As you finish your delivery and glare into your catcher’s open mitt, you think of nothing other than successfully executing the decision the two of you just made. As a pitcher, your “battery mate” is not only there to catch the ball when the batter whiffs—he is also there to share accountability for the result of each at-bat.

A catcher is a pitcher’s most valued customer, a partner who is in search of a trusted collaborator who can effectively map his arsenal of capabilities (e.g., change-up, curveball, slider, two-seam fastball, etc.) to successfully solve the problem at hand (e.g., runner on first, one out, full count, top of the eighth inning, your team has a one-run lead).

I’ve been delivering “pitches” for nearly my entire life—first in baseball and then in business. Here’s my biggest takeaway so far. Nobody cares about your pitch. That may sound harsh, but stick with me, as I’m actually trying to help. What’s truly important is the role each pitch plays in a much larger problem-solving process.

Mapping out the problem-solving process

In baseball, the top brass from each major league team is faced with the exact same macro-level problem at the beginning of the season—build an organization that will win the World Series in October. If you break that problem down a bit, each team has 162 chances to earn the right to compete for a World Series championship each season, and within each of those regular season games are (at least) 9 innings, or a total of 27 outs, where each team has the same opportunity to make progress toward earning the season’s grand prize.

If you were to zoom in and take an iterative approach to winning the World Series, you might begin to focus on the only thing that really matters during each moment of a game, that is, winning the current at-bat, one at-bat at a time. A pitcher and a catcher should guide their team toward solving one mini-problem at a time pitch by pitch while always keeping their “October destination” (winning the World Series) in mind.

What does this have to do with sales?

Having been a pitcher and a salesperson, I could probably cook up a long list of similarities between pitching a baseball and pitching a product/service/idea. For now, let’s just go with the following four elements that showcase the common ground between the world of baseball and the world of business:

1. There is no clock – Have you ever been right at the verge of closing a sales deal when it suddenly seemed to go backwards in time? New proposal, new stakeholders, new opportunity all over again—from scratch. It’s not fun. I’ve been there too, but it demonstrates the fact that your customers aren’t on a clock to close your deal. They are on a journey to solve their problems. The absence of a game clock is one of the reasons I love baseball so much—absolutely anything can happen, or as Yogi Berra once put it, “It ain’t over till it’s over!”
2. Situational awareness is vital – Walking into a sales meeting is one of the most interesting things that happens in business. At its very core, the meeting serves as a potential platform for value to be created. I believe that’s mostly up to the salesperson and her/his ability to connect the dots logically between three key points: the customer’s current situation, the customer’s desired future state, and the sales organization’s set of capabilities. Mastering this art is harder than it sounds, so I’ve decided to give it a name that sounds difficult: “situational triangulation.” Pitching also requires this type of expertise—you’d better know exactly what you’re aiming for in a given situation (e.g., in my example at the beginning of the post, with one out and a man on first, you’d rather get a ground ball than a strikeout).
3. Success depends on navigating one conversation at a time – I’ve been involved with sales deals that took as short as two weeks to close and some that took as long as two years to close. In every single meeting were key conversations that took place between “sellers” and “buyers”—and keep in mind, the seller isn’t always the salesperson. In fact, I usually know that a deal has some good momentum when I am no longer selling to my main point of contact, but instead enabling that individual to sell to others about the value that needs to be created to move away from the status quo. A pitcher and a catcher have as many “conversations” during a game as the number of at-bats. You can think of every single pitch as a “value exchange” during the conversation: The catcher communicates what type of value he expects by flashing the signs, and the pitcher responds with the value he believes his catcher needs by either agreeing or shaking off the suggested pitch and then ultimately delivering to the plate. With every pitch comes a new moment that’s never existed before, a new count, a new at-bat waiting to unfold, and the result of each conversation is recorded in the history books for further exploration by players, coaches, fans, and an avid community of sabermetrics experts. Wouldn’t it be interesting to explore sales conversations with such rigor? The way things are today, many sales conversations vanish the moment they’re over, never to be analyzed again. If you could shine a light on sales conversations the way we do in baseball, what would you measure? What would your customers measure?
4. Your competition is literally sitting in the waiting area – A colleague of mine told me that as soon as he finished a recent sales meeting, a competitor was waiting in the lobby of a customer’s office ready to roll with the next sales pitch. When you are a pitcher, it’s even more cutthroat than that. You have seven guys sitting on a bench staring at you from the bullpen, each one chomping at the bit to get his shot after you’re done. That’s right; I’m making reference to a pitcher’s competitor as other pitchers, not the other team. I know it might sound taboo to say that, but when it’s a healthy competition, everyone steps up his game. The other obvious competitor is, of course, the opposing pitcher. Here’s something I’d love to see—a nine-inning buying cycle where the customer narrows the competition down to two finalists who each take the “field” for three outs at a time. Let your imagination go wild with the rest of the rules.

