Sales Management Podcast
74. Sales Enablement ROI with Kieran Smith
Some say sales enablement activities must drive ROI or else not be done. Some say measuring ROI is hard or impossible. We explore this topic in detail in this episode so you can get some ideas as you decide to stand up or expand an enablement operation in your business.
Some say sales enablement activities must drive ROI or else not be done. Some say measuring ROI is hard or impossible. We explore this topic in detail in this episode so you can get some ideas as you decide to stand up or expand an enablement operation in your business.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host, coach, crm co-founder, corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads, let's go. Another debate podcast. Today I've got Kieran Smith. He recently posted on LinkedIn, quote asking the ROI of your enablement department is the wrong and potentially dangerous question and I said, hey, do you want to come debate that on my podcast? And he said, sure, here he is, karen. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great, thank you. Already, I've been practicing my training, my debating training, all morning. I'm ready to go. Oh man, all right. Well, I haven't been practicing, but I think I've got some viewpoints here.
Speaker 2:So asking enablement for ROI is wrong and dangerous. Why, having moved from sales leadership for probably like three, four years now, and I've been to lots of enablement conferences in that time, and we're always asked ROI? How do you prove the ROI of your enablement team? What is the, especially with lots of the layoffs? What are you proving? What are you adding to sales functions?
Speaker 2:Because we're talking no one's coaching, no one's doing this. It's a cost centre and, as I say quite often when we report into the CRO or anyone like that, the only question we are being asked to quantify our impact is what's your ROI in terms of how are you affecting the bottom line? And whilst I think obviously, roi is important, I think the right question to ask is what impact are you having on the sales team and how effective is the enablement programs that you're running? How effective are they? And I think that you can't have one without the other. But I think that when we ask such a steadfast black and white question, I think we're putting ourselves behind the eight ball almost 100% of the time.
Speaker 1:So I think the problem is accepting the fact that ROI needs to be a bottom line metric Because it doesn't have to be. And if you're trying to draw a line from wherever you're at to the bottom line, there's going to be lots of intermediate things that happen. There's going to be steps, there's going to be dependencies. There's going to be lots of different things. So it sounds like when you say this, you're talking about ROI meaning a bottom line profit number or something to that effect. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:That's absolutely fair and I think actually, that comes from another problem that we have at enablement, which is everyone, if you speak to a CRO or every company, has a very different definition of what enablement is. So, really, the only question that's being asked is that what is your impact on the bottom line? Right, you're costing me money with all these tools, but how are you, how are you giving back to me? And I think that, from the lack of understanding of what enablement is, stroke should be um. So what's the question we're asking?
Speaker 1:how much money are you making me which, again, as I say, I think it's a dangerous question to ask of a non quota holding role I think that I'm I'm agreeing with you that going from what you're doing to the bottom line is is not the correct way to do it, but that doesn't mean that I mean r is a numerator, r is a numerator, return is a numerator. I is the denominator, and so the denominator is how much you're investing, and that can be a hard cost, such as money, or it can be a soft cost, such as people's time, which translates to money roughly but not exactly, and then the return is what's the upside that you're getting here. And I think that one way I talk about coaching. Let's talk about coaching. For example, saying that coaching impacts the bottom line is a tough thing to do directly, but a lot of companies that I've worked with, especially the larger companies that I've I've two companies. I've got closed loop that'll roll out of sales methodology. I've got coach CRM that helps managers coach, get more other teams close the gap between top performers and everybody else, and a lot of times companies, especially the larger companies, will already have a sales methodology in place.
Speaker 1:So when someone asks me about the ROI, one question I'll ask on the front is is I'll say do you guys have a sales methodology rolled out? And they'll say yes, I rolled out. And say yes, say all right. Well, let's say on a scale of one to 10. One is adoption is zero, they're not using the sales methodology we rolled out. 10 is hey, we're doing it perfectly every time, it's working just as planned and we don't want to touch it because we're scared it's going to break.
Speaker 1:Where are you? And a lot of times when I ask that question, I'll get a response anywhere from four to seven. And, of course, there's some people, individuals that will be higher than that. There's individuals that will be lower than that. And so when I think about a coaching program in the context of someone that has a sales methodology, well, they've already made the investment to roll that out. They've decided that was a good thing to do. So if you're currently operating at a four out of 10, yep. So if you're currently operating at a four out of 10, what if we help the managers get the team to an eight out of 10? There's an ROI equation there that has nothing to do with EBITDA or net income.
Speaker 2:It's impacting something else that then will impact those other things, and my fear is that if people are too dim to understand that there are intermediate variables that can be impacted, then that's going to be a real challenge in in general in life, in business and in personal relationships yeah, no, I get, yeah, and I think we have a very if obviously coaching can sometimes be part of the enablement world um, and I think we have the very, very similar issue that we run into right, because to go to a CRO and be like, okay, and again, to be fair, I think enablement has gotten lost in certain places in terms of it's seen as very fluffy and it's just training and sales support, which again, is a very dangerous perception of your enablement team. And most in terms of the enablement maturity, I would say, from the people that I speak to, probably like 60 percent, if not higher than that, are stuck in that reactive mode of the maturity where they can't tie things to business outcomes because they're not having those conversations or they don't have that perception. So then when you're asking for gong and you're asking for sales loft and you're asking for show pad or any of these other tools, you just look like a cost center. But then when you get to the point of right so I'm a big sales velocity equation person was as a sales leader, I'm as an enablement person. But if I can have that conversation and be like, okay, what level do you want to pull in? Q2, average order value, perfect, um, okay. So then how we're going to do that as a program like this, it's going to have to run all quarter. We're gonna have to benchmark it. We're gonna have to put something in place in terms of a tangible, measurable outcome. Yeah, we're gonna have to go back and check that week over week, month over month across the corner and but, realistically, even if we up the average order value across that tightest place, probably still going to take three to six months.
