In this episode, we’re talking about how to get real results by utilizing all four buckets of sales enablement: strategy, content, technology, and training.
You’ll hear us ask questions like, what are the key components of sales enablement? What problems or needs are people trying to solve when implementing a sales enablement initiative? And what are the benefits of having a solid sales enablement strategy in place?
Joining Dani to break it all down is our own Maryanne McWhirter.
Maryanne brings so many amazing points to the table, like:
In this episode, we’re talking about how to get real results by utilizing all four buckets of sales enablement: strategy, content, technology, and training.
You’ll hear us ask questions like, what are the key components of sales enablement? What problems or needs are people trying to solve when implementing a sales enablement initiative? And what are the benefits of having a solid sales enablement strategy in place?
Joining Dani to break it all down is our own Maryanne McWhirter.
Maryanne brings so many amazing points to the table, like:
Welcome to the LeadG 2 podcast, the show dedicated to helping sales organizations grow. Each week, host Dani Buckley discusses proven B2B marketing and sales strategies and real life examples for experts and thought leaders from across industries. In this episode, we're talking about how to get real results by utilizing all four buckets of a sales enablement strategy: content, technology and training. You'll hear us ask questions like: What are the key components of sales enablement? What problems or needs are people trying to solve when implementing a sales enablement initiative? And what are the benefits of having a solid sales enablement strategy in place? Joining Dani to break it all down is our own Maryanne McWhirter. Maryanne brings so many amazing points to the table, like how great sales enablement helps make each stage of the sales process more efficient and effective, why great sales teams need sales playbooks and, finally, how starting a solid sales enablement strategy doesn't have to be complicated. You just need to get started.
Dani Buckley:Welcome, Maryanne. I am so excited to finally have you on the podcast. How are you doing today?
Maryanne McWhirter:I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks, Dani. Yes, this is going to be fun.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, this is a topic that I love to talk about, one that I know you are a true expert on, and you really helped so many of our clients around this and our team, and that's all about sales enablement, so I'm going to jump in if you're ready.
Maryanne McWhirter:I love it. Yeah, let's go.
Dani Buckley:Okay, great. So just to give people some context of your background, you've been with EG2 since 2018 and I've had the pleasure of working with you that whole time, and so since that time, you've really dived into a lot of the big sales enablement initiatives that we have for our clients everything from CRM setup to development of sales playbooks and everything in between. But what did you do before? Because I think there's some things that make you a great fit for this, even though we're technically an inbound marketing agency. Tell us a little bit about your background.
Maryanne McWhirter:Yeah, so, gosh, I've been here a little over five years. It's crazy, but I've been in the sales and the marketing space since 2011. So I started out in media sales media ad sales and, in fact, the center for sales strategy is who trained me when I was learning how to sell media ad space and I really fell in love with the education and the process and how to build trust through education that CSS really taught us through both courses and coaching. And then I had this opportunity a little over five years ago and I loved it because it really marries both my marketing and sales backgrounds and kind of combining them and enabling sales people with the marketing that we're doing. So it feels like the perfect fit and I love it here.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, it is Well. We're glad to have you here, as you know, but we won't sit and talk about that all the time, so we'll get into our topic today. So, in your own words, how would you define sales enablement?
Maryanne McWhirter:Yeah, it's a fancy word. That really just means the process of providing sales teams with the tools, the content and the plan that they need to sell their products or, in the case of a lot of my clients, to sell their services.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I mean a lot of people get stuck on like what falls under sales enablement? Because it's like it does sales training, sales process, sales recruitment and like in some ways, yeah, it can. But what we're really honing in today on is like the things that are enabling sales in their sales process, right, like you said, the content, the tools, the tech, things like that.
Maryanne McWhirter:So I think it gets overwhelming for people because it can be so many things but it doesn't have to be all of the things. So sometimes people think, oh, I'm not thinking for that, I can't do all that, but it doesn't have to be all of it.
Dani Buckley:Exactly, and I know we always encourage folks to just create the sales enablement strategy that you need select the things that are most valuable to your organization. So, speaking of that, what are the key components of sales enablement?