A quick comment about hitters

You might wonder why I haven’t focused on the hitters yet. Here’s what I’d say: Hitters introduce a little something we can call “reality” into the pitching equation. A pitcher and a catcher can lay out the perfect strategy together and attempt to execute exactly as planned. Guess what? You might still give up a home run. And every single person in the stadium will be watching closely to see how you bounce back afterwards. We’ve all had sales meetings we wish we could erase, but the only thing we can control is how we behave in our next one. The complexity of dealing with a new hitter with each new at-bat is similar to dealing with the complexity we are faced with day in and day out in the constantly changing business environment. Your plan is one thing. Reality is another. Don’t ever underestimate the hitter.

If you’ve ever pitched anything in your life—a baseball, an idea, a business plan, or a tent—it would be great to read your thoughts, reactions, and questions. Or if you’re just an avid San Francisco Giants fan looking for a place to boast, feel free to take advantage of the opportunity here.

Based on my 20 years as a sales leader, many tasks and priorities have remained consistent; however, many more have changed. It’s still about driving revenue, yet the evolving needs of our clients as well as the profile changes of our salespeople point to the fact that as a sales leader, there are things I know for sure and areas that require serious rethinking.

What has stayed the same?

• The basic definition of what my job is remains true. My role is not to be a super salesperson. It isn’t my job to close business. It is my job to ensure that all of my team members have the tools to be successful. That means removing barriers so they can do their jobs. Most importantly, I lead from behind and not out in front.
• Recruiting the right people is still the most important thing that I do. If you hire the right people, they will find a way to get the job done. However, it is the hardest thing that I do. Great salespeople are in demand. Because of their regular client contact, the word gets out quickly when someone is available, and they usually have their fair share of good offers from competitors.
• Working with salespeople regularly still enhances their engagement. Being in sales is a lonely job. Although they thrive from individual contribution, most salespeople appreciate the team-selling process. It remains important to spend time with team members so they know that they are connected to a company with other employees and resources. I can provide that connection.
• There still is a surprising amount of luck involved in order for salespeople to be successful. The most successful strategy includes casting a wide net. In other words, one should work both hard and smart. Leading with certain metrics in mind is a strategy critical for sales leaders. These metrics are particularly important when a salesperson is not satisfying certain revenue requirements since adhering to metrics should eventually lead to sales results.
• Sales talent is still street smart and is often successful because of strong relationships. A sales leader should understand these relationships and interact with customers in a similar manner. Yet, the sales leader needs to be mindful that key relationships are always with the salesperson and not with their leader. The leader has to be sure to step aside when confronted with a client relationship opportunity since it could undermine the client’s relationship with the salesperson.

Now, what has changed? A lot.

• Using business development technology has evolved over time. It requires understanding database management and sophisticated CRMs. CRMS are not only useful to salespeople, but also the data available to understand customers, the way they buy and sales activity, has become invaluable when leading a sales team. If a salesperson isn’t successful, the data gleaned from a CRM will often provide the diagnostic information necessary to make changes that will ultimately put him or her back on course.
• The way salespeople develop leads has changed; therefore, coaching this process requires understanding social media, grassroots marketing, and other ways that customers interact with each other. In addition, being active in organizations where customers and competitors find valuable resources is critical in a sales leadership role. It allows me to develop soft leads for my team members in a non-sales capacity.
• Leading virtually has become more sophisticated based on technology tools available. Conference calls are the norm; however, meeting tools encourage sharing of information real-time with the ability to build community among a remote team.
• Because our clients are global, the job of a sales leader is not confined to the normal workday in a respective time zone. Often, we are on calls early in the morning to late in the evening. There is no such thing as an eight-hour day in this job.
• The global aspect of our business also creates account ownership challenges. Client locations were generally confined to territories so salespeople could be aligned as such in the past. Now, buying decisions, client locations, and implementations often cross over defined geographies, making decisions regarding account ownership complicated. Often, it’s the client that dictates who the account manager should be based on their own organizational structure.

