Driving Sales Performance Through Purposeful Skill Development

Bryan NaasLeave a comment

This article originally appeared on atd sales enablement blog. Check it out here.

Sales is a highly measurable role where the numbers shine like a spotlight throughout the organization. When we can create repeatability in the process and performance, we can help drive the results that lead success. While these numbers are easy to measure, they don’t always tell the full story when it comes to individual reps.

Building a Skill Matrix

A skill matrix is the foundation of your entire sales enablement program. It’s likely you’ll have to build this from scratch with the collaboration of your partners across the sales organization. If you are lucky, you can build upon the competency model work your HR and L&D counterparts have already developed and make it more specific to the functional needs of the sales role.

The goal is to be able to answer what it takes to be successful in this role at your company. You want to identify the skills and knowledge a rep needs to reach identified goals. Keep in mind, this will be unique for every role within your sales organization.

For now, keep it simple and just start with one role. Start by making a simple list of each skill and why it is important to a rep’s success. Once you have this list, you’ll start to uncover patterns you can use for categorization. Use these to refine and simplify your list to provide clarity.

Measuring Skill Progression

Now that you have your skill matrix in place, we need to look at how we will measure each to define areas of opportunity across the sales organization and for each individual. Just like all sales, measurement is key to ensure we have a clear understanding of ability and progress. This will provide the direction to ensure your development actions are driving the results you need for performance.

There are a few primary inputs to consider when measuring a skill:

Self-Appraisal

This may be the easiest to execute, but it’s also the most subjective. The goal is to capture the perspective of the individual rep and their manager on their ability to achieve each skill. Don’t overcomplicate it here; you can simply use a basic survey. The point is to make it easy for your reps and managers to share and get the data you need.

Performance Metrics

Performance metrics are the most complex measure. These metrics are likely visible and easy to gather from your CRM, but they are nuanced because a one-to-one relationship between the skill and metric doesn’t exist. Think about each of the skills in your matrix and the performance metrics you track as a sales team then match the skill to the metric. For example, if the skill is “differentiate the competition,” the metric would be “win rate.”

It is important to clearly define performance levels for each metric as you gather your data and begin to analyze. Think about each metric in three buckets: over-performance, acceptable performance, and below performance.

Performance Evaluation

These are the opportunities throughout the quarter when each rep is evaluated on their ability to execute a task. Consider things like call review scorecards, role-play evaluation, practice feedback and evaluation, and certification achievement. When gathering this data, you’ll likely leverage your conversation intelligence and sales training tools as the primary resources. Your goal is to capture the opportunities as they relate to performance and growth

Now that you have your measurement criteria, it’s time to analyze and present it in a consumable format for you, your managers, and each rep. Your goal is to combine the inputs for each skill in your matrix to generate a “score” that you can use for comparison. To do this, think about the effect each measure has on the performance of each skill. This will help you determine the proper weighting as you generate the score.

Creating an Action Plan

The most straightforward way to leverage this data is to find the areas of opportunity across your team and role analysis to drive your enablement programs. But this data really sings is at the individual rep level. Let’s take a look at how you can take this data and develop rep specific action plans that focus on development needed to level-up their performance.

The first and most important step of building your action plan is to enable your managers. Spend time helping your managers understand how this is going to directly benefit their teams, how to interpret the data, how to coach each individual skill, and how to properly manage their development time.

Next, when developing individual action plans, focus on the data to find areas of opportunity. These could be clear gaps in a skill that can be addressed for improvement or it could be additional investment in a skill as an accelerator. This means you don’t always have to focus on the skills that fall at the bottom of the list. Each rep and manager should find one skill to focus on and build their plan around it.

Once the skill of focus is defined, document the actions that will be taken throughout the course of the quarter to improve that skill. This plan will include commitments from both the rep and manager. Actions could include training from your sales training platform, role-play opportunities with peers, a book club, or extra focus on call reviews for targeted feedback.

This action plan should be reviewed on a regular cadence to ensure each party is holding up their end of the bargain. Leverage one-on-one meetings to focus on skill development and review actions taken during the week.

Consistent sales performance is the lifeblood of any successful organization. Without a clear understanding of how we succeed, we cannot achieve repeatability across a large group of individual reps and teams. Your skill matrix is the foundation that underpins that success and provides the map for progress.

The Truth About Gamification (The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly)

Bryan NaasLeave a comment

This article originally appeared on Sales Hacker. Check it out here.

There is a lot of talk about gamification and how it can make our training programs more engaging and motivating for reps.

There is some truth to this, but like anything, there is no silver bullet, and context matters a lot.

Seeking to understand the good, the bad, and the ugly of gamification is important before deciding how to leverage it within your enablement program.

  • What is gamification?
  • The myth of gamification
  • 3 areas where gamification can add value

What is Gamification?

Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics to non-gaming situations. Think rules of play, competition with other players, rewards for achievement, points for progress, levels of achievement, and leaderboards.

