The good news? More and more companies are investing in sales enablement. The bad news? More than a few are failing to recognize sales enablement as a distinct discipline, with a distinct audience and distinct development needs. Here are a few mistakes you’ll want to avoid, as well as some suggested remedies.

1.Sales training that’s too generic:
Just as no two salespeople are alike, the same can be said for no two sales positions. Regardless of whether your rep is a new hire in his first sales role, or a more experienced professional who has been selling for a dozen years, there are dynamics that are unique to each industry, business segment and product or service offering. Understanding these dynamics, and the specific competencies required to navigate them successfully, is critical to effective coaching. An effective sales enablement program is not just about teaching your reps to sell, it’s about teaching them to sell for you.

2. Sales training that’s not aligned to your customer’s path-to-purchase:
Understanding your customer’s buying journey is critical to your reps’ ability to progress and close new business. While customer journey mapping is a typical component of any sales enablement program, particularly for new hires, many programs make the mistake of teaching too much, too fast. If your typical sales cycle is 3-6 months, why train your reps on pricing and negotiation, which they are not likely to put into practice for months down the road, in the first week? A better approach is to align your training content and focus with the sequence and timing that your customers will follow in selecting, and ultimately purchasing your solution. For most sales teams, that means starting with personas, prospecting and qualification, not pricing or proposal development.

3.Focusing on the wrong data points:
This is really a story about leading versus lagging indicators, and it’s a common challenge for many sales leaders. We all know the sales manager who spends all his time looking at “what’s closing this month?” Metrics that this manager focuses on are things like, number of deals closed, total bookings, average deal size, length of sales cycle or number of new customers secured. The rub is that these are lagging indicators: they are the resulting output of the work that came before. Unfortunately, because they are the result of effort expended in the past, this also means that they can’t be changed. They may be important things to be tracking, but it’s not the right place to focus when it comes to proactively managing your salespeople’s time and effort.

For example, you may have a (lagging) KPI of $250K in quarterly sales revenue but your sales cycle is 6 months. Managers should define one or more leading indicators such as number of first demos or meetings executed, or the size of your reps’ pipeline to ensure you’re on track to close enough deals to achieve your KPI.

The second part of the data story is ensuring that you’re measuring the right combination of leading indicators to deliver on your goals. When it comes to data collection and analysis, sales managers will most often turn to their CRM system. Yet CRM systems tell only part of the story, and are generally limited to process and productivity metrics such as number of calls and meetings, or number of new opportunities created.
To get a complete picture of their team’s capabilities, as well as their future capacity to meet their goals, today’s sales leaders need a rich data set that also takes into account the individualized knowledge, skills and behaviors of their team. These might include dynamics such as product knowledge proficiency, competitive positioning, even sales process adherence and core selling skills.

Sales leadership and enablement pros can also work together to develop dashboards that align a variety of critical KPIs and measure each rep against them. Sales operations can capture leading, learning and lagging indicators and create dashboards that help reps understand how they are doing, give front-line managers individualized perspective on where reps may benefit from additional training or coaching support, and provide a roll-up view for sales leadership.

These dashboards also help determine what coaching actions should be conducted to improve overall performance. With customized categories and KPIs, it requires an agreed upon view of what “good” looks like and how each category of metrics works together. When evaluating a rep, it’s also important to group individuals by cohort to allow front-line managers to analyze and coach individuals based upon similarity of tenure, role and organization assignment.

4.Ignoring your sales managers:
Sales managers have a complicated role. While their main goal is to grow revenue, they’re often managing large, widely dispersed teams that require them to be consummate managers of people as well. This is where coaching can provide significant leverage, and the benefits are clear. CSO Insights found that in companies with proactive coaching, 68.2% of reps achieve quota versus only 48.4% of those in organizations where coaching is substandard.

While coaching is a critical component of any successful enablement program, the obstacles to building and maintaining an effective coaching culture are significant, including lack of time (and to a certain extent, lack of coaching skill).

One of the biggest mistakes companies make in investing in a new sales process, for example, or even launching a new product, is to assume that after the training is done, the sales managers – just because they were at the same event — will pick up the ball and run with it, keeping the concepts alive and ensuring that they’re properly and consistently put into practice by their reps.

We know that on average, about two-thirds of coaching time today is dedicated to opportunity-specific coaching, while only a third is focused on skills and competencies development. Remember that most of our sales managers were once top sales people themselves, promoted into their roles often with very little preparation or instruction on to become great people managers. Doing this effectively requires a significant change in mindset, going from being a top sales hero to being a leader of sales heroes. It also requires sales enablement pros to develop specific training and development programs focused exclusively on their front-line managers, essentially, “coaching the coach”.

