How to Drive Continuous Improvement in Sales Enablement

Some of my hardest lessons as a sales leader came when figuring out how to setup and run training (learn from my mistakes!) Me as a new leader: "Great we have 10 topics we want to cover... let's do 1 a week. 2.5 months later we will have covered SO much ground!" 🙃 Training was more of a "box checking" exercise. Someone shared feedback on what they wanted to learn, and it got added to the list Having one 30 or 60 minute training on any topic is never sufficient, and I did the team a disservice So what was missing? And what did I seek to add later? 👉 Focus Instead of 10 topics, we might go into a quarter with 1-2 priority focus areas. The deeper engagement on a narrower topic is not unlike narrowing your focus on a smaller set of ICP accounts This creates room for practice, follow up sessions, different voices delivering the material, and ultimately makes the content stickier 👉 Engagement from other departments Where applicable, involvement from other departments can add incredible value to your training program. For instance, when you are training on a new product category, it is valuable to: - Hear firsthand from Product how it's built - Align your training timeline with Product Marketing so that materials are ready to go as the training commences - Work with Marketing so that messaging aligns to how you can sell it and everyone has the same talking points from day 1 - Work with Rev Ops to identify a market opportunity to apply your learnings - Have Sales Enablement help prepare uses cases in your sales tech stack 👉 A system to encourage accountability Once the trainings are delivered, how do you know that the sales team was paying attention? That can take many forms: - Group activity like pitch practice - Measuring adoption through tools like Gong - Contest/SPIF to encourage initial matching sales activity - Knowledge tests in your LMS (my least favorite) 👉 Repetition There's a reason Sesame Street used to repeat episodes during the week - once wasn't enough to get the message home! While your sales team isn't full of 3 year olds, similar principles apply Bottom line: instead of thinking about any topic as a single "training", think about creating "training programs" for your team 🎓 Tying it all together for a training on "New Product A" Week 1: Product & Product Marketing introduce the new offering Week 2: Outside expert/marketing/leadership deliver the industry POV Week 3: Team gets together to identify prospects and practice the pitch Week 4: Team provides feedback on material and prospecting plans are built incorporating the training Weeks 5-8: Measuring adoption through Gong. Shouting out strong adoption and privately helping laggards identify gaps in understanding Week 6: Short contest to encourage cross/up-sell opportunity creation Week 12: Revisit/Feedback #SalesEnablement #SalesTraining #LeadershipLessons #CorrCompetencies

Every enablement team has the same problem: - Reps say they want more training. - You give them a beautiful deck. - They ghost it like someone who matched with Keith on Tinder. These folks don't have a content problem as much as they have a consumption problem. Think of it thusly: if no one’s using the enablement you built, it might as well not exist. Here’s the really scary part: The average org spends $2,000 - $5,000 per rep per year on enablement tools, programs, and L&D support. But fewer than 40% (!!!) of reps consistently complete assigned content OR apply it in live deals. So what happens? - You build more content. - You launch new certifications. - You roll out another LMS. And your top reps ignore it all because they’re already performing, while your bottom reps binge it and still miss quota. 🕺 We partner with some of the best enablement leaders in the game here at Sales Assembly. Here’s how they measure what matters: 1. Time-to-application > Time-to-completion. Completion tells you who checked a box. Application tells you who changed behavior. Track: - Time from training to first recorded usage in a live deal. - % of reps applying new language in Gong clips. - Manager feedback within 2 weeks of rollout. If you can’t prove behavior shift, you didn’t ship enablement. You shipped content. 2. Manager reinforcement rate. Enablement that doesn’t get reinforced dies fast. Track: - % of managers who coach on new concepts within 2 weeks. - # of coaching conversations referencing new frameworks. - Alignment between manager deal inspection and enablement themes. If managers aren’t echoing it, reps won’t remember it. Simple as that. 3. Consumption by role, segment, and performance tier. Your top reps may skip live sessions. Fine. But are your mid-performers leaning in? Slice the data: - By tenure: Is ramp content actually shortening ramp time? - By segment: Are enterprise reps consuming the right frameworks? - By performance: Who’s overconsuming vs. underperforming? Enablement is an efficiency engine...IF you track who’s using the gas. 4. Business impact > Feedback scores. “Helpful” isn’t the goal. “Impactful” is. Track: - Pre/post win rates by topic. - Objection handling improvement over time. - Change in average deal velocity post-rollout. Enablement should move pipeline...not just hearts. 🥹 tl;dr = if you’re not measuring consumption, you’re not doing enablement. You’re just producing marketing collateral for your own team. The best programs aren’t bigger. They’re measured, inspected, and aligned to revenue behavior.

Hey sales leaders: What do you think is the purpose of enablement? Allow me to confound that expectation. Your answer probably includes sales onboarding -- ramping new hires quickly. It may include keeping reps abreast of all the changes -- new releases, new campaigns, new processes, etc. And some of you may include doing periodic training on your unique skills, tools, and processes. But I'll bet a nickel you haven't thought about enablement in terms of performance improvement. I mean identifying behaviors that are contributing to performance gaps, and creating an intervention to measurably change those behaviors -- thereby reducing the performance gaps. Example: you're hearing that reps are discounting too heavily, and you get support for this in reporting on avg discount rates. A performance improvement approach says: --What are the behaviors contributing to the performance gap? --What do we want the behaviors to be? --How can we empirically measure if the behavior has changed? --What's the best way to achieve the desired behavior change? --Fast forward: did we move the needle on those empirical metrics? PROBLEMATIC BEHAVIORS: Maybe the behaviors contributing to the high discount rates include reps not selling value -- not uncovering the business impact of the status quo, not articulating the positive business outcomes of your solution. And maybe they're also not engaging the right personas throughout the sales cycle. DESIRED BEHAVIORS: Maybe you have a sales methodology that calls for reps uncovering & articulating business value -- so you want them to apply that methodology more rigorously in calls & emails. Maybe your deals usually start with mid-level managers, but later reps need to engage the VPs of 2 departments -- so you want them to apply that kind of persona multithreading in their deals. HOW TO MEASURE: For value messaging, leverage Gong/Chorus to measure the % of calls that mention specific words/phrases. For multithreading, measure avg # of personas on opps, & when they're added. Other interesting metrics: Avg # decreases in TCV of an opp, and avg push count. BEHAVIOR CHANGE INTERVENTION: Training is ok, documentation is great, but ongoing coaching is the best way to achieve sustained behavior change. Ideally led by the frontline manager, but okay if led by the enablement team. REVIEWING METRICS: When you clearly define the desired behavior change, the empirical metrics, and the intervention, it's very easy to show whether you made a difference. And it's very easy to argue that it was the enablement initiative is to thank. As a veteran enablement leader, I firmly believe that this kind of "purpose" (and approach) is sorely missing in enablement orgs. And IMO if more enablement orgs approached their work this way, more sales leaders would consider their enablement leaders to be strategic partners in growing the business. Happy selling. #heysalesleaders #salesexcellence