Get answers from sales leaders
Alicia Lewis
Culture Amp Senior Sales Director • January 12
To be an effective sales leader, you must have strong communication skills and be driven by data and process. Strong communication, especially a coach-like mindset, is extremely important in terms of supporting reps to achieve quotas. Positive and effective communication between a leader and their reps allows for a smooth flow of information, which creates an environment that motivates the team to work towards achieving goals. More than ever, being analytical and process driven is key to creating and scaling a high performing team. It’s important that leaders understand the story in the data, make impactful decisions based upon it and motivate their team with data. In terms of nice to haves, having an eye for great sales talent is something that can take time to develop as a sales leader. I’ve been in sales my entire career and being able to identify great talent is something I'm always working on. If early on in their tenure a sales leader can hone in on a candidate's desire to learn and succeed, they are set up for success.
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Maria White
Cornerstone OnDemand Vice President Sales Enablement and Education • April 6
Better Together - Collaboration with other departments and Sales Enablement If you have not already started to build out councils with your core heads of department this will allow for set times for you all to meet to collaborate on the enablement priorities and build out RACIs to outline who is responsible during each phase of each project. Below are three steps that can help you start one 1. Meet with all the key department heads that you need to collaborate with to effectively manage or funnel all the information that is required for sales enablement to build strategy and enablement for the field. Explain what your organization is responsible for and how you can partner together 2. Schedule regular cadence with one representative from each group and form your sales enablement governance council - this allows each head of the department to delegate someone to represent that group in any or all projects that require you all to work together. 3. Keep it documented, share the successes, take input and build together The above is the most efficient to build credibility, trust and collaboration with your department heads, remember they will be talking to the sales leaders in other meetings just like you so building your collaboration and trust will help you all partner better together for the benefit of the sales and the organization.
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Andrew Zinger
Fastly Senior Director, Global Sales Enablement • January 10
Another topic that is always top of mind for sales leaders, and their recruiting teams, is their employee retention scores. It is a massive expense to organizations when they see talent leave, whether regrettable or not, and have to spend resources recruiting, enabling and eventually filling that seat. Programs, behaviours and approaches that may help keep your teams intact and excited about their role, can include: - providing new challenges and opportunities. This can come in many forms of internal career growth avenues, including progression through the sales segments, offering leadership opportunities, and/or programs and resources made available for personal development. - Engaging with your employees on a regular basis. Demonstrate to your teams that their feedback is welcomed, valued and encouraged. You've seen this done with internal 'employee engagement' surveys, 'ask me anything' panels with leadership, and of course it all started back in my early days with the physical 'suggestion box' (dating myself slightly). - Expand your 1:1's to be more than just about deals and quota. There is more to a seller than their ability to sell. Think of what 'behaviors' you want your team to excel at..are they good collaborators with cross functional teams? Are they a good team member and help mentor new members and don't shy away from sharing learnings? Do they show up prepared, educated, and lead with the customer first? Also, think of what sales 'competencies' you want to ensure the team excels at, such as being strong at doing 'discovery', they have the ability to tell compelling customer stories, and are they doing account plans for their tier 1 accounts?. If you build a team with strong sales 'behaviors' and 'competencies', the quota retirement will come. - Celebrate and acknowledge. Celebrate both big and small things within the sales org, and set up a recognition program outside of your 'Presidents Club' (or equivalent). Everyone responds well to their positive acknowledgment and reinforcement.
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George Cerny
Iterable VP, Growth Sales, B2B2C Sales & LATAM • November 15
By far the most over-hyped KPI is total pipeline created. This is certainly a key metric to track week over week as a health check, but it provides little insight into what's actually going on. The problem with total pipeline created, is at no point should the conversation end with that KPI. If it's low - why? If it's high - why? Was it one large opp? Was it a bunch of baby opps? Was it quality pipeline? Was it from one AE/Segment/Business Unit - or is everything firing on all cylinders? At best it provides directional guidance to tune into major variances and inspect. At worst it provides false confidence in a pipeline that won't get you to goal. Typically addressing total pipeline creation falls into one of two camps: 1. Mention & move on. These are meetings where the metric is called out, compared to last week and it's either * Good - "great job, let's see if we can stretch this 10% higher next week" * Bad - "we really need to prioritize pipe gen this week. Get on it." 2. Paralysis by analysis. These meetings show the metric, and then dive into 40 slides with individual permutations of how everything performed over the past week; leading to information overload and very little insight into what actually needs to change. This is why instead of just tracking total pipe creation - we want to take a three-pronged approach: 1. How are we tracking towards our pipeline generation goal (which is a leading metric against future bookings)? 2. Identify the factors that are contributing to the current results. 3. Define strategies to optimize the path to goal The standard discussion described above hits the first objective, skips number 2, and the only strategy is often "do more." We could write an entire post on steps 2 and 3, but here are a few variables that can take your basic "total pipeline creation" reporting to the next level * # of opportunities created & average opportunity value. This controls for the one big opp skewing results. You generally want more big deals, but don't want to have to rely on only one big deal to hit the goal. This helps monitor quality & quantity. * Split by region/segment/AE's - this allows you to identify people and parts of the business that are doing well and understand why (do more of it, share learnings, double down). It also ensures that those who aren't doing well don't hide behind overall success of the business and get neglected. We want to identify why they're struggling, and ideally get them unstuck to improve performance. * Pipeline by opportunity source - attribution can lead to some sticky conversations, but tracking where the pipeline is coming from is necessary to improve the overall output. This isn't meant to start a blame game, but you can't optimize something you don't measure. So if AE's, SDR's, Marketing, Partnerships, or PLG is slacking - what can we do about it? If something is working incredibly well - how can we do more? * Pipeline conversion metrics - how is the pipeline that's coming in converting through the funnel to closure? Are disco to demo conversion rates improving, declining or staying the same? What about win rate? Any new trends where we should ride the wave? Anything that's not working which we should stop doing? These metrics will give you a much deeper understanding of the factors that contribute to current results and lay a strong foundation so you can define strategies to help optimize results. With a strong team and partners in marketing, partnerships, SDR and RevOps leadership - you're a brainstorming session away from having your best pipeline generation quarter yet.