These mechanics offer a proven formula for game designers to drive fun and engagement.

In the early 2000s, business leaders began applying some of these same techniques to their teams in an effort to capture some of the same results: engagement, loyalty, and fun.

These are highly desirable cultural traits, and the concept of gamification in a corporate setting can make sense. When it does make sense, gamification focuses on behaviors that lead to outcomes. When it misses the mark, gamification focuses on behaviors that don’t directly lead to the long-term outcomes.

Let’s see if we can learn from the past and use gamification to our advantage.

The Myth of Gamification

My personal journey with gamification started at a conference in 2011. I was working primarily on learning strategy and design and was excited to learn about the hype that was engulfing the learning community.

I attended almost every session available that mentioned gamification and came away with a notebook full of ideas to begin implementing. We tried a few things and saw some success, but was never able to go full out — our LMS didn’t offer gamification options for us to leverage.

Fast forward a few years, and I was finally able to see gamification implemented firsthand in programs I was leading. By this time I had become a little skeptical, but I was excited to unlock the benefits promised at that fateful conference.

Unfortunately, this is where my story takes a turn.

Rather than see the outcomes expected, I began to recognize behaviors that weren’t in-line with the goals identified for the programs launched. The excitement of points and badges grew throughout the organization, but I quickly noticed that the behavior was very specifically targeted to the gamification, not the actual learning.

As I began to engage with and gather feedback from the teams I was supporting, I began to realize our programs were encouraging the reps to “game” the system to “achieve” the points and badges as quickly as they could.

Embarrassingly, I was as guilty as the reps I was supporting — I was doing the same thing with no concern for the content.

And unfortunately, as I began to engage and gather feedback from the teams I was supporting, my skepticism proved warranted. Ultimately, in these targeted situations, gamification can lead to the promised outcomes of engagement, loyalty, and fun. But when we applied these concepts too broadly, they actually resulted in behaviors that were opposite to the ones we were looking to drive.

One of the biggest shortcomings with gamification is the focus on short-term gains vs. long-term needs of the business.

As we look at some of the engagement elements of gamification — points, badges and leaderboards — it is clear they can provide an increase in engagement when implemented into an enablement program.

Learners often express the joy they feel when earning their points or being able to display their newly acquired badge. It is tempting to evaluate that joy and engagement, and correlate it to business results. But you have to ask yourself, “What learning is actually happening?”

The goal of all training programs is to encourage or change a behavior.

One of the biggest problems with gamifying learning is that it puts the focus in the wrong place. When we add points, badges, and leaderboards to the learning process, we are indicating to reps that the completion of content is the most important part.

However, a training program is just a means to an end. The end result we want to drive is increased performance through the application of knowledge or learned behaviors.

As humans, we are designed to follow the path of least resistance. If a path exists to gain the reward without fully engaging in the content, many are going to choose this path of least resistance. This leads to reps “gaming” the system to simply acquire the points or badges and reach their “goals.”

Who is benefiting when this happens?

It certainly isn’t benefiting the reps who are taking the easiest path — they aren’t actually acquiring the knowledge or improving the skills identified as important by the program. It isn’t benefiting the business, since the rep they rely on won’t have the knowledge or skills necessary to perform at the highest level.

Frankly, the only group it benefits is the enablement team. The enablement team gets to tout increased ”engagement” in training programs, since the reps complete the training at a higher level when they game the system.

Let’s unpack why this doesn’t work.

The root of the problem lies in the motivation of the individual. At the most basic level, this is an intrinsic vs. extrinsic issue. When we emphasize the reward as the outcome, we draw focus away from the goal.

The extrinsic motivator of the reward (points, badges, etc.) will often lead to a short-term boost in performance that will deteriorate over time.

Studies across all industries and subject matters show that extrinsic motivators don’t last; they don’t get to the value and integrated levels of intrinsic motivation that lead to long-term results in behavior. Research shows that external rewards can even be a demotivating factor in engagement and satisfaction over time, leading learners to avoid tasks or simply “check the box” to get it done.

To illustrate this, let’s look at an example outside of training and enablement.

Foursquare exploded onto the tech scene in 2009 with hypergrowth fueled by a newfound desire for social networking. A year later, their growing base of over a million users continued to “check-in” to businesses they frequented to earn points, badges, and recognition that would show to their friends as a form of status on the app.

But by 2013, everything began to crumble and Foursquare’s status among the app elite floundered. The focus on the gamification features in the app is ultimately what led to their struggles.

The extrinsic motivation of the badges and mayorships only provided a temporary engagement incentive for their users that ultimately wore off. In the end, Foursquare had to reinvent itself to put a stronger focus on more long-term value in user reviews.

Like I mentioned before, gamification isn’t all doom and gloom. There is real value in these techniques when they are leveraged in the right situation and executed effectively.