Speaker 2:And I think in enablement we get asked that question of ROI. What have you done for me lately at the end of every quarter, which is a really difficult question? And again I've had it talking about overall win rates. Again, just look at a big enablement job descriptions is impacting on win rates and you're going to speak to this company and the sales cycle is 9 to 12 months long. I know in my job in a neighbourhood I won't get 9 to 12 months to prove that I've moved one metric 1%. But again you go back 6 months into a new role. Yeah, but you've not done anything. Hold on. We've done X amount of programmes. We've impacted the overall competency on this, this and this. It's been effective to your point. The methodology adoption has gone from 40% to 65%. We've done all these incremental things. We've had an impact on these. Our programs are actually effective. You just have to wait for the ROI, and I think that's where the ROI question becomes super. Like you know, it's turkeys voting for Thanksgiving or for Christmas right at that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. So I think okay. So let's dig into one of those that you're talking about. Let's look at the order size, average order size. Well, average order size is impacted by a few things. So there can be a company that has one product or a company that has multiple products. The easiest one to look at is the company that has multiple products. So the company has multiple products. Are we selling just one thing or are we trying to sell a package, a solution, a suite, whatever you want to call it? So that's the first thing, and so one way to measure ROI might be well, it's April right now.
Speaker 1:Let's look at our pipeline and understand, of the deals that we've got, how many of them are proposing multiple products as part of the solution? Let's say it's 20%. Well, can we get that to 40%? There's a metric and, while it doesn't tie to EBITDA or net income, that is a way to track ROI. And then discount rate impacts order size. So how many of our deals are discounted? How much are they discounted by? And split that up by cohort experience, drop new rep individually, look across teams, things like that, and then I'd even look at how are we talking about discounts? Are we doing this silly thing of like you know we're always flexible over here. Is that phrase ever showing up Because we can eradicate that one? We're willing to deal with you if you want. You know it's under quarter wink, wink, and I always say if you do stuff like that, you're just negotiating against yourself. Yeah, so again, it doesn't float to a bottom line net income number, but many things don't.
Speaker 1:One story that I'm reminded of is the Alcoa example in the 80s. A new CEO comes in Alcoa and goes to the investor meeting and says I'm going to track one metric, it's safety. And they thought he was wackadoo because he said safety was the only thing he's going to track. Well, it turns out that companies with the best safety record in mining and manufacturing organizations well, they have better employee retention, they have happier employees, they have lower litigation insurance costs. All great things happen as a result of that and in sales you could look at methodology adoption or something like that as a similar metric to safety, which traditionally isn't something that you'd use to measure ROI. So that's where I look at it. There's different ways to get there that aren't just a pure financial metric 100%.
Speaker 2:And again, I think, because enablement is seen as a cross-center, because we want to buy so many tools traditionally, or when I say traditionally in the last 5-10 years, they'll be like oh, you're asking for more licenses, you're asking for more licenses, you're asking for more this, what are you giving me back? And I think it's the whole narrative of the conversation that makes it dangerous right. And again, I think there's there's there's education to be done on both sides. Like to your point, if you've got a, uh, maybe forward thinking is wrong, but if you, if you've got a strategically thinking enablement leader who can break the programs down by, okay, that's okr for the business, whether that be for the quarter or for the year, is average order value or overall win rate. We've done program abc and that's turned out xyz. That's the impact and effectiveness which is going to turn into the bottom line roi.
Speaker 2:But we need to see that. Yeah, but we need to have senior execs, normally the cro, who and who has an understanding that what enablement does right and the enablement isn't just going to be, if you compare, because again, to go to the bottom line, if you were to ask most sas companies right, what percentage return do you need on your enablement team to make it worth it. It's probably one percent or less, right, if you're, if you're a decent sized sas company, if you increase, if you increase the, the um arl, one percent, you've paid for your enablement team probably for five years. Sure kills. But again, that's what I'm saying is, and if you ask that question in that way, it seems obvious that enablement's a no-brainer. But if you go the other way and go, how much money, how much money is enablement contributed to the ARR this quarter?
Speaker 2:You're struggling to answer that because it's almost intangible, right, and I think that's the difference where lots of enablement leaders, myself included, will sit in front of the CR and go, yeah, yeah, but we gave you this money or we gave you this headcount, what are you giving me? And I'm going, yeah, but we've done this and this and this, and they go. I don't care right, how like we like we still finish the quarter behind, right, and I go with you. But that if I, if we finished it 20 ahead of, ahead of target you, I wouldn't get the credit for that. So why am I getting the blame that we're finishing 20 behind? Yeah, it's just the overall narrative of the conversation. I think that makes it dangerous. It's just a little bit of a hot potato subject and unfortunately, when you go up against the cro as an enable leader, you'll probably lose that conversation.
Speaker 1:Right like it just is how it works well, yeah, and I think the the key is being able to go into the data a couple of levels deeper. So, did we have the lead volume that we expected? That's that's one place. Is marketing giving us enough leads?