What is still true and will remain true is the dynamic and exciting nature of this job. Deciding to become a sales leader is never made because of financial reward or status. In fact, in some compensation schemes, top salespeople make more than their managers and could have much more prestige and influence in an organization. Still, a great sales leader has the ability to both increase the engagement levels of their team members and to positively and measurably impact the bottom line of their organization through others. I will continue to embrace this great challenge in the future!

Whether your organization wraps its business model around products, services or both, the one common denominator in every business is the need to sell. As products and services become more complex and customers become more sophisticated, many established sales professionals struggle to communicate the value of their products and services effectively.

Moreover, new hires who may have stellar sales skills may nonetheless have zero knowledge of how to engage your unique customers in more powerful conversations about your products and services. While new hire training programs are rich with product knowledge, company culture and other corporate mandatories, they are often lacking in the kind of human-focused, globally consistent information that enables new people to hit the ground running with your customers. Most would agree that they’d rather not have new people learning to develop their skills on the customers themselves, but that’s often the only recourse as sales leaders and training leaders find it difficult to speak the same language and collaborate effectively on meaningful sales programs.

The following series of essays from GP Strategies’ Sales Enablement expert, Brian Lambert, addresses the issues of new hire sales training programs, including improving effectiveness among existing sales leaders and closing any communications gaps between sales leaders and sales enablement and other training professionals.

Download a copy of the Sales Enablement eBook today: http://bit.ly/1Da2caQ

CEOs are continuing to look at bringing costs into alignment while at the same time looking for ways to grow their organization. As a result, a lot of activity continues within the sales team. Sales leaders are looking to increase the competitiveness of their sales team as the economy continues to slog along. One area under increased scrutiny is the onboarding process within client-facing teams. On one hand, the new hires need to perform quickly and hit their sales goals as fast as possible. On the other hand, the new hires need to understand what customers need and how to communicate the value of products and services. While this is an age-old problem, today’s solution to this challenge is anything but routine—especially when learning and sales leaders are struggling to justify the investments being made in new hire onboarding activities. Learning leaders often find they need to do a better job explaining how their activities clearly link to improved competitiveness at the point of sale.

I recently hosted a webinar with Brian Lambert, sharing real-world examples and providing insights on these tough challenges. We specifically talked about what it takes to:

• Orchestrate a new hire onboarding process that decreases ramp-up time of new hires
• Understand how learning and sales leaders are taking a top-down and bottom-up approach to help new hires achieve more immediate sales results
• Define the often overlooked critical links within the process and how companies are looking to manage friction points in the process
• Get in front of the likely onboarding “mandates” from above, or from product groups or business units

If you missed the webinar, a recording is now available: Cross-Functional Teaming Challenges and Opportunities in Sales New Hire Training

But if you’re looking for the Reader’s Digest version, I wanted to offer a quick look at some of the key takeaways we offered.

1. Think in terms of deploying a “service” that extends beyond creating isolated training courses
2. Remember, your solutions must be integrated with operations, and you need to think that through before approaching sales leaders
3. Be watchful of the pull towards “jumping to the solution”—many challenges need to be thought through first
4. Don’t be afraid to look at the whole organization to align/enroll the support you need to be successful
5. You will likely need to develop skills to think like an “architect” as well as a “plumber”

During the session, a number of questions came up, and while we were able to address most of them, we weren’t able to get to all of them due to time. Below are those questions and my best answers. This is an ongoing conversation, and I encourage you to keep the questions coming in via the comments section at the bottom of this page.

Q: Can you talk more about the concept of engagement? It means a variety of things, not just sales activities and achieving numbers. As a Sales L&D person, creating engagement or engaging environments is key.

A: When organizations look to establish a go-forward strategy, it is crucial that they appropriately engage across the organization to validate the vision, understand the different mechanisms that need to be orchestrated in order to achieve the vision, and gain a commitment of the appropriate stakeholders that will be involved in the initiative.

Q: What KPIs are determining success of your Sales New Hire Process?