Even the best sales managers can fall into the trap of trying to coach too many skills at once, or coaching the wrong skills altogether. With Aevias your sales managers not only know who needs coaching, but when to coach, and the specific skills that need to be addressed. No more guessing.

And remember: Managers at all levels can benefit from leadership development support that ensures they are equally fluent on critical material, and that they have the skills to be effective leaders. Aevias customers often pilot new sales challenges to managers first, before a training program begins, and will include scenarios that are unique to a manager’s specific role, product focus or business unit.
Are there other sales enablement “mistakes” you’ve experienced and overcome that should be added to this list?



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If you can’t see it, how can you make it better?

It doesn’t pay to say to the CFO: These numbers on the P&L aren’t true.
And arguing with BUA or Konga about your market share stats doesn’t work either.
You can’t make things better if you can’t agree on the data.

Real breakthroughs are sometimes accompanied by new data, by new metrics, by new ways of measurement. But unless we agree in advance on what’s happening, it’s difficult to accomplish much.

If you don’t like what’s happening, an easy way out appears to be to blame the messenger. After all, if the data (whether it’s an event, a result or a law of physics) isn’t true, you’re off the hook.

The argument is pretty easy to make: if the data has ever been wrong before, if there’s ever been bias, or a mistake, or a theory that’s been improved, well, then, who’s to say that it’s right this time?

“Throw it all out.” That’s the cowardly and selfish thing to do. Don’t believe anything that makes you look bad. All video is suspect, as is anything that is reported, journaled or computed.

The problem is becoming more and more clear: once we begin to doubt the messenger, we stop having a clear way to see reality. The conspiracy theories begin to multiply. If everyone is entitled to their own facts and their own narrative, then what exists other than direct emotional experience?

And if all we’ve got is direct emotional experience, our particular statement of reality, how can we possibly make things better?
If we don’t know what’s happened, if we don’t know what’s happening, and worst of all, if we can’t figure out what’s likely to happen next, how do take action?

No successful organization works this way. It’s impossible to imagine a well-functioning team of people where there’s a fundamental disagreement about the data.

Demand that those you trust and those you work with accept the ref’s calls, the validity of the x-ray and the reality of what’s actually happening. Anything less than that is a shortcut to chaos.



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You’ll hear CEOs say, “Our people are our most important/valuable asset.” But salespeople read reviews on Glassdoor, search for their company on “The Top 100 Companies to Work For,” and even ask themselves, “Does our senior management believe my peers and I are the most important thing around here?” And not all of them are buying what their CEO is selling.

A skill that sales managers have consistently scored poorly on is their ability to hire salespeople who will be successful at that company. When this ability is lacking or not a strength, we find ourselves at the other end of the continuum, asking the practice question above. 95% of World-Class performers answer they agree/strongly agree that they exhibit this behavior, better than twice the rate (42%) of All respondents (which includes World-Class).

There is a business maxim that bears directly on today’s topic: People join companies but quit managers. Consistently through years of surveying, Gallup has reported the number one reason people quit is their relationship with their immediate supervisor. When we combine this maxim, the real question becomes whether we learn from salesperson departures and, if so, what do we learn?

In sales, conventional wisdom holds that not making your number is the quickest/surest path to the exit. But sub-par performance is typically tolerated – or worse, ignored – far longer than anyone would imagine. In all the years we’ve been working with sales organizations, we have yet to hear a manager lament, “You know, I’m not sure I gave that rep enough time to be successful.” Why the disconnect between the belief and the reality?

At the root of it may be the best practice we’re discussing today: consistently determining why a salesperson leaves, and determining a course correction. We see in the chart below that World-Class-performers experience less than half the turnover of all firms. This represents an enormous competitive advantage.


Lower turnover means lower costs: less energy/resources expended on recruiting, hiring and on-boarding. New-hire ramp-up periods to full productivity are now longer than six months for two-thirds of companies, and that results in reduced revenue generation. Since few companies discharge over-performing salespeople, the involuntary turnover likely followed some period of time, often extended, as noted above, of under-performance. And when experienced sales professionals voluntarily depart, especially high-performing ones, not only is revenue lost, but also product/industry experience, established relationships, and higher levels of account access.

Questions to ask yourself:
Are sales representative departures truly seen as a breakdown in the rep/sales manager relationship?

Do you investigate to determine whether a pattern exists in this breakdown, and take corrective action?

Are early departures (less than two years) viewed as a lack of manager ability to hire successfully?

Do you demonstrate that salesperson retention and development protects your most important asset?





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