What are your target groups for your enablement services? “Sales people“ you may say, and as it’s me who is writing, you may add “sales managers“…But where is your focus within these groups?
As always, there is no “one size fits all“, especially not if you equip complex selling scenarios. Based on my experience, SE professionals should focus their effort on what really matters to increase performance and to drive transformation. Therefore, let’s discuss two challenger groups and two target groups:
Groups for challenging your concepts:
- A-Player – sales people:
The goal to engage with A-Players is to get as much input as possible from your most successful sales people. Engaging with them is often a challenge in itself: They are the „troublemakers“ who challenge an organization’s processes and systems all the time – which is actually a gift for all! They are always successful – whatever you provide. Often, they cannot articulate pretty well, what and how they are doing differently. They just do, and lead. Whatever enablement services you will provide, check-in with your A-Players, let them challenge your ideas, your trainings, your content, even entire frameworks, weave in their feedback, before you roll-out anything to the field.
- A-Player – sales managers:
Your top sales managers have the same importance – for two purposes:
First, it’s regarding the enablement services you will provide for their sales people. Gather their feedback from a sales coaching perspective and integrate their feedback. Based on their daily coaching experience, they know exactly where and why which sales people struggle the most.
Second, challenge your sales manager enablement services with them. It can be a very challenging undertaking, but it’s absolutely worth your effort, because the sales managers have always the biggest leverage effect regarding performance and transformation. Everybody will benefit if your top sales managers are enablement evangelists.
Your main target groups:
- B-Players – sales people:
They are the most important target group for all your sales enablement services you are going to provide for sales people. The goal is to empower them on their journey towards the A-Players’ performance level. This is why it’s so important to incorporate their wisdom – especially in complex sales. It’s essential to focus on principles rather than on processes and check lists, because every selling situation is different. Engage with a group of B-Players after you challenged your services with the A-Players. Then, adjust what’s maybe not completely understandable.
- B-Players – sales managers:
After having challenged your sales manager enablement program with a few top sales managers, run a second pilot with the B-Players, to make sure that everything is well understandable and can be well received to create the most value for them. Focus especially on the sales coaching framework and connect the dots to the enablement services for sales people. Make sure that there is a lot of space to practice sales coaching and to get coached on coaching…
Focus on WHAT MATTERS MOST in your specific environment – the most important principle.