“The benefits of sales readiness when implemented well, create more than just a mindset. Sales readiness is a complete transformation.” – Chris Lynch in today’s Tip 1028
What’s your thought about this?
Join the conversation below and check out the links!
Chris Lynch on LinkedIn
Readiness Blog Post
The New Sales Enablement Standard Benchmark Report
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes Chris Lynch. As Chief Marketing Officer, Chris is driving the next phase of Mindtickle’s growth. In his role, he oversees all global marketing functions, including product marketing, demand gen, brand, and creative. He has deep experience in product positioning, messaging, go-to-market strategies, and the alignment of marketing with sales objectives. Here he is:
Chris Lynch: Mindtickle recently partnered with Heinz Marketing to conduct a sales enablement benchmark report titled “The New Sales Enablement Standard: How Today’s Sales Leaders Grow Revenue With a Sales Readiness Approach.” The report provides a snapshot of the key issues revenue and sales leaders face as they take greater ownership over sales enablement, coaching, and training.
For our daily sales tip, the report indicates that 90% of sales leaders say that improving sales enablement will help achieve revenue goals. Because only 14.7% of sales teams hit their sales goals, we are reminded of the importance and need for sales leaders to invest in a comprehensive sales readiness strategy to drive a continuous state of excellence within their revenue organizations.
For background, Mindtickle and Heinz Marketing surveyed more than 280 leaders in sales, business development, and sales revenue operations. Titles included Executives, EVPs, VPs, to Senior Directors, to Senior Managers in industries such as manufacturing, financial services, technology, consumer goods, and healthcare and pharma, among others. Companies range in size from 500 employees to more than 10,000.
Here’s a quick high-level look at the most valuable insights that we uncovered.
The first sales teams with highly defined key performance indicator metrics have higher success reaching sales quotas. Defining an ideal rep profile and setting clear performance expectations is crucial to seller success. Key performance metrics provide an immediate baseline of seller’s overall performance. The bottom line, most organizations have an ideal rep, have an ideal customer profile, but it’s critical that sales management understands your ideal rep profile. Seller excellence should be defined based on individual data-driven benchmarks to keep teams accountable to revenue goals. With comprehensive data and reporting, sales management can make systematic adjustments to proactively reach organizational goals with the talent that they have.
Companies with dedicated sales enablement programs are more likely to meet their sales quotas. In today’s selling environment, teams that have dedicated sales enablement programs and break down silos by involving multiple functions are most likely to achieve their revenue goals. The bottom line revenue leaders must proactively take ownership over their enablement programs and pull together relevant stakeholders across departments, such as marketing.
Sales enablement programs should prioritize continuous improvement and customized training to achieve revenue goals. Building seller knowledge starts with onboarding but is most effective when continuously reinforced throughout a seller’s career. Without practical reinforcement of the knowledge, sellers begin to forget what they learned and the performance suffers. The bottom line most seller knowledge is forgotten in just days. You need to have a strategy for how you’ll continually drive engagement with your program to ensure that knowledge sticks.
Sales coaching is the missing puzzle piece to building sustainable seller optimization and revenue attaining teams. The majority of respondents who have effective continuous coaching experiences reap the benefits of an improved learning library, increased engagement from managers and sellers, and improved overall onboarding and training processes. The bottom line coaching the coach is just as important as training your sales team. You must ensure that your sales managers know how to use data-driven techniques to improve the performance of each individual seller on their team.
Practice is important, but teams struggle to optimize resources to improve their programs. Practice is ranked as the highest area of importance but is one of the least utilized tactics of sales enablement programs. The bottom line in order to truly hone their skills, reps needs to be given ample opportunities to practice them. In turn, this gives leaders the chance to gain insight into their team’s proficiencies and weaknesses, allowing sales coaching to happen proactively rather than reactively.
Without the resources to modify your sales enablement programs as a result of those insights, the same problems will continue to persist with other reps across the organization. As new technologies and products are introduced to the market, it is critical to enact sales readiness strategies that help sellers develop the capabilities to meet their revenue goals. The teams who will thrive in today’s competitive landscape will be those that make sales enablement a data-driven practice.
To foster sales-ready teams, these five core components must be addressed to ensure sellers are prepared to perform. Define organizational excellence, build knowledge, align content, analyze performance, and optimize that behavior to win. Overall, the benefits of sales readiness when implemented well, create more than just a mindset. Sales readiness is a complete transformation.
Scott Ingram: For links to “The New Sales Enablement Standard” benchmark report, to connect with Chris and more, just click over to DailySales.tips/1028
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!