Maryanne McWhirter:Yes, okay. So it definitely starts with what you just noted, right, customization strategy. Diving in to try to accomplish or check a box is not the way to start. So always starting with the strategy, creating a plan, the goals to create consistency among your sellers, and so making sure that you have best practices and a plan for what your strategy for your specific business is going to be absolutely the first place, first bucket, right, and then content Getting creative with the avenue that it's delivered, but coming up with content that can be used. And I would say tech is another big bucket, which is kind of the fun one that's always ever changing, right, where all your sales enablement tools kind of fall in. And then training, which is one that people like to overlook or just check and move on from, but training is another big bucket that really needs to be addressed in your sales enablement entire strategy.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, great, okay. So let's dive into each of these. So we've got strategy, content, tech and training, so I'm going to come back to that in a minute, but before that, I want to like continue to paint this picture of why does an organization need sales enablement, how, if someone's listening and they're like we already have a great sales processor, we have some of this. Let's just highlight what are the big problems or needs that you see that clients typically are trying to solve when implementing sales enablement initiative, or so, in other words, what are maybe the benefits that an organization could get out of improving or growing their sales enablement strategy?
Maryanne McWhirter:Yes, okay, so closing deals. Obviously Everyone's trying to close more deals.
Intro:Make more money.
Maryanne McWhirter:There's a goal of all of the things but close more deals and then to dive into that a little more. Sales enablement really helps make each stage of the sales process more efficient and more effective. So speeding it up, making it more effective, making it more consistent among your sales team, so bringing consistency to what each person on your sales team is doing and what they're saying, and then they're moving them faster through each stage of the process and mostly by building trust earlier in the process. So the goal is to build trust earlier in the process to move them through the process, their sales process and their buyer's journey whatever that looks like for each company a little bit faster. Yeah, also sorry, there's so many benefits to sales enablement. No, don't worry. So I'm going to say the ability for growth. So hiring, training, growing your sales team. Sales enablement makes that a lot easier.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, I love that you mentioned that, because I think that's sometimes forgotten. It's like, okay, how do we help the folks that are out selling right now? But when you have all this stuff in place, when you have all this different content and resources and technology and processes and plays, when you hire and onboard someone, a new sales person, the most important thing is like, how quickly can you get them up and running and out doing their job? And so I'm really glad you said that Sales enablement having this stuff really helps expedite that process. Great, okay, all right, so let's talk about those four different buckets that you mentioned. So starting with strategy, which often involves like a sales playbook, is a good example of a whole strategy of like here's all everything we're going to do around sales enablement. Let's start there. Tell us what a sales playbook is in your words.
Maryanne McWhirter:Yes, I love sales playbooks. So great sales teams need sales playbooks. They are a guide, a giant guide to bring consistency to both the individual seller, your team of sellers, but also to management. So making sure that sellers can approach the same scenarios and the same objections with the same answers right, you don't have different sales people out there doing lots of different things. I've been able to work on a lot of sales playbooks at my time at LeadG2. And in fact right now I'm working on two different sales playbooks for different clients. So it's fun to get to see the different benefits that both sellers and management really get out of a playbook. So sellers like the confidence to move quickly through objections, talking tracks for how to talk to editors, really a unique understanding of their target persona and who they're going after. I mean our sales playbooks are entire guidebooks for a quick access to everything sellers need to know to hit the ground running.
Maryanne McWhirter:So again going back to onboarding or, if you've been there forever, making sure that everyone's kind of doing similar answers to the same things and helping them in their sales process, but then also management's who I work with so I can tell you the big benefits there.
Maryanne McWhirter:They love that their salespeople have that consistency. But the biggest answer to, I just think, is consistently the onboarding Knowing. You know, I talked to these sales managers and they're like I now feel like I can grow, I feel like I can hire a team of people and they're all going to be doing the same thing. I feel like I can hire three people and not spend two weeks straight with them thinking of things like oh yeah, let me tell you more about our target persona. Or oh yeah, you haven't even heard about the mission and values of our company. We do have you straight, you know. So it's a great, consistent onboarding doc where it gives sales managers a good piece of mind to be like yes, I have this, I can now grow, I can hire people, I love a sales playbook, it's all the things.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, you already touched on many of the benefits. I think the thing that I wanted to note that you did touch on was that it's consistency and it's taking best practices that we know and teach, because if we're the ones building it, but it's really extracting what your team is already doing really well. I love that you and our other consultants who build these playbooks for our clients that's a huge piece of it. It's not like here's what you should be doing differently. It's like, oh, let's actually take the best knowledge and examples and email templates and best thinking from your salespeople and your sales leaders and let's get this all down, because sometimes it's just living in other people's heads and it's not actually being shared.