Speaker 2:and if the answers, if our, if our win rates are going up, if our deal sizes are going up but our lead volume is going down, yeah, then you can make a really strong argument that enablement's working yeah but if lead volume is going up and the other stuff's going down, then that's that's not so great yeah, but even to a point that you made, like if your win rate is going up but so is your discount rate, you're not making any money, right? And something again is who's monitoring all of these and whose responsibility is it to monitor all these? Because, again, if you've got someone that only focuses on win rate, overall win rate again, for me the overall win rate is almost as dangerous as just ROI because there's so many different parts. So for me I'll look at convergence stage to stage. How do we impact this? What part of your sales methodology do we need to lean into? And discovery that will get us to, I don't know, red lines or whatever it is.
Speaker 2:Just to make that again, to make it almost it's never linear. But to make the impact and effectiveness show up right, Because now it's never linear. But to make the. To make the impact and effectiveness, uh, show up right, because now it's not showing up. But and especially if you're at a complex sass nine months thing and you go, okay, I want you to move the overall win rate nine, ten percent in nine months. That's, there's a tough ask and you'd also probably operating at the wrong end of the funnel, right, you're probably only going to operate the deals that are already in the last three months. If you want to move that overall win rate, but down the line, what impact is that going to have? You're probably still going to have the same issues, whether that be lead volume, poor discovery, no value, whatever it is. So again, there's a couple of metrics there that just overall win rate is again it's a bit of a sticky one, yeah, well, here's let me.
Speaker 1:Let me throw you an example that makes it even more complicated. It depends on what you're focused on. Are you focused on this quarter's income statement and profitability, or are you focused on the enterprise value of the organization? Because with a sas company, for example let's, let's use round numbers Every dollar added creates 10x enterprise value, because exit multiples for mid-sized, quickly growing SaaS companies are on either side of 10x ARR. So if I close a $10,000 deal, I just added $100,000 enterprise value. Well, if I discounted 20% and close an $8,000 deal, sure I sacrifice $2,000 in net income, but I still create $80,000 in enterprise value. That's a win. So it's the lens at which you're looking at. It is interesting because you might have a mid-level finance person that's just focused on cash, but you've got a CEO and a board who are focused on enterprise value and those people are at conflict. And then boom, sales is in the middle.
Speaker 2:Sure, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And these are the things that people I just it drives me wild. I mean I see even people posting about questioning if people should go to college or do advanced study. You don't understand things like income statements, balance sheets, cashflow statements, the three financial statements. If you don't understand things like enterprise value and exit multiples, as a salesperson, it makes what you do very confusing. So my strong suggestion to everybody is just get as much education around this stuff as you possibly can on the financial and company side. And if you work in a private equity company, understand what those dynamics look like. Your private equity company that owns you, their customers the the bigger private equity company. They're polishing you up to sell to somebody else. And understanding what that looks like and why the things that you do matter both on the revenue and the cost side. It's critical. If you don't know this stuff like what are you doing?
Speaker 2:yeah, I shouldn't agree more, and I think that's even I can't remember who I heard it from. I think it was Kate Lewis at E4 Enable. She was like if you don't know what your CEO's top three priorities are for the year or for the quarter, you're out the loop, right, and you're focused on the wrong thing. Almost certainly right, you're focused on the wrong thing. And again, I think exactly to your point, like you've got to. If you're not bored facing yourself and I've been fortunate or unfortunate enough to be bored facing a couple of times in my career those conversations are intense, right, like they are very, especially if it's private equity, they're very intense. So then, if you need to be skilled enough in enablement to glean that information from your CRO, who was definitely in that meeting and had to be part of that pitch deck and had to justify the number, whether it was good, bad or indifferent, so you've got to, you've got to be able to glean that from them and be like they want more this, and I had it.
Speaker 2:One of the companies. They want multi-region expansion, so that sounds great, but we just hired one person in australia and then. But so this is for staff augmentation, for engineering talent, but what we? What they did there is they just hired two people, one SDR, one bit there. They went over there with US prices, so the minimum was $5,000 a month. Well, the thing is with Australia it's on a map. It's three inches away from India, where you can't. They could just undercut you left, right and centre. So it looked really good to be able to expand globally and have a presence in APAC, but you set those people up to fail.
Speaker 2:You didn't do the due diligence on how your pricing would have to be different, what the competitive market was like. Why are you going into it Just so that you can say it stick a little flag on an interactive map or your website? So to your point, even as an enablement leader which I think is a another slight conversation with lots of companies, when they're hiring and they've their first enabling person, they hire it at manager level. So then that person just gets wound up and pointed in a direction. So they're never having these conversations, so they get stuck in that reactive way, so they never again.
Speaker 2:What's the roi on that person? It's almost zero. They are a cost center because they're just being told what to do by people who are going on gut instinct and maybe not even looking at the data. So I totally agree with you that you need to understand all of these things, be able to hold a conversation at that level, but also your job is to take that information and operationalize it. And how do I chunk this up? How do I make impactful and effective programs that will actually have a business, a viable business outcome, whether that be conversion stage to stage or actual overall money on the bottom line, which it should do eventually. But it's how long will it take to get?
Speaker 1:there, andy Kirklander.
Speaker 2:Eventually Steve Keen yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah it's. I think that your example of hiring someone at the enablement manager level, that's a great way to just get a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a couple of one-pagers that people have been screaming out for. That they'll never use, right, and I understand why. But again, you can either invest a director-level salary for someone to come in and have those conversations. If you, you can either invest a director level salary for someone to come in and have those conversations or you can waste and have an able to come across center for a manager level salary right, you need the experience to come in and do that, right. You don't need someone to come in with jazz hands and run you a couple of lovely sessions where they use kahoot and everyone leaves because they're laughing.
