel and consistently reach their sales quotas. As a result, the companies' revenue growth was not optimized. To bridge this gap, we created an enhanced sales enablement program: Sales Enablement 2.0. It's a unique and powerful lever for growth, designed to enable salespeople to guide their prospects through the buyer's journey with greater skill, speed, and success. Many portfolio companies have transformed their sales processes with this approach.

The secret sauce of our sales enablement program is our focus on frontline sales managers. They need to be a company's sales enablement leaders. This means that before you coach your salespeople, you coach your sales managers. Then they train and coach the salespeople. This approach offers several advantages, including the ability to scale sales training as needed. The goal is to continue coaching and reinforcing the salespeople until they have internalized your best-practice sales skills. The skills should be reinforced over and over until they are so ingrained that salespeople can consistently achieve or exceed their sales goals. In other words, train them until they have developed powerful muscle memory.

In parallel to sales coaching, you need to supply your salespeople with the right support. This includes stage-appropriate marketing materials throughout the buyer's journey and the right technologies to accelerate the process. When you embed your sales process into your CRM, for example, not only does this help your salespeople follow your best practices, it also provides them with the data-driven insights they need to identify where there are new sales opportunities and where there are gaps. As a result, they are not flying blind.

Our Sales Enablement 2.0 process flow

In the Cortado Group Sales Enablement 2.0 process, our sales experts help you create and implement your customized sales enablement program according to the following process flow.

To achieve their revenue goals, company leaders need to advance sales training from a tactical to a strategic mindset.

Too often, companies don't have a clear sales strategy. This leads to predictable results. Their salespeople don't perform optimally. Deals are lost. Win rates are low. Opportunities are squandered. In the worst cases, sales training programs can introduce or reinforce bad selling behavior. Bottom line: salespeople won't consistently achieve their revenue goals.

Company leaders likely understand this challenge, but not necessarily the solution. To solve the problem, organizations often assume sales training is the remedy. But sales training is just a tactic. It's not a strategy. What you need is a comprehensive sales strategy. If you research the impact of sales training, you'll find the stark reality. An often-quoted study by ES Research found that between 85% and 90% of sales training programs have no lasting impact after 120 days.

Harvard Business Review posed this question: organizations spent $359 billion globally on training in a single year, but was it worth it? The conclusion was no.

Another study found that a standalone sales training program results in learners forgetting 75% of what they were taught within six days. That's a very bad return on investment. Among the many reasons sales training programs aren't working is that humans don't change their behaviors based on a few training sessions. If training programs don't work, then what? The answer is a strategic sales enablement program. It's the only way to strengthen your sales organization in meaningful ways that produce lasting change.

How to take a strategic approach

A strategic approach to sales training requires sales leaders to step back and view their sales program in its entirety. This includes answering critical questions such as:

• What are our specific sales challenges?
• What are our revenue goals, including opportunities and win rates?
• How well do we understand our ideal customers, including how they buy?
• What is the root cause holding us back from obtaining our goals?
• How are changing market conditions impacting our sales results?
• If we implement sales enablement, how will we know when it's working?

Once you answer these questions, you've arrived at a starting point for creating a strategic sales enablement program aimed at revenue growth.

To elevate your sales success in ways that meet a private equity firm's financial vision, you need to put yourself in the mindset of your buyers.

When salespeople are not hitting their sales quotas, sales leaders must ask themselves the tough questions. Why aren't we reaching our sales goals? Why aren't my salespeople consistently making their numbers? Why isn't every rep on my team performing at the same high level? What else do they need to consistently make their number?

You can conduct sales analysis. You can price your products correctly. You can deploy the latest technology, tools, and processes. But at the end of the day, sales is all about the people who talk to your company's potential buyers: the salespeople on the frontlines. If your salespeople aren't working in sync with your potential buyers, they may never achieve the level of sales success you expect.

Salespeople must understand how your buyers buy

To be in sync with your buyers, your salespeople need to understand them, including how they buy. Then they must be skilled in guiding buyers through the buyers' journey at every step. This includes understanding the key inflection points and milestones that each buyer needs to overcome before they will move toward a sale. There are specific sales skills that salespeople need to fulfill this mission, and your sales enablement program must include the lessons and modules that teach them. Sales enablement must be customized to each company's exact buyers' needs and challenges. That's why cookie-cutter training and sales enablement programs never work.

Build your salespeople's muscle memory

Even if you have one or a few sales superstars, that still won't be enough to ensure your company consistently reaches its monthly, quarterly, and annual sales goals. You need far more than training your low-performing salespeople. Your entire team needs to move in the same direction, with everyone consistently executing at the highest possible level, fully in sync with your buyers' expectations. You also need a system in which new hires can join the team and ramp up quickly.

Every salesperson on your team needs to develop a type of sales muscle memory. In this way, your sales program becomes deeply ingrained and predictable. Launching a comprehensive and customized sales enablement program ensures you are pulling all the levers to elevate the performance of your entire sales team. When you do, your company will be better positioned for revenue growth.

"Sales enablement is the last mile of your growth strategy. Done right, a portfolio company trains and reinforces the skills and behaviors that its salespeople need to consistently perform at a world-class level."

George de los Reyes, CRO, Managing Partner, Cortado Group

To move the sales process forward successfully, salespeople must have access to stage-appropriate marketing materials at every step of the buyer's journey.