The Value of Gamification

The application of gamification should focus on performance, not the process or learning that ultimately drives performance. In other words, gamify the outcomes associated with the training, not the training itself.

Badges can definitely be motivating. I enjoy getting them as much as the next person. But my process to earn that badge is different from yours and any other individual working to acquire that badge.

If we focus our gamification efforts on performance, we incentivize the right behaviors for our reps by indicating to them that performance is the reward, not the learning. The learning and practice that takes place is how we help them get to that performance, and the reps who leverage it are the ones that ultimately succeed.

There are a few key areas where gamification can work and work well in your training program. Let’s take a closer look at those now.

Performance Visualization

When you design your enablement programs, it is always important to ensure you are impacting key business metrics that ultimately help move the needle.

While this is different for every business and every initiative, identifying these metrics will ensure your programs are focused on the right knowledge and behaviors needed to be successful. These are the metrics that offer value in gamification.

Let’s look at an example to help illustrate this.

Imagine your company is releasing a new product. As an enablement professional, you are tasked with training your reps to effectively articulate the value of the new product to new customers and prospects.

Ultimately, your company needs to drive additional pipeline to help sell this new product and produce value for the business. This is your business impact performance metric. You want to measure the pipeline that your reps are able to generate with customers and prospects in a defined amount of time.

The learning and practice scenarios you develop to help your reps learn about the product and practice their customer interactions are all in support of driving this performance metric.

Once your reps have completed the training, they gain access to the resources needed to help them engage with their prospects and customers. As they begin to leverage these resources in customer and prospect interactions, award points for every dollar of pipeline they build.

As reps begin to accumulate points, display a leaderboard in your CRM or in a visible office space that shows the pipeline being built and offer prizes to the winning teams after the defined measurement time has passed.

Again, the focus here is about gamifying the performance, not the learning. The learning and practice scenarios are designed to support the performance, not define the performance.

Skill Progression Tracking

Every role within your company requires a set of skills and knowledge to be successful. One of the primary responsibilities of your enablement team is to help your reps develop these skills and acquire the knowledge so they can do their best work.

Empowering reps with the understanding of their strengths and weaknesses from a role perspective is incredibly valuable. Gamification can play a key role in helping reps clearly understand these areas of strength and weakness by visualizing that growth to show progression.

Let’s consider an example.

Imagine I’m a new customer service agent. On my first day, I learn there are 5 key skills that lead to success. As I progress through my onboarding, I begin to show my competency toward the execution of these skills.

Each time I perform well at a skill either in a practice scenario or live environment, I progress toward my growth and mastery of each skill. Seeing this allows me to focus attention on the specific areas of my learning that will ultimately lead to improvement performance.

Again, the focus here is about gamifying the performance not the learning. The learning and practice scenarios are designed to support the performance, not define the performance.

In-Person Training

When you have the opportunity to engage with a group in a face-to-face situation, it is important to utilize that time differently.

This time in person is highly valuable and shouldn’t be wasted with activities that can easily be facilitated through an online learning module or video. Death by PowerPoint (really just slides… nothing against Microsoft here) is a real thing and, as enablement professionals, we must be smart about how we use the time of our people resources.

Games and contests are a great way to reinforce content and drive engagement in an in-person training. One of my favorite activities is to leverage familiar game structures like Jeopardy or Family Feud to engage the group in a start-up activity to a day of learning and simulation.

Templates for these games can be found online. Just be sure you are using it as reinforcement activity and not the primary source for learning. When you do this, you gain the advantage of time-delayed reinforcement to increase knowledge retention of the content, presented in a pre-work module, while having fun and building social camaraderie with the team.

In addition, I love using points and competition throughout an in-person training session, awarding them for engagement, participation, and winning games like those mentioned above. As a word of warning, it is best to do this as teams rather than individuals. Not only does it help to build relationships, but teams band together to help each other engage, learn, and succeed together.

Again, the focus here is about gamifying the performance (and in this case recall), not the learning. The learning and practice scenarios are designed to support the performance, not define the performance.

Bringing it Together

Gamification is a buzzword in the training and enablement world that too often holds weight disproportionate to the value it brings to the learning process.

Using gamification techniques in the learning process doesn’t offer long-term value to the learning. The value of gamification is in how we measure and visualize performance.

I challenge you not to simply check the box on a buzzword. Think through the value you see with the implementation of gamification in your enablement program and make your decisions based on what is best for your reps and your business.

3 Takeaways from Yellowship 2019

Bryan NaasLeave a comment

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in Yellowship 2019. Yellowship is Lessonly’s annual user conference that brings together more than 500 thought leaders in the training and enablement space for fellowship and collaboration. Here are my top three takeaways from a great week.