A: We often see reducing ramp-up time of sales new hires as a typical KPI of the Sales New Hire Process. Each organization typically has its own specific measures that define what constitutes being “ramped-up.” That said, we often work with the organization to pinpoint the specific problem that they are experiencing related to their sales new hires. Zeroing in to the specific need enables us to then establish the go-forward vision and the desired business outcomes of this vision. Then we can work backward from these business outcomes.

Q: What if the new hire is an experienced person; how do you ensure that they will fit into the company’s culture?

A: It is certainly important to assess the dynamics of the company’s culture against the new hire experience and the desired outcomes of the new hire program. In many cases, an effective learning experience will accommodate experienced participants and look to leverage their skills in support of other less experienced new hires. Another key element often resides in the level of participation from the sales managers/leaders who are often in the best position to aptly leverage their experience while passing along the culture.

Q: What does “own” actually mean when it comes to training?

A: When we look at the end-to-end initiative, “owning” refers to the idea that all stakeholders are committed to the vision of the program and take an active role in the shared definition of success. For example, if the new program includes a component where sales managers need to provide some level of support to help enabling performance for new hires, the VP of Sales should own these responsibilities in addition to the key design points of the new hire training itself.

Q: Do you have any examples of successful sales new hire training that you can share?

A: We recently designed an end-to-end new hire training program that targeted reducing ramp-up time for new sales associates for a global financial services operation. We are currently working on defining a comprehensive new hire training program for the sales associates for a major US department store retailer.

Selling is evolving and sales productivity is facing multiple challenges. Complex changes are not only happening within companies, they are occurring from the customer standpoint as well.  Obstacles surrounding the sales process include new products, new processes, new strategies, heightening demands and higher expectations.

In this video, Sales Enablement Principal Consultant Brian Lambert discusses four key factors that address the issue of sales productivity:

1. Decrease ramp-up time.
2. Get the right people in the right jobs.
3. Reinforce the right behaviors.
4. Understand the benefits of technology.

In a recent webinar, Sales Enablement Principal Consultant Brian Lambert and Training Consultant Greg Renner shared real-world examples, providing insights on: Cross-Functional Teaming Challenges and Opportunities in Sales New Hire Training.

There has been an automotive industry shift from traditional mass communication efforts to the need for experiential marketing events. During these events, consumers actively participate in the marketing effort. The events are geared to connect the audience with the brand on a personable, no pressure level. These events reinforce consumer opinions of a brand or change behavior towards it. Listen to Bob Pientrantonio as he explains how GP Strategies leverages experiential marketing events for customers.

How could your company benefit from experiential marketing events? Leave a reply or an example about how your company leveraged an experiential marketing event to gain or retain customers:

We are often asked to look at what content, skills training, and tools new hire salespeople receive as part of their onboarding process in an attempt to “make the new hire experience better.” This request is usually in response to sales and business unit leaders asking learning and development teams to create more globally consistent new hire training programs that drive costs out of a fragmented process with multiple stakeholders, no real clear-cut owner, and lack of accountability.

When taking a step back and looking at new hire training and the overall onboarding process, we often find a lot of work going into creating new hire training content or building more distributed methods to reach and teach remote salespeople. For example, there has been some good work in building ramp-up toolkits and even creating communities that new hire salespeople can use to get the help they need. But, have you ever stopped to ask your team, “What is the business benefit of all the new hire training-related work we do?” or better yet, “How do we know our sales new hire training program is effective?”

If you think about it, newly hired salespeople face a very real challenge: “How do I (as a new salesperson) meet with buyers who will buy from us and then sell them something so I can hit my quota?”

Unfortunately, more often than not, the new hire training process doesn’t get close to helping salespeople answer this fundamental question. Instead, we often find an altogether different reality in existing new hire sales training programs. What we usually find looks something more like this:

• 500 different content assets including courses, modules, and reinforcement guides
• 370 hours of available training to participate in at the time of their choosing
• 4 different portals/internal websites to sort through
• 2 different internal social networking websites to engage in

In more real terms, we find that only 15% of this content is really about the buyers/customer that salespeople need to actually talk to in order to “sell them something.” Yep, that’s right, 15%.

And, to make matters worse, this lack of focus on customers in the new hire training process increases the burden on internal subject matter experts. Oftentimes we find that salespeople have to navigate to 10 different subject matter expert functions or people to in order to figure out how they can add collective value to clients (yet these internal groups are largely ignored in the new hire training process).

