Defining Sales Enablement

I’m publishing a series of Q&A excerpts from my interviews with Sales 2.0 leaders. This is the first of three excerpts from my interview with Sharon Little, director of field marketing communications for VMware.

Anneke: You have a mission statement for your sales enablement group. What is it?

Sharon: To deliver high-value consumable information that builds competency, drives culture and enables performance for the field.

Anneke: Isn’t that Marketing’s job? What’s the difference between what your group does and what Marketing does?

Sharon: We do the translation and packaging of information created by Marketing and other sources. Our job is to make that content prettier and more actionable for the sales team. For any content, we can determine what’s missing and fill in the pieces to make information worthy of the sales person’s time.

Anneke: What’s the difference between Sales Enablement and Sales Operations?

Sharon: In my view, Sales Operations sits between Finance and Sales, while Sales Enablement is the liaison between Marketing and Sales. Sales Operations works on behalf of Finance on things such as budgets, compensation plans, metrics and technology to make sales people more productive. I believe that, over time, Sales Enablement will provide the same service for Marketing.

Anneke: What are the most important words of advice you’d give sales executives looking to implement a sales enablement program?

Sharon: I would start by asking them to open up their perspective on how they view sales enablement. This is about transformation — not just training, communications and kickoff. Every sales leader must be thinking about how to prepare their teams for the next hurdle — a well-articulated sales enablement operation is strategic on many levels. At a minimum, sales leaders must insist that programs and tools be consumable, actionable and easily absorbed by the sales team, and in a format that can be put to use with a customer immediately, without hours of modification. Equally important, they should be integrated and aligned with the rest of the tools the sales organization uses on a regular basis. They should tie together, support each other and just make sense. I call this, “The golden thread of sales enablement.”

I truly believe that, five years from now, every sales executive will insist on having an experienced sales enablement team at his or her disposal. Sales enablement is the key to solving sales and marketing alignment issues, and it is the lever sales leaders need to drive performance. Sales operations measures what you are doing and predicts future performance. Sales enablement makes it actionable.

Read the full interview with Sharon Little in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: actionable content, content, marketing and sales alignment, marketing communications, marketing materials, Sales, Sales 2.0, sales and marketing alignment, sales enablement, sales enablement tools, sales materials, sales operations, sales process, sales programs, sales support, sales tools, sales training

Current Customers – the Key to New Customers.

Guest Blog by Cindy Fahrner, Phone Works Engagement Manager

Cindy was a quota-busting sales professional in her own right before joining Phone Works, where she has helped numerous companies pilot, implement and accelerate inside sales teams, achieving such success that many have been subsequently acquired because of their technology and sales performance – companies including Global Sight, Caw Networks and ClosedLoop. On behalf of Phone Works, Cindy is currently working with The Grossman Group on an inside sales calling pilot. She recently took a short break from her typically jam-packed schedule to attend the Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco and came away “refreshed, rejuvenated and full of innovative ideas to share.” We asked her to reflect on some of what she learned.

Wow! Where to start? I took away a lot of information about new and exciting tools that will ratchet up today’s Sales 2.0 processes. I loved the session by Executive VP Dave Fitzgerald, of Brainshark, challenging us to ask, “Is Your Sales 2.0 Platform Mobile-Ready?” But I think I’ll focus this post on a recurring theme from the conference that led to a very practical takeaway we can all implement today.

The recurring theme? Buyers are more educated than ever. OK, this is not news…the Internet has been around for years now and access to information is nothing new. But, what has intensified is the use of Twitter and Facebook to obtain colleague/counterpart recommendations. Buyers are turning to these resources to get quick recommendations for their buying decisions from people they know and trust.

Playing off that trend was this intriguing idea from the Peer-Powered Sales & Marketing session, moderated by Focus Expert Network (Moderator: Craig Rosenberg, Leader, Focus Expert Network, Focus.com. Panelists: Carlos Hidalgo, CEO, The Annuitas Group; Steve Gershik, CEO, 28Marketing; and Adam B. Needles, VP Demand Generation Strategy, Left Brain Marketing). The suggestion was this – to bring existing customers’ successes, ideas and learnings into your sales process to serve as voices of experience for your product – not just at the end of the sales cycle, as we commonly do, but early on to fill this “recommender” role.

