Customer Enablement for Sales Reps: Helping Your Champion to Succeed

How many of us as sales professionals have hit a home run in developing a champion at a top prospect, only to find out that our champion was unable to convince their management internally to go with our solution?  We were able convince our champion of the wonders of our solution, but we failed to truly enable our customer to “sell” into their own organization.

Just as marketing and sales operations teams need to improve “sales enablement”; as sales professionals we need to improve our “customer enablement”. Customer Enablement is defined as:

"The delivery of the right intelligence to the right customers(prospects) at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist them in moving a specific buying opportunity forward."

The right intelligence includes providing a collective set of relevant facts, concepts, experiences and know-how to our champion/buyer.  The right format will enable our champion to easily share this intelligence across members of their buying team in a relevant and memorable fashion.

It’s true that getting the right intelligence in the right format will require many parts across a company to work together in order to optimize customer enablement across your targets (e.g., marketing’s awareness building process; alignment between marketing and sales for sales enablement and pipeline management, etc.).  However, as your company establishes the right infrastructure and tools, here are a couple of thoughts of what you can do as a sales reps to accelerate your opportunity:

• Your prime contact is your ambassador: Think of your key prospect(s) as your delegate within the organization – the person most motivated and situated to share your information and related tools across their company’s network. Once they’ve bought into you and your company’s products, you need to enable them to get the rest of their organization to buy-in.  Lean on your own organization to help you accomplish this.
• Be relevant:
• Follow your buyers and their companies online to best understand their needs and interests
• Leverage this insight to provide relevant intelligence to help them in their jobs, and to help them succeed, as part of your regular interaction with them. (e.g., send them only the highest quality, most relevant sales and marketing assets from your organization, or send them links to interesting articles you find online)
• Leverage your resources: Tap into your account-based marketing team, sales development reps and/or inside sales team to help you identify new people within your target companies that should be part of your “sphere of influence”
• Develop an account strategy: Include “customer enablement” as part of your account planning process (Sales Advisory Service clients, refer to IDC’s best practices in account planning)
• Collaborate with your key prospects: Identify who else needs to be influenced within their company, as well as what the best strategy is to convince these players about the value of your solution.
• Work with your marketing organization to develop an interactive white paper that will facilitate their communication of your solution’s value add to their organization (or better yet, leverage your next generation sales operations and other sales enablement focused teams to facilitate this process)

What experiences have you had in successfully enabling your champions at your target companies? Feel free to share below or send a note to me and I can post them anonymously. (mgerard@idc.com)

IDC's Sales Productivity Quiz

Here’s a quiz for all you sales and sales operations executives:

1. What is the best measure of sales productivity?
1.  Quota attainment
2. Revenue per sales rep
3. Size of reps’ expense budgets
4. Sales investment as a % of revenue
5. Ratio of sales output to what’s required to produce it
6. I’m really just not sure!
2. How Often Should You Assess Sales Productivity?
1. Every week when reviewing forecast data
2. Don’t bother, as long as you’re hitting quota!
3. Annually in order to look like you know what you’re doing
4. At varying intervals throughout the year based upon the type of metric and the segment and “DNA” of your organization
5. Sorry, what’s “productivity” again?
3. How do you know that you’re doing ok optimizing your sales organization’s productivity?
1. At the end of the year I still have my job
2. I’ve established a key set of performance metrics, in collaboration with management, that help guide strategic and tactical decisions
3. I don’t, but no worries . . . my spouse is the primary bread winner
4. One more time. . . what’s “productivity”?

If your answers add up to 11 then there’s a good chance you answered all of these questions correctly.

Let’s focus on the definition of “sales productivity”.  For the sake of simplicity, sales investment as a % of revenue or revenue per sales rep could be an option to measure productivity.  However, these definitions are too general and insufficient to make the phenomenon of sales productivity understandable. (Wikipedia)  We need to further define the concept of sales productivity so that it can be better understood and better leveraged to: 1)help manage our business; 2)drive action; and 3)demonstrate that we know what we’re doing as sales executives. 

Here are four key attributes to consider as part of your company’s definition of sales productivity: (Source: IDC's Sales Productivity Scorecard)

1. Sales investment:  How much are you investing across your entire sales organization?. . . by region, globally or year over year versus revenue? (more advanced organizations will analyze this data by market growth potential) 
2. Sales staff efficiency:
1. Sales staff spend KPI:  What percent of your investment is staff versus program spend? (IDC Benchmarks Study: 78% for the average tech firm)
2. Sales rep time allocation: There are certainly flaws associated with a time-motion study; however, in context with other metrics across the organization, this insight can prove quite valuable. (IDC Benchmarks Study: the average rep. spends 17% of time preparing for customer interactions, and ~1/2 of this time is wasted)
3. Sales support staff KPI: What percent of sales staff are support versus quota-bearing? (IDC Benchmarks Study: 42%) Based upon IDC research, a low KPI here results in low productivity and poor customer satisfaction.
4. TandE (travel and entertainment) per sales staff: Better leverage collaboration technology,inside sales and coverage models to optimize this KPI. (IDC Benchmarks Study: $18,000)
3. IDC’s Sales Productivity Levers
1. Talent Management: On-boarding process, ongoing training, turn-over, etc.
2. Sales Management/Methodology: Adoption rate of your sales methodology – or at least use of a common language as part of forecasting, account planning, opportunity management, etc. Maturity of your sales force automation system, including its ability to enable more sophisticated pipeline management and analyst, and interactive coaching. 
3. Customer Intelligence for Sales: What’s the maturity of your organization’s customer intelligence? (within sales and from marketing) Are your reps able to easily obtain and leverage share of wallet data and customer intelligence to improve their productivity?
4. Sales Enablement: Your company’s ability to “deliver the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward". Sales Advisory Service clients should check out IDC’s 14 Attributes of a Best-in-Class Sales Enablement Strategy and request your personal sales enablement strategy session included in the service. (IDC Benchmarks Study: Quality of marketing and sales assets today?: 5.5 out of 10)
4.  Sales Operations Maturity:  Is your sales operations team positioned for the next generation of sales operations? – i.e., fulfilling the need of sales strategy, productivity and automation. (IDC Benchmarks Study: 8-12% of total sales staff are sales operations, with 1/4 to 1/3 represented by a Center of Excellence team)

Want to learn more?. . . including assessing your own organization’s sales productivity, and getting access to benchmarks for all of the above attributes specifically within the technology sector?  Contact Irina Zvagelsky or me if you’d like to participate in our annual Sales Productivity and Investment Benchmarks study. (more advanced organizations should also participate in our marketing benchmarks study to get access to joint sales and marketing benchmark KPIs)