Why Change Selling Blog

What is Sales Enablement?

To my surprise, the Wikipedia definition of Sales Enablement has been removed and after a few queries I uncovered this definition from Forrester, which aligns with my take on the subject.

"Sales enablement is a strategic, ongoing process that equips all client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with the right set of customer stakeholders at each stage of the customer's problem-solving life cycle to optimize the return of investment of the selling system". 
One of the many objectives of the sales enablement team is equipping client-facing employees with the ability to consistently and systematically have a valuable conversation with customer stakeholders. Note this does not say a presentation, but there may be a point in a customer's problem solving cycle where a presentation is appropriate, but it is usually well into the buying cycle.

What is Value-created selling and why does it matter?

I visited the Apple Store in Monterey CA., three times in the last three months to buy products and noticed what a pleasant experience it was. These experiences combined with learnings from a recent MECLABs webinar, contributed to the criteria for our Website redesign.

Our Website is critical to generating inbound leads for business and our prior design was overdue for an update, it was text heavy and I was not happy with the look and feel and the CTA's were clunky and hard to read.

Whiteboarding is emerging as a mainstream enablement tool in B2B technology companies that actually contributes real value during the sales cycle.

Having trained several thousand sales and support people in the Whiteboardselling methodology over the past 18 months, my observations on the most valuable aspects of whiteboarding as an enablement methodology are:-

1. Creating clarity in your value proposition and building it into a story that everyone can tell is an excellent initial win. Most companies confess that their messaging is somewhere between 2-3/5 for clarity when we start the process.
2. Message Ownership - in 1/2 a day Whiteboardselling training Symposium salespeople either see or do the whiteboard up to 9 times using an active learning method and on the very next day they can give the whiteboard, - they know it.
3. Consistency and confidence in telling the story are the knock-on benefits for individuals and this is important in creating differentiation in the mind of the buyer - when the competition are saying the same things you are. 

What is under appreciated about whiteboarding is that sales-people will find it very difficult get up and whiteboard on an ad-hoc basis....unless they have already decided what they want to say and practiced what they are going to draw.

A pre-requisite for salespeople to whiteboard effectively is a visual story that centers around what the buyer is trying to achieve, that salespeople can use to engage the buyer in conversation.

A Simple Visual Confection - the Whiteboardselling method

My observations in riding shotgun on many sales-calls as a sales trainer are that salespeople can often get a meeting, but when they are face-face with senior executives, often don't know how to engage in a business discussion and thus revert to where they are more comfortable - discussing their products, and the meeting terminates shortly thereafter.

Ten Tips for Effective Whiteboard Engagement

A few things that might be of interest.

It's the official start to Barbecue season here in California with the Memorial Day holiday weekend. Much has happened over the past 8 months since arriving in the US; including buying and renovating a house and settling in Pebble Beach and working as an affiliate with WhiteboardSelling.

Do you attend B2B technology tradeshows? If you do, please answer the following questions to put you in the trade-show mind-set.

• Do you love tradeshows or hate them, or do you see them as a necessary evil?
• How good were the leads you got from your last tradeshow?
• Is the tradeshow on the wane, or is still a viable marketing investment?
• What's your tradeshow strategy as a vendor...are you like HubSpot and shun them, or do you select the best ones and invest in them?
• Do you just talk to the visitor or you do a quick demo and hand out a brochure?
• Do you have a 3-5 slide PowerPoint presentation with just the elements of your story?
• How do you sort out the visitors who just want a stamp so they can enter the draw for the iPad from a potential prospect?

I attended a trade-show recently and used a visual confection to tell my story. (The confection below is an excerpt of the Advanced Marketing Concepts Whiteboard story - a visual confection).  According to Edward Tufte, Visual Confections are “ structures that consist of a multiplicity of image events that illustrate an argument, organize information, show and enforce visual comparisons; they should be transparent, straightforward, obvious, natural, ordinary, conventional…with no need for hesitation or questioning on the part of the viewer”

You have 20 seconds to hook the visitor, 3 minutes to engage, tell your story, qualify and get permission to follow-up

Visitors come thick and fast during the breaks and at lunch and drinks sessions. You have a 20 seconds to hook the visitor and between 2-4 minutes to discover their top issues, tell your story, qualify their interest and get permission for follow-up.

Last night FC Barcelona,  a “star-team” beat Manchester United, a “team of stars” 2-0 in the final of the European football championship.

It was a disappointment for many English and Man-U fans, but an outcome entirely predictable. Apart from the first 10 minutes of the match, Barca controlled the ball through crisp passing, ball control through mid-field and selfless 100% contribution from every player on the team.
 Man-U’s star strikers were held for most of the game and could not put penetrate the Barca defence; while Barca showed remarkable composure and scored 2 goals from a total of 7 on-target attempts, vs . no goals from 2 on-target attempts for Man-U.
At sport’s highest levels where teams are evenly matched, we see time and time again that “star-teams” almost always beat “teams of stars” in final matches.

Last year I wrote about FC Barcelona in “Training to Win”, after witnessing their summer training camp regime from my office window. Barca brings their whole team, trainers, doctors, coaches, even their own security and some of their grounds-men when they come for summer training; their preparation and training is second to none.

Barca’s 2008-9 performance was exceptional in winning the La Liga championship and EUFA Cup, scoring the most goals in any season, having the least goals scored against them. In just one year as coach, Pep Guardolinos' capacity for leadership, ability to develop and inspire individuals to believe in themselves, combined with disciplined and extreme work-rate and focus on technical excellence, have found him a place in football history.
In business we look at sporting hero's and great teams for lessons and inspiration.

If FC Barcelona was a technology company it would likely have all or some of the following characteristics...and a whole lot more;-

How important is clarity in your messaging and how clear is your message?
I'd say it's the difference between life and death for start-ups.

Sales and marketing are dependent on the clarity of your message to win mindshare, generate leads; and to engage, diagnose and qualify new opportunities, yet clarity is often an afterthought. 

I was prompted to write this article after a call this week with a technology company based in the Mid-West. This company has World leading technology, great vision and is completely failing in marketing.

They are in the red zone. When you arrive on their Website it is not possible to figure out that they do on the home page. Nor is it possible to figure out what they do by clicking on the CTA. You have to click on the product page to find the description of what they do and it's in 10 point font in the middle of the first paragraph. This is not a joke....this is a disaster.

This year's, top sales performance problems that sales leaders are investing in solving are - ability to show benefit/value, closely followed by differentiation from competitors.