Speaker 2:But they're right, like for me, the missing bit for enablement is it's called sales or revenue enablement. So you've got to enable revenue performance, right, like that's the bit that's missing. That's what the job is called. So if you're just going in and doing like, there's two things I always say this that trigger me can I have a one pager and can we do objection handling training? There's like you don't need a one pager and I'm 99 percent set on objection handling.
Speaker 2:It's not your problem and I've not even listened to a call right, I agree with that so that's, but that's my, that's my trigger to do a discovery right and be like where's that come from? Why is that? How will we get into this outcome? And yeah, I've, I've created so many one pages in my enabling career and I would say less than 1% have ever been looked at more than once.
Speaker 1:Oh, I refuse. So here's my trick with one-pagers. For everybody listening is if someone says, can I get a one-pager for blank, I say, sure, can you send me the email bullet points that you've been using in lieu of not having a one-pager? And then can you walk me through why we need to design it specifically? And guess what they usually do? Oh, we don't have it. So you don't even product. Everything is product development. I've gotten down this. Now that I'm on software stuff too, I've gone down this whole rabbit hole.
Speaker 1:A couple of books for people to listen to if they want to learn product development, just kind of quick and dirty. Platform revolution is amazing. It helps you understand this whole concept of software platforms. And dirty Platform revolution is amazing. It helps you understand this whole concept of software platforms and platforms. You've got creators of content, consumers of content, people build stuff in the platform, people take stuff out of the platform and hopefully lots of people are doing both as well. So you've got the platform revolution and then inspired. Those are some really good product books. And then, if you're in startup land, steve Blank's books are all awesome the startup owner's manual. So I think about it just like product development.
Speaker 1:So what's the minimum viable product for one pager? Well, it's a list of bullet points. And then the question is well, why do we need to turn those bullet points into an attachment? Maybe there's a reason, I don't know. But then when I do that, does it need to be dynamic? Are you going to want to edit it? Okay, so that's a whole nother set of requirements. So, product management 101, gather your requirements before you build anything. And this goes back to why I find it hilarious that there's an anti-college movement, which is critical thinking skills are. I've had countless people say how do I teach my team critical thinking skills? Like, are you using that as part of your rubric when you're hiring? No, okay, well, I don't think that in your 30s is when you learn critical thinking skills yeah that's my opinion.
Speaker 2:Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but that's what I think no, I think even on the hiring there's a dichotomy of like hiring processes and what's actually expected. Like I work for a company where he paid well for enterprise sales people but they never had like a presentation stage. Yeah, so the thing is, the first time that they actually got before we built the onboarding, the first time that they actually got so before we built the onboarding, the first time that they would ever see them present would be on the first live call at strategic enterprise level and they would be paid $200,000 a year plus, you know, like serious money. We're not talking about like SDRs fresh out that you might be able to have plausible deniability.
Speaker 2:And I watched one and the person he came from microsoft as well, so he had like a pretty good background. Literally, how are you hi slide deck, no discovery questions, none like not a single question. All the way through his rapport building was him talking about his brand new screen that he bought for, you know, for his laptop and stuff, and then no questions straight through the thing. And then at the end he had a slide for questions and just left the slide up for 13 minutes on screen share, especially getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and that was the first time that we saw them present. And you wonder why that hiring cohort didn't go well. Right, it doesn't make sense. Yeah, I think there's a huge issue with expectations of the role.
Speaker 1:Hiring people because they worked at big companies is hilarious. I hear this a lot. Oh, I worked at Microsoft. I worked at Facebook. I was like, yeah, don't hundreds of thousands of people work there? Cool, so you hired someone that works at a company where hundreds of thousands of people work Awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also it almost never fits the company they're going to work for. Right, it's always some small company, and I've got lots of people that I know, probably similar to yourself, that work at Salesforce. They've got the best of the best. They've got all the support. Their enablement team is like 150 strong globally and you expect them to come into your startup where you give them a g drive of one pages to read and expect them to smash target day one because they want somewhere else.
Speaker 1:It just doesn't compute right, it doesn't work, yeah well, people struggle with the hiring process. They don't know what to do yeah sure if anybody's concerned about your hiring process internally, shoot me a note freestuffatcoachcrmcom freest free stuff at coach crmcom and I'll flip you our hiring course for free. First, 10 people. Yeah, it's, it's wild, because you bring people in and then you give them to enablement and you say, hey, fix this hiring decision I made for me, karen yeah we have that make you feel do you know what it's.
Speaker 2:I had one leader in particular that I worked with once and we just got the blame for everything Like if the person was a bad hire, it was enablement's fault or it was onboarding's fault or it was whatever.
Speaker 2:And it got a little bit tumultuous Because the finger kept coming back to us to the point. I was in a meeting with the CRO and he goes WTF. I've spoken to XYZ leader and they've told me that the onboarding was terrible and that's why this person's not very good. And I was like based on what, though? Right, like, so my sort of two very trite questions are so what? And says who? So like it's like the onboarding was bad, says who? Says this person who didn't turn up, are you married?
Speaker 1:Yes, I am. How's that work in your personal life, oh?
Speaker 2:um, not well. That's why I have, that's why I have a bed in my office, just in case I ask one of those questions that's the so what says who bed in the office yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Again, it's like my, my very like. So even I asked that of enablement programs. Oh, we've just done a good session, so what? So what happens next? Right, so you've just done a session, are you going to follow up? Are you going to reinforce? That was a really good session, says who says you because there was people clapping at the end.