So, let’s recap: New hire training isn’t about customers and it’s not designed to help newly hired salespeople reach the internal subject matter experts who can help communicate value. No wonder the executive team is often wondering what the return on investment is for their new hire sales training program.

Having worked in this space for a while, it’s easy to see how new hire programs can evolve over time to diffuse customer focus. Increased executive expectations and pressure by product/business unit leaders to ensure product knowledge is pumped into the heads of new hires can create a confusing web of complexity that salespeople simply need to “understand” in order to get up to speed more quickly. Suffice it to say, we often find that new hires face a steep learning curve—especially within the first 90 days. 

The good news is that some learning and sales leaders are looking at the sales new hire and onboarding process as an area of targeted improvement. They are beginning to work cross-functionally to upgrade, optimize, or even transform the new hire sales training experience. 

I thought it would be helpful to share some of the challenge I am seeing as they begin this work. If addressing the new hire training challenge is on your radar screen, let me offer you a brief categorization of the several barriers that get in the way of new hire productivity. No matter your path forward, these barriers need to be addressed, especially, if you’re looking to apply more than just a temporary Band-Aid to the sales new hire training challenge.

• Barrier 1: Failing to confront the new hire salesperson’s reality. While the future growth strategy is tied to reaching C-level executives, is it realistic to turn your new hire salespeople loose on the C-level inside your best clients the first day on the job? When we look at new hire sales training, we often hear that mandate: You just need to go sell to the C-Level! The challenge is that it might be a good idea to actually practice those conversations in the new hire experience instead of letting them practice on your customers. For many sales and learning leaders, just trying to figure out what to train and what to teach people to say is daunting—but it models the reality that your new hire salespeople face (and they just started working in the company).
• Barrier 2: Failing to define new hire sales training clearly. Many organizations define onboarding as the “stuff that HR does,” while defining new hire training as the “stuff HR doesn’t do.” This leads to a lot of gray areas in the overall new hire experience. Can you define where new hire training ends and where it begins? What about the HR onboarding process? How much of the new hire training experience is about success in role? And how long does it last? Without a clear definition of where new hire training begins and ends, you end up with multiple perspectives (like product, marketing, and sales perspectives) all asking for more time in the poorly defined process, and they seem to be all “good ideas” but together may not actually be meaningful to the new hire. While adding value to the new hire process is important, it’s doubtful that internal content providers can create valuable content if they can’t define what the new hire process is. Defining the new hire process clearly is an often very real barrier that needs to be overcome to get the right help you need internally.
• Barrier 3: Failing to align content, skills, and tools to the specific sales conversations that new hires need to have. If salespeople need to get in front of C-level, how much time is actually dedicated to helping reps engage at the level (not just mandate action) in the new hire experience? Or more specifically, which training content and materials are specifically aligned to helping reps get access to a specific C-level role? New hire training content needs to help salespeople achieve tangible results in their sales process. Unfortunately, overgeneralizing what it takes to be successful with all buyers doesn’t help the cause. Aligning the content that new hires need to be successful with the real-world conversations they need have with those buyers is a barrier that needs to be overcome to increase new hire productivity.

Removing these barriers can dramatically affect the speed to which new hire salespeople get up and running in their role. By addressing these barriers, you are well on your way to decreasing new hire ramp-up time and giving new hires a leg up by decreasing the slope of their learning curve. Additionally, by working cross-functionally to remove these barriers, you can build a new solid foundation for new hire sales training and start focusing on decreasing the time it takes to achieve quota by:

• Increasing buyer empathy. Focus on helping different kinds of salespeople develop understanding and empathy with the buyers they’ll be working with and communicate in the way those buyers need. This will eventually trump run-of-the-mill product training, which has been the emphasis of onboarding and training for more than a century and had a dramatic role in getting reps sent to procurement instead to the C-suite.
• Driving sales objectives. Develop reps based on specific and measureable sales objectives that map to their sales process and are in relationship to the types of buyers they work with on a daily basis.
• Tailoring the experience. Fine-tune the experience to enable different types of reps with different messaging, stopping the one-size-fits-all new hire training experience.
• Building a value-added program. Engineer an ongoing new hire development process that sales leaders find more valuable (as opposed to creating a one-off time bound fragmented series of activities).