1. More than a user conference

While Yellowship is a user conference for current and future Lessonly customers, it is much more than that below the surface. You’ll be hard pressed to find much of a focus on product outside of current customers sharing their experiences. There is no discussion of roadmap or future enhancements to the product. No big demo. No announcements. No, Yellowship is about bringing people together who care about improving the lives of their colleagues and believe that path is anchored in the relationships we build and a focus on improvement.

I continue to encourage friends and colleagues across the industry to ignore the stigma of the user conference and join as a personal growth opportunity. If this is you, let’s chat about how we get you there next year!

2. People are the community

In his keynote to kickoff the conference, Max Yoder said “Better Work is about Relationships”. This couldn’t be more accurate. As a career enablement professional, my job has always been about bringing people together to understand challenges and collaborate on the best way to solve those challenges. Whether that is creating/adjusting a process, implementing a tool, developing a new resource or delivering a training, our role as practitioner is to understand our internal customer and help solve their problems. A focus on relationships helps us focus on the unique individuals within our organizations to ensure they have the opportunity to excel. These relationships open the doors to understanding that put us in position to be effective enablers.

It’s easy to get caught in the day to day and forget that we need to pop our heads up. The Yellowship community gives us an opportunity to build relationships that extend beyond the walls of our organization and learn how we continue to do our best work.

3. The sales profession is evolving

I had the opportunity to spend much of my time at Yellowship in the sales breakout sessions. Some of the most respected leaders in the space like Todd Caponi, Bryan Neale, Misha McPherson, Shawn Fowler and Meganne Brezina all lead incredible sessions focused on how we improve our sales teams. In each and every session, one theme continued to stand out.

Experience.

The experience we deliver to develop our reps. The experience our reps deliver to our customers and prospects. The experience our customers have as they interact with our business. Sales is no longer about selling. Sales is about providing an experience that builds trust and that trust results in relationships that create business partnerships. In the highly competitive sales environments we all live in, differentiation must extend beyond our products. Differentiation starts with the development experiences we create for our reps to successfully guide a buying experience that results in happy customers.

If you had the opportunity to attend Yellowship this year, I’d love to hear about your takeaways. Let’s chat!

3 Tips to Improve Your 1-on-1s by Leveraging Your Sales Enablement Tools

Bryan NaasLeave a comment

This article originally appeared on the Lessonly Blog. Check it out here.

Weekly 1-on-1 meetings are an integral part of the growth and performance of any sales team. The coaching a manager provides to her sales reps helps improve their skills and ensure they’re focused on the right sales activities that promote growth. However, too often, these meetings end up focused on the sales cycle (pipeline management or individual deals) which help in the short term but don’t promote long term growth. Sales managers need to focus on activities that develop their sales force and ultimately lead to higher performance. 

Fortunately, our existing sales stack is ripe with enablement tools that help sales reps do their job each day. These tools enable sales managers to engage each of their reps in development focused 1-on-1 meetings. The following three tips enhance our 1-on-1s by leveraging our sales enablement tools for training and coaching opportunities, and they can help your team, too. Here are the big three:

  • Game film using your conversation intelligence platform.
  • Digitally practice using your sales training platform.
  • Virtual role-play using your online meeting platform.

1. Game film using your conversation intelligence platform.

Game film is one of my favorite activities to do during a 1-on-1 because it gives me the opportunity to focus my coaching on specific scenarios from actual interactions with prospects and customers. Here’s how it works—prior to coming into a 1-on-1, instruct your rep to pick one call from the previous week that went well, and one call that didn’t go as well as planned. When you start your 1-on-1, discuss the two calls focusing on what made the “good” call better than the “bad” call. The goal is to identify what the rep is doing well and enable them to replicate those same behaviors in all of their customer interactions. Starting a 1-on-1 this way gives both the rep and the manager a clear idea of what’s needed and how to improve.

After briefly discussing the two calls, open the “good” call in your conversation intelligence platform and begin listening (or watching if it’s a video call) together. The great part of using a conversation intelligence platform here is you can leverage some of the key features to your benefit as you review. While you review your rep’s interactions with a  prospect or customer, focus on the aspects you identified in your discussion and make comments in the comment section and specifically highlight those areas. This will reinforce those behaviors and provide a good record for you and your rep to reference later. 

Once you are through enough of the “good” call that you feel like you have strong examples of the desired behavior, switch your attention to the “bad” call. Follow the same process as before, but this time focus on the areas of opportunities. Like before, be sure to document each part of the discussion as you progress through the call in the comment section of your conversation intelligence tool. 

Finally, it’s time to put an action plan in place for improvement. Remember, your goal here is to help your rep identify the specific areas of improvement, and then replicate the behaviors identified in the first call. Action plans should be individualized to match your rep and the behavior they need to improve. One great way to do that is by leveraging your sales training and coaching platform for additional practice. Let’s look at what that might look like next. 

