What are your biggest challenges in enabling global sales teams, and how do you overcome them?

Sales reps are busy. Sales managers are even busier. It's not easy to convince these busy folks to take an hour out of their day to sit in a classroom and listen to a lecture. And when your team is global, the odds are that this one hour comes at an inconvenient (EMEA) or impossible (APAC) time for a rep or manager. Some of the things we've done are - (1) region-specific enablement sessions, (2) tapping sales leaders and influential sales reps to lead some sections of enablement sessions, especi ...Read More

Enablement tactics and tools that work for a team of 50 reps need to be adjusted when you deal with a team of 500 globally dispersed reps. Some common challenges I have seen include: Multiple enablement/training tools and portals making it confusing for reps to know where to go Breaks in communication and lack of localization of content Failure to take local needs into account Changes in personas and competitive environment Prioritization of requestsProduct marketers should work with their sales ...Read More

The important word in this question is "global"---the challenges of scaling enablement efforts across the world are primarily across 3 buckets:  -language: scaling localization of core assets and training -insights: scaling understanding of regional markets so that nuance informs the approach to that market  -bandwith/HC: to really be effective, you need in-market specialists (pmm and enablement) but that's not always feasible and often in-market marketers are tasked with every marketing functio ...Read More

Regarding enabling sales teams in general, please check out some of the other answers I’ve posted here in this AMA, but specifically for the global aspect, here’s my take: there’s a good chance that a lot of your program and material will apply globally, and you might even think you don’t need to do regional enablement because of how good and wide-reaching it is. However, I would highly encourage you to ditch that school of thought and lean into regional-specific enablement. First, you might lea ...Read More

This is particularly relevant to Visa given our global nature and the 200+ countries we operate in. The biggest challenge I encounter is how unique each country / market is, and by extension how that influences the customer mindset and how sales should engage with them. That said, although different customers in different countries may think about things in different ways, there are always common denominators. Most companies with global sales teams have some notion of regional hubs or regional H ...Read More

Regional needs differ. We tend to look at things through a US lens and that's a mistake. Buyers in EMEA vary even within that region. Southern and Northern Europe are different. UK is different in its own way.  If possible in person meetings (QBRs) are one of thr best ways to understand local needs.  Its impossible to meet every regional variation so I like to break out assets by stories that will stay consistent across regions and then areas that need to be adapted. Core value drivers aren't go ...Read More

I have a couple of points to make, as this is an area I've done a lot of work. 1. Number one challenge is the logistics of travel. Cost. Time. Personal commitment. The best way to teach people to sell is to go out on calls with them. This obviously doesn't scale, but you use the activity to drive content and training. You make sure you're at 10 customers a day if you travel, so it's a good use of time. Good sales leaders will make sure their teams keep you busy when in region. In those calls, yo ...Read More

I would love to say that you can enable global sales team with technology, localization and ensuring they have access to all of your HQ resources. But that is just not the case.  Here are the true challenges (and solutions) when enabling global teams:  1. Resource Constraints: You have $100 worth of bandwidth but mainland brings in 80 to 90% of the cash. Do you proportionally help the global team? Answer: No, you still need to enable them as if you were enabling a local team. You can do fewer pr ...Read More