Watch Brian Lambert’s latest thought leadership video on Sales Productivity.

Since the challenge of communicating value to customers is a very real one, many executives continue to invest in developing the skills of their sales team.  They have to respond (in other words, the have to take action), or they risk an eroding market share or competitive losses.   For example, many of our clients are investing in negotiation and questioning skills or looking to develop programs to connect with and educate executive level clients on industry trends and insights.

Against this backdrop of increased business challenges on one hand and increased investments in skills training on the other hand, you would think sales enablement leaders within organizations are expanding their influence and taking more direct control over expenditures.  Surely, if the problem is in the “wheelhouse” of the sales enablement team and the need is so great, the influence of the sales enablement function will continue to evolve, right?

Nope, that’s not happening in most of the organizations I talk to.

The reality is that many sales enablement professionals are struggling to reach out to the sales leadership team and create a truly effective partnership that drives lasting business results. This is perplexing because the sales leadership team runs a specific functional area that needs the help of “skill developers” and also falls within the potential scope of “performance challenges that need to be addressed”.  In the view of one VP of Sales, “I hate to say it, but I think I need too much help. The challenge I have is figuring out where to start.”

So, what’s up?  Why are sales leaders not engaging their enablement and training function more collaboratively?  Why aren’t training leaders able to earn the trust of the sales leadership team in order to truly take a more proactive stance?

Tough Question. Tough Answers.

When it comes to addressing this reality, it’s a two-sided coin.  Clearly the sales function and the learning function should, and could, become partners.  Getting there requires meeting in the middle.

If you are a sales enablement leader, it’s likely you have a sales problem.  Your challenge has to do with helping sales leaders understand the help you can provide, and more importantly the value you can create with the sales teams you support. I will share more about this below.

If you are a sales leader, it’s likely you have a creativity problem. Your challenge has to do with making a decision to create “white-space” around a specific team or group and boldly experiment to find out what will really truly work to communicate value differently within your sales environment.  Creating that white space requires bringing the right cross-functional team of training, marketing, technology, and content providers together with the sales team to work together. More importantly, it means allowing the cross-functional team to test, learn, and deploy in an iterative and adaptive manner that is equivalent to “failing forward” (more details on this forthcoming in another blog post).

In both cases, business as usual is the equivalent of putting your head in the sand.

Addressing the Sales Enablement Sales Challenge

As I work with sales leaders, I often ask, “What is the business purpose of your sales enablement/training function?” Their answers provide a dose of reality.  Some current perspectives that sales leaders have about the training function include:

• “That’s the group that does HR training.”
• “That’s the group that does training (and manages the course catalog).”
• “That’s the group that runs our kickoff events.”
• “I’m not sure what they do.  They do their stuff, we do ours.”
• “They help me shift the behavior in our sales team to sell to executives more consistently.” (This is very infrequent: 1 out of 50.)

So, where does that perspective come from?  As a sales enablement leader, you have a sales challenge.  So, what are you selling to sales VPs?

Hello VP of Sales:

• “We need to make sure every salesperson attends information security training.”
• “We would like to talk to you about the courses you would like us to offer next year.”
• “We are hosting several lunch and learns on the technical aspect of product X.”
• “We would like to conduct a needs-analysis.”

In sales, the way you engage your customer (the sales leadership team) often dictates the expectations you create.  In working with sales leaders, it’s important to take stock of the expectations they likely have of you and your group and confront reality.  To some in the space, this is equivalent to more design thinking, or thinking more like an architect.  I think Steve Jobs summarized the challenge the best when he said:

“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.”

So, what experiences have you had?  How are you at connecting the dots for your sales leaders?  Are your answers linear (that is, are you always recommending the same solution to a problem)?

To help, let’s take a step back and look at the questions that sales leaders are likely asking with regard to their sales enablement teams.

1. What’s in it for me?
   • Translation: What are you selling me?  A course? A needs analysis? An approach?
2. Why should I work with you?
   • Translation: How are you going to work with me?  Are you going to put the burden on me to figure out things, or are you going to offer me your thoughtful point of view so that we can co-problem solve? What are you bringing to the table?
3. Why should I care?
   • Translation: What problems do you really solve?  What are you going to take ownership of?  What are you willing to get fired over (because that’s my reality – it’s likely I won’t be in this job more than 2 years)?