2. Digitally practice using your sales training platform.

Now that you’ve identified specific areas your rep needs to improve, leverage the digital practice functionality in your sales training and coaching tool. As a part of the action plan, assign your rep with targeted practice scenarios that focus on the desired behaviors you’re trying to develop in your rep. Practice reinforces the “good” aspects from the calls you reviewed during the 1-on-1 and help your rep dial in those skills. Once submitted, be sure to give your rep detailed feedback so they know if they are moving in the right direction. If more practice is needed, assign additional scenarios to continue the practice. 

3. Virtual role-play using your online meeting platform.

The final step in this progression is to use subsequent 1-on-1 meetings to execute a live role-play. Again, you want to focus this role-play on the same behaviors you identified in your original 1-on-1 to continue the rep’s development as a part of their action plan. A great way to execute this is by simulating a real prospect or customer meeting leveraging your online meeting platform. This may be second nature for managers with remote teams, but when you manage a team of local reps, it isn’t quite as obvious. The advantage here is putting your rep in a scenario that is as close to an actual interaction as possible. 

Here’s how it works—provide your rep with a scenario that’s similar in structure to the call you reviewed in the original game film session. Instead of meeting in your standard location for your 1-on-1, go to separate locations and call into your online meeting platform. Do your best to structure the call in a way that gives your rep an opportunity to demonstrate the behavior they’ve changed in order to replicate the aspects of the “good” call from earlier. Finally, be sure to build in time to deliver feedback and coaching after the role-play is complete. You can either do this during the same 1-on-1 as your role-play, or you can schedule a follow-up to do a game film review of the role-play to even further focus your coaching. 

Use these tips to get the most out of your 1-on-1 meeting by leveraging the sales enablement tools you already have in place. When we focus on the development of our reps, we help them grow, sell, and do better work.

5 Tips to Build a World-Class Rep Onboarding Experience

Bryan NaasLeave a comment

This article originally appeared on Accelerate. Check it out here.

When it comes to your sales onboarding program, are you rolling out the red carpet for new hires and welcoming them in an engaging way that sets them up for long-term success?  A quality onboarding experience can mean the difference between hitting or missing company goals. In fact, a high-quality onboarding program can lead to higher productivity, quicker results, and happier employees. 

Even though it’s such an important part of enablement, onboarding doesn’t just magically happen. It takes planning and hard work to build a program that matches the needs of your business and sales reps. That’s why optimizing onboarding should be a top priority for any team that’s hiring new team members.

An onboarding program is like an iceberg. Everything you see above the water line is the rep’s onboarding experience and everything below is the planning, building, and execution that falls on leaders’ shoulders. Each is exceptionally important and needs to be treated with care to reach your goals as an enablement team and business.

Focusing on five C’s can help you develop onboarding experience that will lead to unmatched success. This includes evaluating:

Culture: Help integrate new reps to the team

Consistency: Help them understand what’s happening and when

Clarity: Help reps understand what is expected of them

Calibration: Help them understand where improvement is needed

Coaching: Help them understand how to get better

Think about this process like you’re evaluating a diamond for purchase. Gemologists actually evaluate diamonds on four C’s: Cut, Color, Clarity, and Carat. Each of these criteria plays a bigger part in the value of the diamond. A large carat diamond with poor color or clarity will result in a lower value than a smaller diamond with perfect color and clarity. Each evaluation point works in conjunction to create a high-quality buying experience. The five C’s of onboarding work the same way to create an onboarding experience for our reps that build knowledge and confidence (oh no—is this a sixth C?) through their journey.

Let’s dig into each one and see how they work together to create an onboarding experience your reps will rave about.

Culture

Integrating new reps into the team starts with the hiring process by ensuring they are a good culture fit from both a company and a team standpoint. Assuming these qualities are met, the goal of onboarding is to provide growth opportunities with their peers so new reps enjoy coming to work each and every day. There are many ways this can be accomplished, but let’s focus on two specific ways: Cross-departmental interactions and a mentor program.

Cross-Departmental Interactions

On the surface, cross-departmental interactions seem straightforward and simple. But, too often this is missed because we’re so focused on the day-to-day and functional job knowledge. We forget to pull out of the weeds and create a solid support structure. To overcome this issue, we like to structure our cross-departmental interactions both formally and informally.

For formal interactions, schedule meeting times for teams to present who they are, what they do, and how they will interact with the rep. This provides a couple of benefits. First, the rep learns about the support structure and how they can leverage the larger team during the selling process. It also gives the support team the opportunity to set expectations for interactions and clarify processes. Be sure meetings to set clear expectations for both the support team presenter and your new rep so each interaction builds on the experience of your onboarding program.

For informal interactions, focus more heavily on personal connections. While the end goal is the same as formal interactions, the setting is different. It builds a more emotional connection and is best executed over coffee and lunch meetings where the expectations are less formal. These types of environments foster a more meaningful, natural, and emotional connection which is beneficial for everyone.