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Eric Martin
Vanta Head Of Sales • November 28
The answer to this question depends on the sales leader (i.e. me vs someone else), the product that the rep is selling, the stage of the business, etc. The list goes on. I personally am always looking for candidates who have these two attributes: 1. Innate curiosity 2. Persuasiveness The first is (hopefully) obviously critical. The more curious the rep, the better they should be at discovery. The better they are at discovery, the more time you can spend helping them execute the back half of their deals. The second is also hopefully obvious. I know plenty of reps who excel in sales through discipline and structure, but I'd take a rep who is also persuasive (on top of those things) any day of the week.
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Beau Noonan
Matterport Enterprise Sales Director • June 7
Rep ramp-up time in my opinion is something that I've seen companies completely overlook. Given the boom tech has been on over the last decade many companies have skipped tracking key fundamentals from the moment you decide to hire the rep to the moment they hit quota due to them smashing their numbers. A key example of this is certifications around product knowledge. Assessing an AE's product knowledge and understanding of the enterprise software solution they are selling is key to this period. This can be achieved through role-playing, pitch certification, standing and delivering on specific product value props, etc. We've veered away from rigorous sales onboarding training in exchange for throwing them in the deep end quicker hoping they'll hit quota, succeed, and contribute to the company without laying the proper foundation.
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I always recommend that candidates study the job description carefully. Take a look at the qualifications and skills/experience that the hiring manager wants. Do your best to come up with examples/stories to showcase those desirable skills/experiences in the interview. If you have time, it never hurts to connect with someone who is doing the role today and pick their brain on what they like, don't like, and do to succeed in the role. You should be able to find them on LinkedIn. This type of insight is invaluable as you will be learning from someone who is doing the job you want. If you're talking to a cross-functional partner that you're not as familiar with, get curious. For example, I really appreciate it when candidates take the time to ask me, "how can I make your life easier in this role? how can this role help contribute to your team?" This type of question is a launchpad and invitation to discuss future collaboration opportunities. Remember it's just as important for you to evaluate if this role or company is a right fit for you as it is for the hiring manager and company to evaluate if you are a right fit for them. So be sure to throw in one or two questions to help you evaluate your decision as well.
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Shahid Nizami
Braze APAC Vice President of Sales • January 10
In today's world it is relatively quite easy to make a very well informed decision when assessing a new role in a different company. These are some of the things I look at and advise my mentees to do too : * If it's a public listed company, look at their financials to figure out their year on year growth. * Check out websites like RepVue which give you a very good understanding about how sales reps in that company are doing * On LinkedIn, check out the trend on their headcount,especially in sales, is it increasing consistently or not. * Check out analyst reports and websites like g2.com to see how the product is rated by their customers. * Check websites like Glassdoor to understand about the culture of the company you are considering * If possible speak with a few customers and partners of the company as well.
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Charles Gryor Derupe
accessiBe Director of Enablement • February 7
Great question! There are three specific ways I do this: 1. There are some annual reports done for Sales Enablement that come from third-party sources like Forrester and Gartner. These may be gated, but sometimes they are sent by tools vendors. 2. Use your tool vendor resources! I always ask my CSMs for all the tools we own if they've created an annual trends report or a "best practice' doc for their specific tools whether it's outbound tools, content engagement, knowledge, etc. They have these for their own product/core marketing behind gated sites but since you're already a customer, they should be accessible to you without the barrier. 3. Forums - one I follow is the Sales Enablement Society forum where professionals ask questions. And, I guess we should give Sharebird a shoutout too!
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Katie Harkins
UserTesting VP of Sales • October 3
I love shared KPIs with Demand Generation. We're all on the same team. If marketing doesn't bring in the leads, sales teams are turning to outbounding which elongates sales cycles. I see the sales team missing content creation on assets that don't yet exist to handle objections within the sales cycle. Take your top 10 objections, partner with your Demand Generation team and create blog posts or one pager PDFs to address the objections and provide best practices to your prospects. They're looking for advice from you.
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