Maryanne McWhirter:Not shared to each other. Yeah, let up my early workshop last week with a team of salespeople and it was all of them answering questions and they were learning from each other, saying, oh, I hadn't thought of it that way or I didn't know you used that when you talked about XYZ problems. Yeah, it's getting a little bit from the best and then putting it in one place.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, love it. Okay, let's talk about content First. Can you just give us a variety of examples, because I think a lot of people are like what is sales enablement content? There's a lot of different things. What are some examples of sales enablement content?
Maryanne McWhirter:Sales enablement content.
Maryanne McWhirter:A good way to think of it is the goal of trying to preemptively or even after a prospect asks a question, answer questions that salespeople can answer and also have content to back them up and help build that trust and rapport.
Maryanne McWhirter:Right now an example would be I'm finishing up a piece of sales enablement content that I'm creating for a PEO client. That really breaks down all of the costs that are incurred with a PEO, so the number of employees that you have, the benefits, the technology, those are all the things you're paying for. But then it also breaks down where you're getting those cost savings and cost efficiencies like lower healthcare costs and lower workers comp costs and reducing admin costs. So there's so many different things that a salesperson can talk about, but they're always getting the question of costs and how it makes up. So it's a question they're always getting and I'm really excited it's going to be broken down into a one sheet that's going to be easy to share after a conversation you have with the prospect or even before they ask about it. So it can be anything from a one sheet to really any piece of content.
Maryanne McWhirter:I mean content comes in all forms at this point it could be a talk.
Dani Buckley:That's a huge thing Email templates, videos, ebooks and guides, even like recorded webinar presentations, infographics.
Maryanne McWhirter:Plot catchment goods.
Dani Buckley:I mean exactly yes, and so I'm glad you actually said that, because I think something that people forget too is that a lot, ideally, if you're doing marketing well, a lot of your marketing content is also sales enablement content, and the way to like connect the dots is just to make sure salespeople understand how to use that. It's not just to pull new people in, like yes, that's the initial goal, but like, oh, this piece that was used in a marketing campaign can actually be used really well in this stage of the sales process or things like that, and I know that's really helpful. When we create sales plays is where we show them exactly where to use content that is often was originally marketing content.
Maryanne McWhirter:Exactly, and sometimes just making sure that they know it's created for them, right, yeah, I think this is my favorite thing to do is create sales enablement contact, create it for the sales team, meet with the sales team, get them excited about it, give it to them to use and then also post it on the website and have it work SEO and say, hey look this is also working for marketing, but it was created for you, so it works both ways. It can be creating marketing, but you're right.
Dani Buckley:Great, Great. Let's talk about technology, Technology one more time about sales-enabled technology. This is anything that salespeople could use. It's a really big buck. I mean, it includes CRMs, but it includes a lot of other stuff. If you were to just share a couple of what you think are just some of the top sales enablement tools because we can't get into everything today what are the ones you're finding just that are the most exciting or most useful that you want to highlight?
Maryanne McWhirter:Okay, I mean most useful CRM. Yes, making sure that your salespeople are keeping up with all of their contacts and companies and notes in one place Definitely Number one and the one that needs to be pushed in held accountable for the most. But then the automation that's available is amazing and the visualization that you get with automation, with your deals pipeline and how we use HubSpot. But there's a lot of really user-friendly options out there with automation to be able to send notifications when one of your prospects comes to your website. There's a lot of different things that are really cool with automation that I see salespeople get really excited about, that they have no idea exists.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, one example I love that I just saw with automation is in a deal pipeline we set up for a client how every time a deal gets moved to a different stage, the sales manager gets a certain email to update them that this happened. So they're in the loop. It eliminates the salesperson having to go report and share that stuff or whatever. They're getting real-time updates. But it also sends reminders to the salespeople of best practices for that next stage. Okay, you just presented the proposal, don't forget to do this. Or here's a great follow-up, or here's the next step. I love that. I love how our team was doing that of like just like. How do we use automation to really actually pull things from the sales playbook, even like different sales plays, and incorporate that into the technology?
Maryanne McWhirter:You're exactly right. The automation makes it foil-proof and makes the capacity of quantity that salesperson is working with much higher Because they're getting the notifications, they don't have to keep it all in their brain. They're able to do more because of those automations.