Speaker 2:I don't care about the outcome and again, for some of the enablement teams I've worked with, or one in particular, it was a little bit immature as much as it was a big function. They were so used to being reactive, doing one-off sessions. There was no rhyme or reason, there was no sort of benchmarking that went before it. There was no reinforcement, there was no manager engagement and they wondered why they had really poor perception internally. People like they would get like 36 attendance to session, yeah, like two, like two enablement sessions that like the, the um session titles were like all over the place. It'd be like ever bolded. Why am I turning up to this? I don't know what it is right, but I say again, just because you've got a big enable enable team doesn't mean it's good, right?
Speaker 1:no no, well it's. It's funny, man. All that stuff that you're talking about, my, my whole goal in life is just to make this stuff as easy as possible, and I think, when it comes to let's just call it onboarding and training that, that bucket of the world there's only two things that need to be accomplished they need to know it and they need to do it yeah and knowing.
Speaker 1:It is the easiest thing in the world to inspect. You. Give them a quiz, give them lots of quizzes, they'll do it. They'll do quizzes. Don't do quiz, see if they got it right or not and then do it. Somebody has to observe them doing it and confirm that they did it or not.
Speaker 2:It's just, it's not hard so I, from my point of view, I've got an extra step in there. I've got knowing it, understanding it, doing it. Yeah, for me there's a big difference between knowing and understanding, and we would show this at a company where, like we used winning by the side and everyone knew what the situation and the pain was, but they didn't really understand it. So we have to go back and do it and again. They should be one in the same thing, but unfortunately pretty much everyone's pressed for time, right, so you?
Speaker 1:well, if you're going, and again what you're doing is you're decoupling knowing it into bloom's taxonomy, level one and level two, which is knowing, understand it, and then applying analyzer this, levels three and four.
Speaker 2:So yeah, correct yeah, but again, even like speaking with my team, they'd be like, oh yeah, no, did they. So when we went back to do like they, we called it fundamentals, like fantastic fundamentals, and going back, yeah, but they already know this stuff. And I said, yeah, but we're not getting for sdrs, but we're not getting more pipeline, because the reason that they're not doing it is because they don't understand it. Right, like so they know what the situation is, but you don't understand why understanding the current situation is important, because then they can find that gap to get to the pain and the impact and they don't understand why these things go together. So we spent a whole I mean again, it was a whole quarter programme and it actually brought us some fantastic results.
Speaker 2:But again, I think when you're putting everyone on Teams's window, pushed up against the time barrier of we need to roll this out now, we can't have the reps off the phone for too long, understandable, and we need it to work. They just go for no, they just tick that box of yeah, we told them what to do, it's up to them. They're not doing it and you know as well as I do it's not as simple as that, right, you need to know point. It has to be reinforced by a manager or someone else, and I think that goes into a whole other issue. I think of practice versus doing it in the real world, and I think that's something we only ever seem to practice in a breakout room for five minutes and every other bit of practice is done live with clients, which is not fun.
Speaker 1:Well, ok, so there's a root cause there, and then I'm going to comment on something else. The root cause there is that second line managers aren't holding frontline managers accountable. Agreed, that's it and it's it's. It's wild because, you see, all these enablement programs are so focused on onboarding and sdrs and junior people and content and events and tools. That's a lot creating credibility and accountability for second line managers. That's hard. People get drawn to the other stuff because it's way easier. And I think that that's the. If the frontline manager is not doing something, the second line manager is not holding them accountable, then nobody else can make it happen yeah and then the other, the other piece, the the whole.
Speaker 1:We can't pull people off the phones or we can't pull people out of sales activity. Yeah, wait. So you're telling me that you got this person or cohort of people that I'll just go wild and say, objectively suck like in areas. Right, maybe their demos and presentations are terrible. They're not setting next steps. Once they start selling more than one product, it just all completely falls apart. They can't do discovery with someone that has gray hair, and so they got all these problems. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:But we can only let them get better. One hour a week. All the rest of the time we have to let them continue to talk to these people and struggle in the same way that they have been. That I just described.
Speaker 2:That's wild yeah, I couldn't agree more and I think I have this thing in my head and I call it. You know where we have, like the sales velocity equation I have and I'm trying to make it stick very much like fetch, I mean girls, I'm trying to make it stick very much like fetch, I mean girls, I'm trying to make it stick.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to make fetch happen, Kieran.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm trying to make it happen, but I call it the enablement effectiveness equation, which for me is teaching plus training times. Coaching reinforcement, divided by the metric that you're trying to move, will tell you how effective your enablement program is. And what I mean by that is teaching is the acquisition or reinforcement of knowledge, training is the utilization of that knowledge in a safe environment. You know, like in a sandbox, if you want to say, and then you times that by the coaching stroke reinforcement in the real world, and then you've obviously got to have a benchmark for that. And I think, think you've got like a nice X axis of like repetition. So the complexity of the feedback starts really low as the repetitions are high and then as you progress through and the repetitions get lower, as you come out of training and go into the real world, the complexity of the feedback should go up, just so that you get that.