These would seem like fairly reasonable questions to ask, especially if you’re responsible for a multi-million dollar sales quota, and you are getting questions from executives, board members, and customers on a daily basis.

An Aspirational Charter

As we begin a new calendar year, perhaps it’s time to take a moment and step back.  It’s definitely a good time to take stock of what you are doing well, and what you might need to work on going into a new year.  And it’s probably a good time to think deeply about how you’ll evolve as a sales enablement leader, responsible for partnering with the sales executive team. Here are some things to think about:

1. How will you increase productivity of workers across sales, marketing, and service organizations in order to increase your company’s return on human capital assets?  What small initiative can you start that tries to move the needle?
2. How will you help the executive team bridge the gap between strategy and execution by helping workers align work accomplishments to the forward-leaning business strategy and changing human capital strategy?  What likely initiatives are coming down from the executive team?  How can you get in front of them?
3. How will you decrease the friction between groups within the organization that need to work together on important business initiatives and produce new outputs that are valuable to customers?  Where do teams need to learn and how can you help them?
4. How will you help workers increase their value contribution by learning new skills and acquiring expertise they need to drive our company’s business strategy forward?  Do you know the future-state definition of the roles you support?  What are they moving away from, and what are they moving towards?

A word of caution:

Make sure you can deliver on the expectation you’re setting.  Take the time to ask yourself the three questions from above.  You have to be able to explain what you’re really selling, how you work with sales leaders, and the problems you solve for them.

See more great sales enablement insights during one of our upcoming Webinars.

What’s going on?
For the past 3–4 years, companies across many different industries have struggled to cope with the harsh reality that the business environment has completely changed at both macro- and micro-levels.

1. Macro-level: The economy has reset itself. Since 2005, world economic markets have struggled. As a result, companies have had to drive productivity, enter new markets, and create new innovations, while cutting costs at the same time. This sustained do-more-with-less reality is here to stay for the foreseeable future.
2. Micro-level: The world of work has changed. As a result of the sustained do-more-with-less reality that exists, the way work is done has changed. While there are many trends and buzzwords, like “big data,” “collaboration,” and “social,” that support this, the reality is, we’re well into the inflection point between the industrial revolution and the information age, creating the need for higher knowledge-worker productivity and more outputs then ever before.

The Challenge?
More CEOs have recognized that their growth comes not only from creating new products, rethinking their go-to-market strategy, or driving efficiencies across processes and workflows (an “inside-out” view of the world), but also from the system that aligns to their customers’ buying and problem-solving processes (an distinctly different “outside-in” view of the world). Companies like Accenture have recognized the inefficiencies that exist in working in silos and have pivoted to a more horizontal view of the work they do in order to more effectively communicate, deliver, and create value for their customers. That horizontal view of adding more value uses customers and buyers as the design point—not products and services.

The Implication?
Instead of going to market in a way that uses products and services as the organizing “design point” for adding value to clients, companies are shifting to using customer problems as that design point. This is a massive shift—it couldn’t be any more different. Buyers know it, and they recognize it (so it’s both different and differentiating in the marketplace). Think about it. Companies like Symantec are beginning to recognize that buyer problems often cut across product and service portfolios, requiring a more configured and coordinated engagement, delivery, and measurement approach to the executives and leaders they sell to. They recognize that in order to grow, product, marketing, and sales teams have to all focus and drive value to those buyers in more relevant ways the cut across the silos that often exist. Not only does that need to happen in these revenue-generating functions, but it also needs to happen in all other customer-facing functions as well. For example, delivery and operations teams that support or deliver on “what gets sold” must also work differently.  

This new reality creates a major strain inside of companies because they aren’t tooled, organized, or staffed to add value to their customers in this way. In fact, here’s what Steve Bennett, the new CEO of Symantec, says about this challenge:

“On our go-to-market strategy what I would say simply [is that] we had talented people everywhere in the world really working hard, but…our system doesn’t work, or probably better said—we don’t have a system. Our process, our technology, the tools we have, our knowledge management—our salesforce is not empowered and freed up to sell.”
 