If your company or product is early in the market, customer input is even more vital to help mitigate prospective buyers’ understandable wariness. It’s the ‘safety in numbers’ thing. Having colleagues make the same buying decision reduces the risk of perception that they may have made a risky decision.

How to turn customers into recommenders
There was some discussion about how to involve customers effectively. Here are some of the ideas that were batted around:

• Integrate client input in content, such as webinars and videos
• Ask clients to join discussion panels
• Invite them to post on your blog
• Encourage clients to join your fan page, and post links on their Facebook pages
• Incorporate clients in your sales training, so your reps can hear how your product or service alleviated their pain

A bit more challenging was the concept of inviting customers to join sales calls. I’m not sold on the reality of this one, yet. Most of our customers are pretty busy at their core jobs.

Still, when you think about it, people like to showcase their success. Why not take advantage of this? Inviting your customers to talk to your prospects gives them a platform to present to their peers how they were able to identify and resolve a problem. At the same time, they get to exchange ideas with their counterparts.

Bottom line, it’s time to start thinking about how current customers can become a part of the sales process – from the early stages on. We know our prospects are out there doing their research before we get to them. Let’s increase the likelihood of being included in a product or service selection by having our successful customers talk about us.

I’d like to hear from you. How are you integrating current customers into your sales process?

Tags: buying decisions, colleague recommendations, counterpart recommendations, customer showcase, existing clients, existing customers, new customers, peer recommendations, peer-powered sales, Sales 2.0, sales calls, sales process

Cutting the Cost of Inbound Marketing

Guest blog by Sally Duby, Anneke’s business partner and Phone Works GM

Just got done reading Gary Ambrosino’s blog posting, Why Inbound Marketing Is Costing You Money and What To Do About It – Part 1. What a pleasure – first because he gave Phone Works a nice shout out (thanks, Gary), and secondly because it’s a topic we discuss daily with our clients.
 
In the post, Gary shared this “typical best practice sales funnel.”

 
He goes on to talk about the high cost of converting Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Opportunities, focusing on the middle two tiers of the funnel and leaving us wanting more in anticipation of Part 2 (nicely done!). In Part 2, he promises to talk about how to reduce Inside Sales Costs (ISC) and accelerate MQL-to-Opportunity conversions. I’m on pins and needles.
 
In the meantime, I’d like to add that it’s critically important to also look at the top of the funnel. That 30% – 50% figure is the first number I would explore. It’s too high! One of the quickest ways to increase Inside Sales efficiency is to highly restrict the number of inbound leads that convert to MQLs and pass on to the Insides Sales/Business Development (Sales Development) team. You only want your reps spending time on MQLs that show strong buying behaviors and meet your target profile. Keep the others in the top of the funnel, where they can be nurtured through automation until they’re closer to buying or they pop out of the funnel.

Marketo, as a company, does a fabulous job of this. As does SalesForce.com.  They are masters of inbound/demand generation marketing, driving a huge number of leads into the top of the funnel. But then, they quickly narrow the funnel, only letting through those that fit a tightly defined profile.  This might make a lot of sales teams nervous, but these highly successful Sales 2.0 companies have learned that it’s much more cost effective to weed out leads at this stage than to pass them on and waste expensive IS/BDR time.
 
How do they narrow the funnel? They employ marketing automation tools as effectively as any company we’ve seen. They track inbound lead activities, carefully study their reports, and continually refine their qualification criteria to arrive at a combination of behaviors that represents a high likelihood to buy. It’s not enough that a website visitor downloads free content or spends a lot of time on their site.
   
Bottom line? If you’re serious about driving down the overall cost of sales (and who isn’t?), you need to look at the entire Marketing/Sales equation.  Are your leads passing through to Sales too quickly? Food for thought…if you follow closed deals at best performing companies, you’re likely to find that they spent 50-60% of their time in the sales cycle being nurtured on the marketing side, before passing to sales as an MQL.

Now, if you’ve been following closely, you’ll notice that I didn’t throw out a figure for how many inbound leads should pass to the MQL tier. Why? Because it’s highly dependent on your sales model – whether you’re a B2B or B2C business; the cost of your product or service, and how complex the sale is. Still, we’ve found across the board that successful businesses are significantly below the 30% – 50% range shown in the funnel above.
 
