Expert Advice to Help Your Team Hit Their Goals

An effective sales enablement team equips sellers with the skills, knowledge, processes, and resources they need to sell and hit their goals. Enablement includes onboarding, training, and change management, among other responsibilities.

Enablement teams manage several moving parts, so it’s essential to be hyper-focused on the areas that will have the most impact. 

During our first-ever virtual summit, WorkRamp LEARN, Melissa Regan, Senior Manager, Sales Enablement, and Stephanie Middaugh, Director of Enablement, share their advice for best practices and focus areas for your team to empower your sellers and hit your sales goals this year. 

Define your goals and desired outcomes

It’s vital to have clearly-defined goals for every initiative. Goal setting involves defining what you’re trying to do and what you want to accomplish. 

Once you’ve determined your goals and desired outcomes, you can work these into an executive summary. Your executive summary serves as your North Star to guide your program and can also help you get the support and buy-in you need from stakeholders. 

Use the “6 Cs”

Melissa shares her “6 Cs” that she uses to make critical decisions and deploy training initiatives:

• Composition
• Content
• Creativity
• Cadence
• Check
• Collateral

Composition

Determine the format for your learning materials and activities. For example, are you delivering resources via eLearning? Through a game or contest? Is this an online or in-person activity? 

“Employees want to feel valued and invested in, Melissa says. “So I’m thinking about the delivery mechanism in terms of is this engaging? Am I making sure that these programs are oozing value, preserving reps’ time, and is it consumable and relevant to them?”

Content

Will your sales enablement content include scenario- or role-based resources? Composition and delivery format is also essential with content. 

After you create content, how will you ensure it’s accessible and valuable for your team?

Read more: 13 Types of Sales Enablement Content Your Team Needs

Creativity 

Creativity means figuring out how to make the materials interesting, fun, exciting, and tactical.

“Creativity is simply looking at the program and figuring out how to get reps to touch it, feel it, experience it, in a way that will be sticky and memorable.” 

 

-Melissa Regan

 

Stephanie shares her approach to using creativity to improve your enablement initiatives.

“You need to be creative with your approach and all of the assets you’re developing,” she says. “Ask yourself, ‘is this something we’ve been doing just because everyone else is? Or is it going to impact the business?’ So be creative in every single element of your enablement programs.”

Cadence

How often will training occur? Will reps complete training in one sitting or space learning out over time? 

It’s also essential to ensure you can scale your program for growth or business changes. 

“You want to make sure you can scale any of your training,” Stephanie says. “This will help you support small and large enterprise-level businesses.”

Check

Remember to check in with your reps to see how well they retain the knowledge. This check-in could be an assessment, a test, or a survey. 

Make sure to apply their feedback to your training to make it more effective and impactful for their needs. 

Collateral

This step involves figuring out what to include with your programs that reps can use when they’re out in the field and need resources. 

What materials will help them to apply the training to real-life situations?

Try the “6 C’s” approach to creating training content and initiatives and checking in with reps to see how they respond to and apply the training to their day-to-day tasks.

Understand your reps

Understanding your sales team members helps you determine their experience and level, so you know the best approach to create effective training programs. 

For example, you can’t train seasoned, tenured reps the same way as new or inexperienced sales professionals. 

“I’ve been in enablement for about five years, and one of the best practices I’ve pulled away is understanding and training your reps,” Stephanie says. “Not my reps, not anybody else’s, but the reps at your company. So make sure you’re taking your strategies and molding them to support the team you have in your organization.”

Determine how you will measure success

Collecting data and measuring your programs is essential to determine their effectiveness. Collecting data also helps you make changes to improve your training and enablement materials.

Melissa shares how she evaluates her programs. She asks herself, “How will I measure the impact so I can learn where I excelled? And honestly, where did I fail my reps along the way? This process helps me make my next program even better.”

You can track several metrics, including sales content use, sales team productivity, onboarding time, and performance-based metrics like closed deals and quota attainment. But it’s up to you to determine which metrics tie back to your overall business goals and help you demonstrate the ROI of your programs.

Read more: Data-Driven Sales Enablement: Track, Measure, Improve

Creating effective enablement programs equips your reps with the resources they need to hit their sales goals and excel in their roles and the future. 

Looking for more expert advice and insights from enablement leaders? Watch on-demand replays from WorkRamp LEARN.