Concepts for Revenue Enablement
There’s a movement to transform Sales Enablement into GTM or Revenue Enablement. It follows suit from developing a centralized operations function focused on an end-to-end experience across all Go To Market Teams. If operations can transform sales operations, then why not transform sales enablement? The natural tendency is to look at the post-sales motion and determine that enablement is far behind the curve for Customer Success. Revenue Enablement then becomes Sales + CS Enablement. Is that it?
If you’re new to this newsletter then welcome! Thank you to the 1,800+ revenue operations professionals who continue to subscribe to this newsletter. You’re the reason I continue to write each and every week on a Go To Market related topic. When I have a template to share paid subscribers will get access. I don’t have all the answers in revenue operations. That’s impossible because RevOps can be uniquely situated for each unique situation. But what I hope you can take away a few guiding principles or tactical snippets which you can use in your day to day. Before jumping into the newsletter, let’s hear from our sponsors that keep most of this newsletter free to readers.
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I’d argue it’s better than nothing. But it’s the beginning of the end for sales enablement if we as revenue operators do not support out partners in enablement. When Ops transformed from functional ops to revenue ops, many companies under funded the function. Long time operators suddenly found themselves performing two, sometimes three, roles in one individual. That’s not a recipe for long term success. It’s a road to burnout.
So where does “Revenue Enablement” go from here?
A glimpse of a roadmap to success in my opinion:
Map the Customer Lifecycle
Each stage should be denoted. Sales stage 1 (S1 to SCW) to Sales Closed Won. Then venturing into post-sales with implementation (CX1), adoption (CX2), engagement (CX3), renewal (CX4) to expansion.
Establish the baseline
Know your conversion rates and what levers to improve in your revenue operating model
Map the required skills for each stage with a “Stage Skills Matrix”
In Discovery you may need to display curiosity in the form of pre-call research and in-call inquiry.
In the Demo stage you may need to flex your empathy muscles by taking what you’ve learned in Discovery to make the demo fit like a glove.
Once you get to the Proposal stage it’s about solution oriented crafting.
Whatever it is for your business, develop a table that tailors the right skill for the moment.
Feeding into your Role Career Development Framework
Enablement doesn’t own this but they sure can provide valuable feedback.
Scaling with tools
Early stage companies struggle to provide training, documentation, feedback, and coaching to their sales and CX team members. This can be solved by aggregating fragmented docs by tagging and updating them. Using a Just-in-Time enablement solution or a Learning Management System (LMS) provides the air cover enablement needs to reduce the amount of live training enablement often finds themselves in.
Heavily relying on live training is a significant tax on enablement. I’m a huge fan of providing a two pronged approach in the form of certifications and just-in-time enablement.
Lately, I’ve seen some clever uses of LLM technologies. It goes something like this:
Taking the transcripts from the highest scored calls on Gong (or equivalent tool)
Feeding it into an open source LLM (beware of training a publicly available LLM tool)
Clever prompt engineering to distill the highlights
Ask the tool to write a training guide based on the transcripts
The development speed of building out these materials is astoundingly fast. It shifts the enablement team into a curator/editing/formatting/delivery role. Sooner than later I believe each of these elements will be radically augmented by AI.
Measuring Enablement
I’ve led and managed sales enablement three times in my career. Each time we’ve developed a scorecard of metrics by which to measure the sales team. Your mileage may vary depending on your business but here are a few examples:
Attempts to pass onboarding certification
Attempts to pass product certification
Time to first deal
Time to 3x pipeline
Meetings per week in first three months
First Value Moment
Customer Value Mapping
Attempts to pass onboarding certification
The first week of an employee’s time with a company is normally focused on company onboarding. If available, week 2 and 3 then focus on building up the account executive and CSM’s knowledge in the following areas:
Company tools
Ideal Customer Profile
Key personas
Products and services offered
Differentiators
Objection handling
Industry overview
Attempts to pass product certification
Team members receive access to the product. For AEs and presales it’s a demo environment which they can use with prospects. For CSMs it’s about gaining access to their customer base’s sandbox or production environments.
From here the training focuses on the ability to navigate the product feature-by-feature. That’s the science. The art of knowing the product is tie the feature to impact with prospects and customers.
Time to first deal
A rep’s first deal is typically of the smaller variety. Get a quick win under your belt with some points on the board. It builds confidence in the team and whets the appetite for a bigger takedown.
When hunting, I bet the new hunters were assigned smaller game. Don’t go for that wooly mammoth just yet. Work your way up to it.
Time to 3x pipeline
3x pipeline coverage is all I need they said? That’s the conventional wisdom anyway. How long does it take for your new sales reps to leverage the skills they’ve learned on a consistent basis to build up a sustainable pipeline. Can they get to 3x within 6 months? Can they get there faster? I’d start with 6 months as your baseline and attempt to squeeze this downwards one week at a time (i.e. 24 weeks to 22 weeks to 20 weeks).
Meetings per week in first three months
A CRO who was interviewing at a company I worked for once asked me, how many meetings per week does the typical sales rep have? What a great question! I researched it by looking at the calendars of each of my sales reps. My highest performers had far more prospect meetings (10 to 12 per week) than my average performers (6 to 8 per week). High performers were able to sustain a high level of activity which correlated with higher sales attainment.
I turned around to my enablement lead and asked him to do a cohort analysis of how many meetings reps created per week in their first 6 months. Assuming 4 weeks per month we created a table where the rows were specific reps and the columns was a number from 1 to 24. Each square was filled in with how many meetings they set by week. Bucketing the high performers from low performers showed me a stark difference. Building the right habits upfront at the start of someone’s tenure is a key winning trait. If your reps can get to success baseline, say 10 to 12 meetings per week, by month 4 then you’re on your way to de-risking that team member from falling into the low performer bucket.
First Value Moment
CSMs work with customers to map the customer’s expectations throughout the sales process to the value they’ll receive from your solution. At this point it’s not about the tool or a feature, it’s about whether or not you’ve helped transform a business process for the customer.
What was the a-ha moment for your customer? When did their eyes light up when they realized they had made the right choice by working with you.
One tangible example of this was when I worked for an enterprise business intelligence solution provider. We would onboard a customer within 8 to 14 weeks. If we exceeded 14 weeks we were sure to receive a lower NPS or CSAT score. We simply overpromised and under delivered. Not a great place to be in. But when we did get things right, the customer was able to log into the solution and start “playing around” with the solution.
Whenever a customer created a snippet in the tool and shared it as a report or an email PDF to a fellow team member, we knew we captured that first value moment (FVM). Find that moment for your solution. Measure when it happens on average. And make it arrive faster and faster with enablement.
Customer Value Mapping
I’m not talking about just creating a Customer Value Map. Instead, it’s the interpretation of the map and the recommendation of where the customer goes next. Below is an example of a customer’s journey in relation to a music sharing feature in relation to the overall customer experience.
For a SaaS customer, they may have originally purchased a solution in order to gain visibility into their GTM data. Seeing the data seems so tactical of a reason to purchase software. Instead, my bet is they were looking for a more truthful, faster ability to make decisions. If a CSM hears that the marketing team pivoted direction in their marketing strategy because of the data they’ve seen. To me, that’s value realization. The customer journey moves beyond adoption and fully into engagement.
Look for those moments.
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