Speaker 2:But again, and I've looked at programs that I've run and I've either done teaching and then they've gone out and I've done training without the teaching and I've just practiced this, and then it doesn't work, or I've done teaching and training, there's been no reinforcement, and it doesn't work. So now when I build a program. I look at it from the point of view of teaching. What are the learning objectives? Why is this relevant? Why, um, what? What's usable today from from this teaching element? What part of training? So, if all I can get away with is a breakout room, cool, I'm going to get that. I would like more, but again, it's never enough. But again will I tick that that training box with that? Yes, we are 99. In my experience, percent of programs fall down. Is the coaching reinforcement? Yeah, is it up front? Again, go back to that frontline manager. They're either not bought in, they don't know how to do it, they're getting, they're not getting enabled.
Speaker 2:But that's like my little fetch of enablement, which is the I love that this equation, um, as I say, it's something I believe and I'm trying to make it stick, um, but I'm happy for you to pull it apart because obviously this is something that you've got extensive knowledge and research into.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that any time that you're quantifying something that's traditionally non-quantifiable, and any time that you're saying this and then this and this and this and all need to fit together, that's awesome, and then you just execute it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it. And the big thing for me is what metric you're trying to move, benchmark. And then you've got to set a success factor right, and again you can improve it 10%, 5%, so again, that's the effectiveness of your programs. And again, for me, you've got to have all three of those elements right, otherwise you might move at 1% or 2%. But if you can get that and again the reason I put the the the times, because it's a force multiplier if you get managers coaching off the back of it right, as you know better than I do. Um, so it's a force multiplier for a reason, and that's what. That's the difference between a one percent increase and a 15 percent increase. Right, like, but by far like no one.
Speaker 2:I don't think anyone could convince me. Otherwise, you yes, you might have someone, some outliers, who get the teaching and they do the knowing and understanding and just one bit of training. They go out and execute. That's like maverick and iceman from top gun, like that's. That's you there. That's like two people in your entire revenue org. Yeah, other than that, you need the coaching and reinforcement, otherwise it's going to fall flat on its face yeah, I've seen the people that I typically see go down that path are the systems thinkers.
Speaker 1:so there are people with engineering backgrounds or just they can take what's being trained and orchestrate it in an algorithm in their head and just say, okay, well, I do this, this, this, this, this, and then boom, and it's. It's like they're running off a checklist yeah, um, yeah, I love that, I think. I think that's awesome. I was just looking something up. The number one draft pick in the 2022 Major League Baseball draft played his first game yesterday, yesterday. Today is April 12th 2024. So two years until he played his first Major League game. They gave this guy an $8 million signing bonus when he started two years ago, gave him $8 million and for two years, didn't let him play in the major leagues, do you want to know why, though?
Speaker 2:That was on Borden's fault for an enablement. That's why he's taken two years. He should have been good enough after four months, but enablement messed it up, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think baseball is fun because, like football and basketball, you go straight to the pros. Usually baseball you always get in minor leagues because a 20, 21 year old guy just can't. It's.
Speaker 2:It's a different sport yeah, yeah, I mean you play against men at that point, right, and I think. But I think I've. I've got a big background in sports coaching and I've seen the same. For me it's football, stroke, soccer, and when you do throw the young kids in they bum out. You might have a spectacular.
Speaker 2:There's a couple of countries that have got it much better, like Spain, when they've got their under 21s teams and their full national team, whereas certainly like England or Scotland, if they've got like a talent who's 18, they put them straight in the first team, whereas with Spain, they'll keep them in the 21s and they'll keep them in there and they'll keep them in there and they'll keep them in there. So what happens is they end up having a fantastic career and then, when they step into the first team because they play with the same style and the same thing and they're indoctrinated and it's all like a philosophy guess what? They have years and years of teams that all play the same to the same high level, rather than one really good player who bursts onto the scene for one tournament that lasts two weeks and then they're never to be seen again. So I think the same success leaves clues across, whether it be sport, whether it be sales, it doesn't really matter. I think it's, I think it's, I think it's the same for most things.
Speaker 1:Right like it just is yeah, for sure yeah, and I think it's much more important to have a sales team that can execute than to have the best salesperson ever, because why is the best salesperson ever want to work at your company?
Speaker 2:well, they won't for very long, right?
Speaker 1:because, yeah, they want to be around other good people, whether they admit it or not right, exactly because if they're the best sales person ever, they probably have a lot of money, sure, and the only time they're the best there's, there's two exceptions. Well, if they're really bad at gambling or really bad at marriage, they probably don't have a lot of money if they keep asking.
Speaker 2:So what says who to their wife?
Speaker 1:this is the only two places where I've seen people that are really really, really good at sales. Just be like, oh man, gambling yeah, I can see that.
Speaker 1:I can see that don't, and just public service announcement. If you're gonna bet parlays, figure out what your implied value is, because a lot of times they don't tell you, they're not legally required to tell you and you're just throwing money away if you're betting part ways. So I don't have a problem with gambling, gamble, straight games, whatever but parlays are just a dangerous, dangerous proposition. I don't touch them. A bunch of my friends do and one guy wins one time and brags about it and everybody else loses all the time and it's always the dumbest thing too.
Speaker 1:You know I got. I got stefan digs to catch two touchdowns, the second half and green bay under 42 and a half, and the backup quarterback for the Texans to complete two passes. Okay, great, just watch, just bet, straight bets, $11 to win 10, and you're fine, you're not throwing out, because some of these bets you end up betting like $20 to win 10. It's wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've got that here as well. First corner kick has got to be one shot on target. It's just getting sillier and sillier the things that you can bet on like one shot, but there has to be less than five corners in the first half. It's got to be raining, do you realize? It's just it's getting quite silly, though, and the thing is, people are like I've got some of my friends um, we, we do this thing at the start of every year because betting's slightly different in the uk. We put we all put 50 pounds in to like the mobile phone app, and then we see who can, by the end of the season, have the most money.
