Arm Sales with the Tools and Training they Need

Sales is the number one customer of marketing and they are often the biggest expense for a B2B software company. As your sales enablement consultant, I will help you make the sales team as effective, productive and well-armed as possible. Of course we’ll create customer-facing sales tools such as PowerPoint presentations and product brochures. But we’ll also create sales tools and training that are specific to the sales process and competitive environment.  These can take a variety of forms depending on the stage of the company, the maturity of the market, product age, competitive landscape, and newness of the go-to-market strategy.

As an employee and sales enablement consultant, I’ve created content for computer-based sales training classes, classroom sales training, sales guides, sales playbooks, and competitive battle cards.  Below are some examples.

The best sales people are always busy, 100% focused on the deals in their current pipeline. Expecting them to learn and retain new products, industries, competitors or use cases when not pertinent to their current pipeline is usually futile.

An effective approach I’ve used as a sales enablement consultant is to create a consistent set of sales training materials, train sales on the format, organization and topics available and let them educate themselves when they are working on a deal that requires new knowledge.

These sales tools can take a variety of forms:

• Sales Training Videos
• Sales How-to Guides
• Sales Portals

These sales tools can cover a variety of topics

• Discovery questions and sample answers
• Business Issue – Solution – Value – Unique Differentiation sheets
• Competitor battlecards
• Product feature/benefit matrices
• How to move prospects from one sales stage to another
• Objection handling

Sales teams have an insatiable thirst for information that will aid them in competing with alternative solutions. They need more than just competitor press releases, product brochures, or feature lists. They need practical intelligence they can use in real-world situations. Short, sweet and to-the-point battlecards that can be easily accessed when needed are always valuable.

As your sales enablement consultant, I can help you create competitive battlecards can cover:

• Handling objections set up by competition
• Traps to proactively set for the competition
• Competitive differentiators to emphasize
• Unique business benefits to promote
• Case studies to reference

Getting the relationship with a new potential customer off to the right start is critical. The sales person needs to establish credibility, demonstrate domain expertise and show genuine interest in the prospect, all while getting the prospect to do the majority of the talking.

Arming sales with an intelligent set of questions to ask the customer that are specific to the prospect’s industry and domain is key.

• Business problem needing solved
• Current pain as a result of the problem
• Driver for solving the problem now
• Current and past attempts to solve the problem
• Current technical environment
• Other potential solutions
• And many more……

A comprehensive discovery guide can help a sales person effectively navigate that first call.

A pivot, new go-to-market strategy, new product line or new competitive challenges can necessitate formal classroom sales training to kick start the learning process and get everyone appropriately armed and on board with the new strategy. Often these are best created by a sales enablement consultant who is not too close to the people and personalities.

These sessions should be supported with

• Training Presentation
• Training Discussion Guides
• Exercises and interactive contests to reinforce the learning
• Reference materials to take back to the office and use when the need arrises

Two good example of circumstances needing classroom training are:

• A move from technical product sales to solution selling aimed at specific industries and business use cases
• A move from propriety enterprise sales to up-selling users of an open source distribution