Peer Mentor Programs

Mentor programs are certainly nothing new but they play an important role in helping a new rep become part of the team. I could write a book on the value of these programs and the best ways to execute them, but for now, I’ll cover some basics. We choose to keep our peer mentor program informal and allow them to grow organically. Every new rep is paired with a “buddy” on day one that becomes their peer mentor. Just like our cross-departmental interactions, we set clear expectations for both the mentor and mentee so they understand how they should interact. This includes basic “get to know you” coffees and lunches and continues with ride-along meetings. The program gives new reps a go-to resource and lifeline when they simply need a peer to give them the lowdown.

Consistency

A great onboarding experience also helps reps clearly understand what they need to do and when they need to do it. Our goal, especially in the first couple of weeks, is to remove as much ambiguity as possible so reps can focus on learning and development instead of simple administrative tasks. We primarily accomplish this with a detailed onboarding guide that breaks the program into five phases.

Each phase is progressively less detailed to promote ownership of responsibilities throughout the onboarding journey and provides clear learning goals and milestones. We start with a two-week immersive experience where every hour of a rep’s day is scheduled. The day includes meetings with other departments and time they need to access on-demand learning materials that promote the practice of newly learned skills.  

Phases two, three, and four build on phase one, but continually add additional responsibilities as reps become more knowledgeable and comfortable. Each phase is flanked with a clear set of milestones and a capstone evaluation point that allows the rep to show their progress.

Phase five functions as a maintenance phase of the onboarding journey. At this point, reps should have all the knowledge they need and show competence in the skills they need to perform. We primarily focus on coaching and making tweaks to ensure they are progressing to plan.

PHASE 1: Highly structured, immersive experience focused on messaging, product, and personas.

PHASE 2: Mildly structured, role-play intensive experience focused on sales process and navigating opportunities.

PHASE 3: Milestone based experience focused on progressing opportunities through the sales process and leveraging team resources.

PHASE 4: Milestone based experience focused on closing opportunities and managing pipeline for success.

PHASE 5: Maintenance based experience focused on performance and coaching for development.

Clarity

We all work better when we clearly understand what’s expected of us. This starts with consistency and continues with clarity. On each rep’s first day, we establish a clear set of ramp goals for each phase of onboarding. We use these ramp goals at every check-point of their journey to ensure every rep understands how they are progressing against their goals.

Ramp goals should clearly align with what success looks like. That’s why we break our ramp goals into two sets of metrics. The first set, which aligns to our first four phases of onboarding, is activity centric. Essentially, we want to measure if they are doing the right things so we look at training engagement and completion, training assessments, role activity metrics, and leading performance indicators. Once we move into the fifth phase, we review performance measures. This allows each rep to clearly track their performance and receive coaching for improvement.

Coaching

As reps progress through onboarding, it’s important to guide them to fill their knowledge and skill gaps.

This coaching comes from three pillars: Their manager, their mentor, and the enablement team, which is delivered in both formal and informal settings.

To support informal coaching, we train managers and mentors on how to provide good feedback and coaching through observation and interactions. A major part of this process is live/recorded meeting coaching. When observing or reviewing a meeting, managers and mentors focus on key coaching criteria based on where each rep is in their onboarding journey. For example, if a rep is just starting, coaching will center around good discovery and conversations, while conversations with more seasoned new hires will focus on negotiation and closing.

Formal coaching is structured around our phases and onboarding checkpoints. At each checkpoint, the rep is presented with a scorecard that matches the ramp goals that were established at the beginning of onboarding. Onboarding checkpoints are pinpointed during collaboration with the enablement team and the sales management team. During the meeting, the rep gains a clear understanding of their progress toward their goals and receive coaching on how to progress in gap areas. Each meeting ends with clear action items that the rep needs to complete before the next checkpoint meeting.

Calibration

The final C in our onboarding experience focuses on calibration and makes sure that onboarding meets each rep’s individual needs. Since every rep is unique and enters our team with unique skills and experiences, calibration gives us the flexibility to ensure we are providing each rep with the best opportunities to develop and achieve their goals. This may mean some reps have extra work to develop in one area or another or extra practice to ensure they are meeting development goals.

Each onboarding checkpoint meeting creates a natural calibration point, but this isn’t the only time we make changes. This is an important part of every onboarding program and must be co-owned across the entire team.

Building a world-class onboarding experience for your sales reps takes planning and hard work. Focusing on these five C’s will help ensure you develop an experience that prioritizes rep success. Just like every development opportunity, iteration is key to the success of your program. The best thing you can do is start and iterate as you progress through the program. Start with one rep or cohort as quickly as you can to learn what works and what needs modification. As you develop and grow, continue to iterate and you’ll reap the benefits of a world-class program.

Podcast: Reach Productivity 40% Faster by Doing This One Thing

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I recently joined Joe Vignolo, Senior Content Managing Editor at Outreach, on his Sales Engagement Podcast to discuss the power and importance of practice. Joe and I had a great conversation discussing how we make practice a bigger part of our every day in the corporate world including three easy ways to get started now.