Steve Bennett, Symantec President and CEO –
January 23, 2013, Q3 Earnings and Strategy Direction Conference Call, Source: morningstar

Rising to the challenge
For many sales leaders, this challenge is felt every day. Complexity and change inside their company, coupled with complexity and change in their client companies, creates inefficiencies at the point of sale. Overcoming these inefficiencies requires cross-functional leadership and teaming as well as a unified focus on driving sales objectives. To facilitate the cross-functional work required, organizations should:

1. Charter a cross-functional team to streamline the horizontal business processes behind sales conversations.
2. Help that team create standards and a definition of sales enablement to coordinate a common approach across the enterprise.
3. Take a holistic approach to scoping and launching initiatives that align content, skills, and tools that salespeople need to be successful.

Here’s what’s going on. Sales leaders are looking to their training and HR colleagues to help improve new hire sales training execution. A major catalyst for this push is the need for more globally consistent programs that:

• Get new hires up to speed more quickly
• Drive costs out of fragmented global execution
• Create a more consistent output of skilled new hires
• Provide a higher quality mechanism that helps reps overcome complexity

Last month I had a conversation with a sales enablement leader in a large financial services company. She was asked to rebuild and relaunch their global new hire training program. She had done a lot of work to identify the work already going on across the globe and determined what appeared to be working or not working. But she admitted they were stuck on how to move forward. The challenge as she defined it? “Getting everyone on the same page so they could all move forward.”

I see this a lot these days. A clear challenge exists, but unified action doesn’t.

Creating unified action across a variety of different groups and moving forward together is a challenge I see a lot. When you look at new hire sales training, there are a lot of people with a vested interest. For example, product groups want to make sure product knowledge is covered, marketing wants to make sure the brand is covered, HR wants to make sure engagement happens, sales operations wants to make sure compliance happens, sales management wants processes followed and sales enablement wants to make sure reps have the right skills. That’s a lot of perspective coming into one program. This is a new reality that many sales enablement professionals have to learn to deal with. In the case of this most recent conversation about new hire training, the concept of improving new hire sales training wasn’t foreign to any leaders in those groups. What was foreign, however, was the idea of coming up with specific actions to take, priorities to tackle and content to create. These tactical elements were hard to wrangle in.

So, we took a step back and took some time to think things through. To help, she sent me the 50+ files that composed the global “view” of new hire sales training and I reviewed it. She also shared more details about where she was “stuck” on their new sales training decision-making process.

When we reconvened, I shared what I was able to synthesize from her situation. And then I asked a simple question: “So, at what point will new hires be learning about their customers?”

“Ummmmmm,” she said.

I continued. “Sorry, I just couldn’t find much detail about the customer as I was working through all the information about who your company is, when it was founded, what products you have, what your vision is for the way products need to be used, the innovations you’re looking to bring to the market, the processes that reps need to follow and the technology they’re supposed to use.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a lot about us, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps we should start there?”

To me, there is a key lesson to be learned in how to balance more with less when it comes to enabling reps to sell more successfully. What salespeople need MORE of are services from internal groups that are designed to help them embrace their reality and help them have more valuable conversations with clients. What they need LESS of is random activity designed to “help them sell” that actually puts more burden on their backs and requires them to figure out what to do on their own.

In other words, if your new hire training program is all about your company and its products, how exactly is that program helping reps have conversations with senior level buyers in the first two weeks on the job? So, if you’re looking to revamp new hire training, remember it’s not about more product, process or program training with the goal of cramming information into the heads of salespeople. It’s about enabling new hire reps to have the right sales conversations with their buyers on day two of their job.

Here are some tips to get in front of the sales new hire training challenge:

1. Define the interlock between employee onboarding and new hire training. While HR typically handles onboarding, what’s the focus and business reason for investing in new hire training? Clarify that design point and get sales leadership buy-in on what the program is designed to accomplish.
2. Determine if new hire training is tactical or strategic. If sales leaders are asking you to revamp sales training, why are they asking? For example, do they want to talk about all the tasks involved, or do they want to talk about the role of new hire training in achieving the sales strategy?
3. Move new hire training from an event to an experience. Too many sales new hire training programs are built as siloed activities instead of an end-to-end enablement service designed to help reps get critical traction in the first 90-120 days on the job. If everyone in marketing, sales, training and management takes that approach, the design point and objective of the program become less fragmented, and the program becomes more about your company than the client’s reality.