Buyers and prospects need to move at their own pace, stage by stage, through the buyer's journey. When I explain the power of stage-appropriate selling to salespeople, I use the following story.

Imagine you've never skied before but want to try it. You walk into a ski shop for the first time in your life. A salesperson rushes up to you and asks what type of new skis you're looking for. "We just got in the new Rossignol 86 Tis. The titanal construction will give you great stability on black diamond slopes. We sell all the top brands: Rossignol, Salomon, K2, Dynastar. Which ones do you want to look at?" Intimidated by the sales spiel, you back up toward the door. "I'm just looking, thank you." You leave the store, never to return.

Before giving up on skiing altogether, you decide to try a smaller ski shop. The clerk approaches you and asks, "Welcome. Have you been skiing long?" "No, I've never skied. But I am curious." "It can be a lot of fun. Let's start with why you want to learn how to ski." You have just been empowered to learn about ski equipment at your own pace by this salesperson's approach. You don't feel intimidated. You feel empowered. You decide to give this store your business.

As sales leaders, it's our job to ensure our sales teams are given what they need to continuously uplevel their skill set. And one thing they need is a sales strategy playbook.

Launching a sales enablement program is one of the most impactful initiatives a sales leader can undertake. It has the potential to influence everything related to running an optimized sales program. A critical step in the process that is often overlooked is the sales playbook. But it should not be given short shrift. A playbook is a vital part of a successful sales enablement program. It provides a standardized framework that documents a repeatable process to guide the entire sales team. It helps ensure that every salesperson is using the same sales approach and methodology.

Every salesperson on the same page

A well-documented sales playbook delivers many powerful insights, including:

You can transform an entire sales team's performance with proper sales enablement. You just need to know how to do it the right way.

"We've trained them on everything they need to know. Why are we still losing sales?" A frustrated executive vice president of sales asked us this question at a company we worked with. There was no easy answer. Six months earlier, a new competitor had launched in their market and was eating their lunch. Win rates had plummeted. The sales team's morale had cratered. Every month, the EVP had the product marketing team tell the sales team how the company was better, why the new competitor was worse, and what to say to counter their attacks. The result of these one-way training sessions? The win rate kept dropping.

In desperation, the EVP turned to sales enablement. We took a step back to observe conversations between the salespeople and prospects. What we discovered was shocking. At least 90% of the time, the salespeople were not asking prospects the right questions. For example, they didn't ask, "What other solutions are you considering?" Even worse, when they did ask and the competitor was mentioned, the salespeople offered only weak reasons for why their company was better. Clearly, they needed better training to get over this hurdle. We designed a four-week program called "compliment, plant, explain."

There are two essential insights that sales enablement provides to salespeople. First, what actions they need to take to move a buyer toward a closed-won deal. Second, what actions they need to stop taking because they aren't working. Technology and data provide insight into both.

To reach super-seller status, salespeople need to know the impact of their actions based on factual data rather than guessing. They need to know what prospects and customers are experiencing, their buying journey, and their buying signals. Too often, critical insight is overlooked, yet it has a significant impact on sales. Accessing and sharing this insight requires deploying the right sales enablement processes, systems, technologies, and measurement tools. We have designed successful systems by capturing data at each step of the buyer's journey, from opportunity, to prospect, to account. By understanding customers better, we don't waste time capturing data points that don't matter to prospects.

When a company deploys a sales enablement program backed by intelligence, it gains several capabilities, including these.

Medical education company overcomes sales gaps and boosts sales

To overcome missed revenue milestones, a private-equity-owned medical education company transformed its clinical subject matter experts into stronger salespeople with a comprehensive sales enablement program customized for its unique sales needs.

How will you begin your Sales Enablement 2.0 journey?

The best time to invest in sales enablement was yesterday. But today is not too late. The right approach requires a shift in mindset. There's more to sales enablement than just sales training. Doing it right requires a comprehensive approach, from mapping the buyer's journey to extracting best practices to deploying the right support systems.

When done right, a sales enablement program can transform your entire sales team into a powerful sales force. The team will be set up for success and can achieve outcomes not available with traditional sales training methods. Your salespeople will be empowered to do the right things, at the right time, to drive the right results. And your sales organization will reap the benefits of tighter alignment, predictable outcomes, stronger and more consistent sales performance, and ultimately higher revenue growth.

How Cortado Group accelerates your sales growth

The Cortado Group approach to sales enablement involves addressing and overhauling every critical step in the entire sales process. It requires thinking beyond just training, just technology, or just hiring all-stars. Instead, sales leaders take a holistic strategic approach that encompasses every aspect of the sales process, from understanding the ideal customer profile to mapping the stages of the buyer's journey to creating a detailed sales playbook. We approach sales enablement like we approach every challenge: we fix everything that's broken and rebuild processes until they run optimally.

Is Sales Enablement 2.0 right for your company?

• Have you deeply researched your real-life buyers and how they make a purchase decision?
• Have you designed a strategic sales process that aligns with how they buy?
• Have you identified the sales skills that will help your salespeople consistently deliver the desired outcomes?
• Have you both trained and consistently reinforced the right sales skills with your team?
• Have you embedded your buyer-centric sales process into your CRM?
• Have you provided the right marketing and technology resources to help your sales team perform their new sales skills successfully?

If your company is struggling with sales growth and you don't have a sales enablement function in place, now is the time to get started.