Listen to the episode by following the link below. While you’re at it, go ahead and subscribe to get every episode sent to your favorite podcast service. You’ll be glad you did!

Listen to Episode 38 of the Sales Engagement Podcast

Practice is such an integral piece of all development in our quest to do better work every day. After you listen, be sure to come back here and share your thoughts and feedback. As always, let’s chat!

The Top 5 Key Features of Great Sales Enablement Tools

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This article originally appeared on the Lessonly Blog. Check it out here.

Choosing the right sales enablement tools to complement your training and coaching is a key part of any quality sales enablement program. These tools can help sales and marketing teams reduce the friction of content sharing and collaboration and improve efficiency in the sales process. However, with an ever-expanding sales tech stack, it can often be overwhelming to understand which tools are best positioned to help your team.

As you evaluate the tools to meet the need of your sales force, it’s important to start with a clear understanding of the problem you want to solve. Assess your sales reports (likely from your CRM) to get the full picture of the data that lives around your sales reps and you’ll most likely uncover areas of gaps where you can make improvements. Be sure to consider the full sales cycle from top of the funnel activities all the way to your closing events.

Once you have a clear understanding of the problem you want to solve, it’s finally time to start looking for the tools to meet your needs—this is the fun part. While there are many great tools on the market to help with everything from managing the sales funnel to tracking sales activity, remember that any tool you implement is only as good as the engagement you get from your team. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of the key features you should consider when choosing the right tool to meet the needs of your sales team:

Simple user interface

As I mentioned, your tools are only as good as the engagement and buy-in that you receive from your reps. This is why a simple, easy-to-use interface is important to consider during the evaluation. Find a tool that is intuitive for your sales reps to navigate and makes it easy to find the content they need when they need it. Many tools on the market have done a nice job taking complex solutions and making the engagement layer of their software easy to interact with.

One of our top values at Lessonly is to “put learners first.” This means that every design decision we make with new features and functionality always goes through the lens of our learners. We want to know how each learner will engage with the tool and ensure that the learner experience stays top of mind during the process.

Easy content creation tools

One of the hardest parts about implementing a new sales enablement tool into your sales tech stack is the difficulty of creating and maintaining the content your sales resp will consume. Most sales teams move at a fast pace, which means waiting for content to be developed before you can get it to the team can literally make all the difference in winning and losing a deal. During your evaluation, be sure to consider how quickly and easily you can create new content for your team. Look for a tool that allows you to leverage all your subject-matter experts and top sales reps as content creators in a way that doesn’t require special training.

At Lessonly, we call this “purposefully simple” and believe in speed over fidelity. We want to empower all creators to share their expertise and ensure the best content gets into the hands of your reps as quickly as possible.

Effortless collaboration

One challenge I often see plaguing sales enablement teams is the tendency to work in silos. Working closely with your customers (your sales team) in a tight feedback loop is imperative to create the enablement that will get the results and positively impact your business. Look for a tool that helps you easily facilitate collaboration with all of your stakeholders across the business.

One of Lessonly’s core values is to “share before we’re ready.” This means that we don’t spend too much time on any given project before we ask for feedback from our teammates. While we may feel vulnerable to share something that may not be fully fleshed out, it allows us to get the input we need and quickly develop the best end solution to meet the needs of our business.

Ubiquitous access

Developing the best content and enablement is only effective if your sales reps can get what they need when they need it. When deciding on a sales enablement tool, be sure to look for a solution that allows your team to easily access the information and learning content they need to do their best work. Mobile apps and access are table-stakes for a sales team that is often out in the field. It’s also important to review the other tools your team uses on a regular basis and to ensure that every tool can integrate with one another.

At Lessonly, we work closely with many partners, like Salesforce and Zendesk, to ensure our solutions work well together and provide reps a seamless experience. We also believe in the power of contextual learning, which is why we developed our Chrome extension which recommends enablement content based on rep behavior and provides access to their full library of training content at their fingertips.

Comprehensive analytics

You can’t prove value to something you can’t measure. When it’s time to decide on your next sales enablement tool, be sure to consider the data you can view and manipulate. This will help you ensure your programs are making the impact your business needs. Every layer of data is valuable, so it’s important to look at data functionality and recording from the individual rep all the way up to the entire team.

At Lessonly, we work hard to create the right visualizations of data so leaders can easily spot trends in their sales enablement programs. However, we believe you shouldn’t be locked into what you can see. Every customer can download the data from their Lessonly account and manipulate in their own business intelligence tools for even better business data and decision making.

Sales enablement tools are a must-have in today’s fast-paced sales environment. But finding the right tools can be hard. When you find a tool with these 5 key features, you’ll get your evaluation off to the best start and be on the right path to reaching business goals.