Speaker 2:So you're not just keep just keep doing it like each week. But we, where you have parlays, we have accumulators so you can put back, like, rather than betting one game, you can put five games on the same thing and it obviously doubles your odds, whatever. And I've got one friend and he goes for these crazy bets like the corner kicks and the fouls and the yellow cards and all that Every single time within six weeks of the season. Bear in mind, there's 38 games of the season. He's got no money left.
Speaker 1:He's out of the game. That's wild, yeah, and I think that's what it's like with the sales team is you've got to get a core group of folks that can execute and have an outlier. I mean sure, if you can find somebody that's the next best salesperson, that's great. But I always say, if you haven't worked with them before and they're just on the market applying for your job on the website probably not the best salesperson ever, but that's fine, they're probably good you can make them great, and a good process, methodology and coaching system will make lots of people great and that's what I'm excited about To go back to one of your points or one of the points we were talking about.
Speaker 2:I'd like to get your take on it. So one of the things you were mentioning there when we were talking about taking the whole sales team off the floor, right. So in my experience in enablement, that's like one of the biggest pushbacks. Too much enablement right Now. That often comes when it's too much bad enablement, which is fine, but from your experience working with companies, do you ever find the person say it's the cro that brings you in or the ceo. Do you ever find them then become the main blocker for you doing what you do like in terms of, like, having time with the sales team?
Speaker 1:no, oh really I don't, because I tailor my contracts in a way that say we start on this date, we end by this date, here's how much time I need from you and here's how much money you're giving me, and that works out great, and I know that's what you do as an internal employee.
Speaker 2:I would say that's probably one of the biggest blockers for enablement. Teams is like, whether it's VP or whatever CRO level, they'll say, look, we need to work on this, even if it's a business outcome. And then they'll be like, yeah, but we don't want you to do that much training. So they end up becoming the biggest blocker. The person who asked you to fix the problem ends up blocking the problem. And obviously I speak to quite a lot of enablers and they run into that. And that could be even like I had one with Gong Adoption, where it would be like we're not using it.
Speaker 2:You want to do a coaching culture but your managers are not listening and scoring goals, and he would say what would you do? And I would say, well, here would be the KPIs I would give them, which would be like three hours a week listening to calls, score one call per rep per week and then phase it. So in a while you have like one 30 minute coaching session every two weeks with each rep and he, but that's too much, and I but I break it down, but that's 11 of their week. Yeah, I worked with one caro and he came and he was like so I can see where you're coming from. However, I what I'll agree to is one hour a week of them listening to calls, and they can score one call a week.
Speaker 1:That's wild right and I was like I said, with all due respect, that doesn't help anybody right, yeah like so then so little johnny on an eight person team will get his call us into two months from now yeah, but and then once right, and then it'll be yeah, so if it's a discovery call, he'll get that, but the proposal review, that will happen for another four months. Yeah, that's crazy man I. So here's, here's my take. It doesn't happen to me personally because, like I said, the way I set up engagements that we do, but I do see it happen to folks internally.
Speaker 1:And here's what I always advise Okay, so little Johnny can only give you one hour a week. Cool, let's look at his calendar. Sure, flip up his calendar. Almost always it's either a wasteland. There's tons of empty spots. I'm like, okay, I'm confused, why the heck can I only get an hour with little Johnny? Well, now that you put it that way, or you pull up his calendar and it's, it's obscene. So if little Johnny's a manager, in this case case, he's doing one-on-ones. He's got like one one-on-one every half a day for the entire week, like, yeah, do two back-to-back, take a break, do two back-to-back. You're knocking them out like crazy. Yeah, or is just tons of meetings with people in marketing or whatever it's. I rarely see a calendar that's actually full. Yeah, when someone has a problem, I see calendars that are full and people are crushing it. Sure, but yeah, the whole show me their calendars thing that works pretty well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I probably. I think I did that with the managers and I probably did it a little bit too early. I probably didn't have the credibility to do it at the time. I think my first role in everyone because I come from a vp of sales role um, I probably went in there a little bit arrogant and be like what do you mean? You don't have time? You know, I probably was. I probably came across a little bit combative for the for the same sort of narrative as you're talking about. Yeah, what are you doing then? Right, because I'm saying that this is 11 of your week, right, and you're telling me you don't have time. Like what are you doing? They?
Speaker 1:don't want to do it. That's it all. The bottom line is they don't want to do it that's fine.
Speaker 2:Don't have that, don't have a manager job, then right like yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:But okay, so let me let me in the in the spirit of proposing alternative solutions. There is also nothing wrong with having a quality assurance person listen to calls and then feed that intel to the managers. I love that. But guess what then happens, okay, so let's go through these issues. So here's Corey's version of how this is going to play out. Step one is the managers say they're too busy to listen to calls. Hilariously, they're not too busy to live, attend meetings and take them over in super clothes, because that's what they like doing and that's what they think they're good at. And then they hire people that don't actually do their jobs. They just sit there while their manager does their jobs for them. Okay Aside. So the manager's too busy to listen to calls? Cool. So then you hire a QA person to listen to calls and give the manager feedback.
