What are the components of a good sales enablement training program?
I always like to go back to basics and follow the same principals that we as PMM's follow when it comes to positioning to our customers. What is the customers pain point? What use cases are they trying to solve for? How can our products/solutions help them achieve their key business objectives? If we take those similar principles and apply them to an enablement curriculum you ensure you're aligning and delivering value to sales.
How are you helping them?
What will they be able to achieve from being enabled? (i.e more deals, higher contract value, close deals quicker etc)
Lastly, pay attention to some of the process/frameworks that sit around enablement. What is the best frequency (to avoid burnout and sales switching off or not showing up) and what level of training is needed for a given audience. Make sure these are well thought out, calendared well in advance, and appropriate amount of guidelines provided leading up to session (and after) to ensure the highest level of success.
I think the pillars of a great sales enablement program are:
Regular touchpoints - sales enablement is a never-ending program. So you must create rituals to show how important the program is and to create the habit where the sales team expects to engage with enablement regularly. Build the habit early and often!
Meaningful content delivery - building and maintaining a content library sales can self-service to find what they need can be difficult. But if you take the time to create and continually feed that resource, enablement can exist outside of your Zoom meetings, and live and breathe throughout the organization.
Two-way feedback loops - enablement shouldn't be perceived as simply a service that product marketing provides to sales. Instead, you should be cultivating spaces where sales feel empowered to give feedback on how messaging and assets are performing in market. This two-way street is a win-win for everyone. Product marketing gets valuable feedback to iterate and create better materials, and sales get to leverage those improved assets to sell more effectively!
Trust - at the foundation of the first three pillars is trust. It takes time to build, but by doing the above consistently you can build a connection between product marketing and sales where both teams are contributing to each other's success.
Sales enablement training starts on day one. Sellers need foundational knowledge of the product and buyers, along with an understanding of sales processes. It's crucial to not just provide training materials but also opportunities for role-playing scenarios with prospects and customers. Continuously showcasing demos and use cases for ideal customer profiles reinforces learning.
Since everyone’s at a different stage of their selling journey, training should be flexible and adaptive. Regular huddles and newsletters ensure ongoing support, making resources available for continuous learning and reinforcement.
The components of a good sales enablement training program are:
Metrics: Know your goal for building the program and create a baseline before you get the program off the ground. Some goals might be easily quantifiable, like shortening the sales cycle or increasing the win rate against a competitor. Other goals might be more abstract, like increasing confidence in selling to a specific persona or use cases. Whatever the primary goals, it's good to have a baseline to know what to focus on. Each quarter, I'll run a sales enablement survey to understand the field's confidence level and identify gaps in training or content.
Content Planning: Now that you have your baseline and direction of where to focus content and training needs, start building out the topics you want to cover during the quarter. Having a few blank sessions is good as things get moved around or new topics take priority.
Regular Sessions: Hold regular sessions (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly). You can host a regular company-wide enablement session to do high-level overviews and then host smaller department-level enablement sessions to drill into topics specific to them. These smaller sessions will help the team feel more comfortable asking questions but try to keep the group smaller than 5-7 team members if possible.
Use Variety: Everyone has a different learning style. While some people may like meetings and interactive sessions, others may like to go at their own pace and read from a document or slide deck. Others may like to get a hands-on feel. When building the session schedule, look for opportunities to switch from live sessions, recorded sessions, deck shares, and even interactive demos. Also, don't feel like you need to be the only one creating the content. This is a good opportunity to build cross-functional relationships. Reach across departments and ask for help leading topics.
Get Buy-in: An enablement program is only as good as the contributions of others. Get buy-in from the sales exec to ensure that the field teams are paying attention, participating, asking questions, etc. If they aren't, you'll need to do some discovery to figure out why.
Measure: Like the first step, you want to compare metrics to the baseline. Rerun the survey, reach out for comment, and look at the numbers. Is the program effective? What could be done better?
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