I’d like to hear from you. What do your numbers look like for converting inbound leads to MQLs?

Tags: Business Development, cost of sales, cutting cost of sales, Inbound Marketing, inside sales, Inside Sales Costs, inside sales efficiency, ISC, Lead Nurturing, lead qualification, marketing and sales alignment, Marketing Qualified Leads, MQLs, sales cycle, sales development, Sales funnel

How Much Money Does the VP of Sales Make?

If you are benchmarking your Chief Sales Officer’s compensation, don’t miss the Phone Works VP of Sales Compensation Survey Report, which was released last quarter.

Here are some of the highlights from our survey of VPs of Sales in B2B companies across industries:

• The majority of respondents work in technology companies based in CA
• 50% of respondents are responsible for bringing in revenue between $11M and $100M
• Sales price for products/services ranged from $49 to over $10M
• Quotas ranged from $80K to $248M
• Average quota achievement reported for last year was 94%
• 57% reported compensation based on base salary plus commission
• Average base salary was $176K; average total compensation was $330K

Download the report, to also find:

• field sales rep compensation data
• differences in compensation between respondents in Northern CA compared to other geographies
• differences in compensation between SaaS company respondents and others
• stock option compensation and vesting data

Have your compensation and sales quota changed in 2011? Has your sales headcount and budget gone up, down or stayed the same?

Tags: VP Sales compensation

Sales Innovation in a Traditional Industry

This is the second excerpt from my interview with Ned Trainor, president and co-founder of BuildSite, an online product database used by the construction industry. It is part of the Sales 2.0 Leaders Interview series.

Ned launched sales in a traditional way in an attempt to meet with the manufacturers who would be his advertising customers. When results didn’t meet expectations, he began working with my company, Phone Works, to design a new way for BuildSite to engage customers by phone and online, track every prospect contact and close sales without leaving the office.

Anneke: Tell us about your customers: Would you describe them as Sales 2.0 innovator types?

Ned: There are a few, but these are fairly traditional industrial companies. Some are divisions of Fortune 500 companies, and they’re big; they do $500 million in sales or more. Others are little chemical companies that have 20 employees. They have tended to be sort of shoe-leather sales people, and they mostly use their own reps or manufacturer reps. It’s a very traditional, automobile-intensive, personal-meetings type of selling.

Anneke: Why innovate in such a traditional space? What’s the benefit to you?

Ned: We had to be innovative — the old way wasn’t working. Our outside reps couldn’t get the appointments with the right people at the right time. A lot of these companies have downsized. No one has any time to do anything.

One of our taglines is, “Look it up on BuildSite … and get it done.” We’re trying to appeal to our users’ desire to just cross one thing off their to-do list. We have to do the same for our advertisers. We have to show up when they want to see us, not when we happen to be in town.

Anneke: What measurable results can you point to from transforming your sales model?

Ned: Revenue is really what we’re looking at. Q1 was our best quarter we’ve ever had, and Q2 is going to be as good as Q1. And that’s because of the new sales model. In terms of qualified leads, we’re not in the Hail Mary mode a month from the end of the quarter, going, “God, I hope this guy closes, or else we are really in trouble.”

It’s, “OK, I’ve got this guy with this probability, this guy with that one.” I’ve got a half a dozen or more that could close within the next couple of weeks, and if half of them do, we’ll have a record quarter. I can see it, I can feel it. It’s OK, and if they don’t do it now, then we’ll get them in July. They’re not going away.

Anneke: If you were talking to another executive about the journey to Sales 2.0, the challenges and the rewards, what advice would you give them?

Ned: I’m lucky. I have an organization of 10 people, so there are no behaviors to change. We knew we had to do something. We didn’t have the resources to try this for six months, and if it didn’t work we’d try something else. But this was the right thing to do, and I had a few people telling me not to do it. I did it anyway.

I would say to anybody that it’s worth taking the risk here. I don’t see any downside. Try it out. You don’t have to change the whole organization, just do it in a corner of it, and see what happens.

Read the full interview with Ned Trainor in the Resources section of this website.

Tags: innovation, Sales 2.0