Speaker 1:Well, now we're at this point where we're trying to figure out the hardest thing when it comes to coaching, which is diagnosis. The hardest part of really good coaching is diagnosis Looking at all of the things that you could coach somebody on, and it's not just the call. You got to zoom out, you got to coach the player, not the play. Zoom out and think about the call the sales pipeline, the individual deals within that pipeline, time management, their skillset, how they work with their teammates and things like that All these different things that you could coach them on. And then we got to make that big list and we got to figure out, well, what's the biggest impact thing that we want to coach on, or what's a quick win, what's the low hanging fruit that we could just knock out the next couple of days? So what's that one thing we want to coach on?
Speaker 1:And when I work with teams that haven't developed coaching expertise yet, it's crazy how hard this is for folks, especially folks that haven't been formally trained in management or formally trained in sales management. They don't know how to do it. It's hard. It takes practice. Guess what? Anything that's anything that you can get really good at is hard. It takes practice. Playing pool takes lots of practice and it's really hard. Chess same thing. I love those things. And so then you get diagnosis, then you have the coaching conversation and then you drive accountability, which is also hard. All of these things are hard.
Speaker 2:And if they're so busy and they're not doing any of these things, it just tells me that they're drifting to their comfort zone, super closing deals or trying to do stuff. That's easy and that's wild. 100 and that was what the the whole ride-along culture. I'm like you know that this person's you, you think they're fully ramped, but anytime they get a difficult question they hand it to you. Yeah, like you don't, but like your point to just take over. But so when I found myself at one place in a year I listened to 2238 gone cops. There was no, no one that knew more about what was happening in the revenue than me, and I prided myself on that. Not, I didn't realize how many calls it was to the end of the year, but then I'd have managers be like oh, my team don't say that. I'm like, yeah, they do. Or they'd like turn up to a certification should be like a role play certification at the end of onboarding and people would obviously be watching gong calls to prepare for it. But we don't say that anymore. No, we really do. They picked it up from live calls that they've listened to recently or calls that have been listened to. Yeah, but I didn't think we said that anymore. I was like well, we do or we need to work on this. And I'm like no, you don't Right, I'm telling you you don't Like.
Speaker 2:When I first joined at enterprise level, they were only setting an agenda on 17% of calls and the most common close that we had was so what do you think? Ah, so again to your point, that was like a very quick win in that we just bookended it. So we went with an agenda, an upfront contract. So then it was like, if it gets to this point, so from the upfront contract you would close the call based on what we spoke about at the start. I think there's a good fit here. The next step is XYZ, mec, and within a month it wasn't great overall. It was good percentage growth, but we took that agenda from 17% of calls to like 49% and then the closing was better. But again, going back to the business outcome, our conversion rate from that qualification stage into the next stage, because we were closing for next steps, was also increasing within a month. But again, if you were to ask the leader at that time, what do you need to work on? Oh, we need a one page, or on objection handling, like you really don't, and it's just one of those things.
Speaker 2:And, as I say, like I do think and this might be a you know, nailing my colors to the mast for people to come after me I do think there's a little bit of an epidemic in sales leadership at the moment. I don't know if you think the same. I think we always talk about companies hiring too quickly. I also think they probably promoted way too quickly into leadership roles and there's been almost no support for them and again I've stolen this and changed it but certainly for managers they don't rise to the occasion, they fall to the level of the training and almost no manager has been given any training whatsoever. So I don't know. Me personally, I believe that the frontline manager is the hardest role in sales by far. That's my opinion. I don't think it's SDR, like lots of people say. I think it's frontline manager because of the expectations and the lack of preparedness that they go into the role with.
Speaker 1:I think if someone's unprepared for the role, I agree with you. I think if someone's being, if someone's good at being a frontline manager, it's probably easiest role in the company.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, because this is it's funny, man, like it's. It's the hardest role if you don't know what you're doing. It's the easiest role if you know what you're doing. But it's it's crazy, because how many professions out there put somebody in a role that doesn't know what they're doing?
Speaker 2:never can you imagine hiring an accountant that doesn't know how to do taxes right, or a doctor that doesn't know how to do surgery yeah, we have have it so often and sales, right, there's so many of those like metaphors and examples where we just expect people to do things and frontline managers especially when you're promoting internally, right, that old of like oh, because you can, they can sell a lot, they can manage the team, like. I think I got my first sales director job when I was 22. I had absolutely no business having that job. I was really good at sales, right, and I was leading a team of eight people. I could barely communicate, right like.
Speaker 2:I was doing like and I was managing people who were older than me and it's, I'm sure it's nice, but I had absolutely no business having that role and I muddled through. But I made so many mistakes, right, even just in how to speak to people and how to do one-to-ones, and I was very much like if it's not working for you, just do what I do, right, which doesn't work for anybody. But that was just the situation I found myself in for anybody listening, I've got a sales manager assessment.
Speaker 1:It looks across about 20 different management competencies and helps you determine where your gaps are, something you can roll out with your teams. Flip me a note free stuff at coach serumcom, free stuff at coach serumcom and I'll flip you copy. Well, kieran, we're hitting time here. Man, any last words or anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2:um, last words is roi is important, but break it down to the impact of and effectiveness of your programs. You know, quarter over quarter, uh, if they're done well, it will lead to bottom line roi. If you're having conversations that are only centered around ROI, try and change that narrative and be a little bit more considered. No, nothing I want to plug, thank you.
Speaker 1:Love it. Well, I made a couple offers today. If anybody's interested in the coaching assessment or the hiring course, free stuff at coachserumcom. I'm Corey Bray, Coach Serum co-founder. We'll see you next time on the Sales Management Podcast.