How to Train Faster and Better with Microlearning

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Yesterday I joined a webinar with Jeff Toister, author of The Service Culture Handbook and Customer Service Tip of the Week, to talk about microlearning and how to best leverage it to uplevel your teams. We focused specifically on customer service teams but the concepts and conversations definitely apply to all business.

Webinar with Bryan Naas and Jeff Toister

I hope you enjoy the listen and, as always, look forward to chatting more in the comments and on social!

How We Reduced Sales Ramp Time by 40%

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This article originally appeared on Openview Labs. Check it out here.

One of the biggest challenges for any scaling company is to bring a new sales rep up to speed quickly. Decreasing the time to productivity for new reps is crucial to meeting ever-expanding goals and closing more deals. While building a strong onboarding program that includes knowledge acquisition and skill development is key to sales ramp, it’s only part of the process. Measuring performance and progress throughout this period is also critical. Lessonly, like many other growth-focused companies, has tested processes, measures, and individual plans to evaluate the growth and ramp performance of our scaling sales team.

Identify key measurements

When it comes time to track ramping quotas, sales leaders have an abundance of data at their fingertips. It’s important to put time and consideration into choosing the data that will provide the most insight into sales rep productivity throughout the entire sale cycle. While this may take some trial and error, the right combination of data will provide a real-time, in-depth snapshot of rep performance. After several rounds of experimentation, Lessonly’s sales team decided to look at 10 data points that include 5 objective and 5 subjective KPIs.

 

Each of our objective figures matches a key success measure for our reps and aligns to skill development that’s part of the onboarding process. These measures come directly from our Salesforce dashboard and are up-to-date when it’s time for our review session—ensuring we have the best information for our evaluations.

Objective:

  1. Self-sourced opportunities
  2. Pipeline
  3. Win rate
  4. Average Contract Value (ACV)
  5. Quota attainment

Then, each rep’s manager completes a survey that focuses on Lessonly’s five subjective measures. During this time, our managers consider the rep’s day-to-day activities and responsibilities to gauge how well they’re acclimating.

Subjective:

  1. Grasp of role
  2. Conveying value
  3. Navigating process
  4. Meaningful sales conversation
  5. Confidence in success

We capture and record each measurement on a scorecard every month. At that time, we also assign a score of 1-10 for each data point on a weighted scale based on goals as they correlate to the timing of the review cycle. For example, in a rep’s first month of hire, their pipeline development goals are much lower than what is expected in their third month.

Rep scoring data

Translating the data

Compiling this data enables us to do two things. First, we take the combined data score (objective) and the personal score (subjective) and rank the reps. Then, we plot each rep’s score on a quadrant to provide a visual indicator of ramp progress.

Combined data score

The quadrant provides additional insight that we use on a monthly basis to track the path of each rep. This allows us to monitor how each rep is progressing—or regressing—throughout their onboarding. We also compile the entire team on a single quadrant to give us a snapshot view of every rep and how they’re performing in relation to the rest of the team.

Team data

An inside view of the process

Over time, we’ve found that completing this process on a monthly basis gives us ample insight and action steps that we need to lead our reps to ramp success. At this time, the sales management team reviews the data prepared by the enablement team to:

  1. Review how each rep is progressing in their onboarding journey
  2. Identify reps who are experiencing difficulties, and establish a development plan to assist their progress

Here’s a glimpse of our agenda:

  1. Review the action steps put into place during the previous month’s meeting. Our managers and enablement team share takeaways from working with each rep during 1:1’s, call recordings, and pipeline reviews.
  2. Assess team data, both quadrant and stack rank, to see how the team is ramping as a whole.
  3. Evaluate each ramping AE and their month over month progression (or regression).
  4. Build development plans for individual coaching that provide defined next steps that are owned by each manager.

Over the next 30 days, each manager reviews the data and action plans they created with each rep. This is a great way for both the manager and rep to get on the same page and create commitments for the rep to make progress on before the next month’s review meeting. This process doesn’t just get results—it gives the rep ownership of their development and ensures they are on the path to sales success.

Template_ AE Review Monthly Scorecard

Lessons learned

After nearly a year of using this process with our sales team, we have a few key takeaways that any team can consider when creating an effective ramp program.

First, this process has given us essential visibility to the development of every rep during onboarding. We know exactly where they each stand on an individual and team level which helps us make quick, informed decisions for their development.

Additionally, the visibility into each rep has provided data that we can use to predict who may or may not be successful during onboarding. In doing so, we can move reps through the process quicker, or if needed, determine if they would perform better in a different role based on their skillset.

The time it takes from bringing in a new rep to the stage when they’re able to hit their quotas is a key measure of success. In our experience, a robust process coupled with a high-quality onboarding and sales enablement curriculum has been key. In fact, we’ve found it so beneficial that we’ve decreased our ramp time by more than 40% to positively impact productivity and better performance overall.