Dani Buckley:Yes, love it. Our fourth one that you talked about was training. I know you mentioned this is often overlooked or just oversimplified, maybe. What tips do you have for businesses when they're thinking about training for their teams?
Maryanne McWhirter:Okay, a lot. Number one is do it often and keep it short. They're not going to learn a new tool with one training session.
Dani Buckley:Like a full day workshop where they're trying to be taught every possible thing. It's not going to happen.
Maryanne McWhirter:You can't just cram it all in and say this is a new tool we have, this is how you should use it. Start tomorrow. That's just not how any individual people learn, but definitely not entire sales teams where you're working with lots of personalities. Multiple short trainings is the way to learn, always ending your task with a task for them to practice. If people sit through a training and they don't practice it within 12 to 24 hours, they're going to retain half or less by the very next day.
Maryanne McWhirter:The sales teams that I do trainings with, I'm known for giving them homework and I call it homework. At the end, I want you to practice this. After you teach them they really need to practice. Then really the big one is for sales managers to hold them accountable, setting those expectations, making sure that they get into habits of reviewing tech. Often We've even had sales managers who don't pay commission unless they've entered things into the CRM that they're supposed to. You can take it to extremes, but accountability in whatever way feels comfortable for their leadership at the company is huge, yeah, great.
Dani Buckley:Okay, I have another question that I know I hear all the time. I want to hear your answer for it. The question is who should be in charge of sales enablement at a company? There's not always. Yes, there's many organizations, larger ones, that have a sales enablement team or sales enablement director of sales.
Dani Buckley:Enablement, and that's a position that's growing a lot. We're seeing more and more of that and it's awesome to see that people are emphasizing the importance of that role, but not everyone has the budget or means to have someone solely dedicated. Tell us what you are seeing out there that could be running the sales enablement strategy for a company.
Maryanne McWhirter:Yeah, I'm seeing directors of marketing. That would be my next pick, after a sales enablement manager to lead the initiatives and really implement the strategy. I would say marketing is going to be creating the strategy. They're going to be creating the content. I would say director of marketing would be the next pick of who could lead that up. But it's also very important to have someone involved from sales Again, we just talked about with accountability to hold them responsible and create that environment of expectation. But marketing managers are often the enthusiastic ones about and creating the strategy and the content For the sales enablement to be successful. They could use an agency partner like us. Hey, I'll be here, I'll do your sales.
Dani Buckley:That's a really good point, though, because I think often we do see marketing overseas it, because there's the creation of content, there's things like that. There might be some pieces that are more led by sales, like the tech piece or something, but oftentimes if there isn't someone who has the experience or specializes in sales enablement and this stuff, it really is important to bring in an outside person, whether it's an agency or just someone who actually has that experience, because, yes, marketing can create great content, but do they not create the strategy and great content that is used in the sales process? So working with an expert that can help them up level in that way, I think, is really valuable. Yes, totally agree. Okay, great. So let's talk about ROI. Obviously, that matters to everyone and we know, as with marketing, but sales enablement can be a little trickier to track direct ROI, and so tell us the kinds of metrics or KPIs that you might look at when evaluating sales enablement.
Maryanne McWhirter:Yes, Okay, I love this conversation. I mean I hate to start with. It depends, but it is going to depend on your company and what metrics are going to be important to them. But the place you're going to see the uptick is in sales productivity. So reporting activity in your CRM, making sure you have a best way of tracking that but activity in the CRM should definitely be a place and then looking at each, looking at different metrics in each stage of your deals pipeline, so of your sales process. Again, it will depend on what is most important, because every sales process and pipeline is different, but that each stage should be moving a little bit faster. With thoughtful sales enablement initiative in place, you're going to see improvements in time in each of those deal stages. So overall conversion rates, even from one stage to the next, should be higher. So really looking at CRM activity and then the deals pipeline stages, that's where you're going to look for finding that ROI Great.
Dani Buckley:I feel like those are the big ones and for those that like even a couple more ones that I'm thinking of that are like more like API versus necessarily tracking ROI, or even just like out, like tracking how much certain things are being used Right, I know that's something to do Like is this resource actually being used? You know, if you have tools like HubSpot, for instance, has tools where you can see and track the open rate of sales email templates, like are these? Which ones are actually working? Which content is actually being viewed? So I think those things help you build the ROI by tracking some of those metrics. Would you agree?
Maryanne McWhirter:Yeah, and circles back to marketing. Right, well, if it's working for sales, what do we need to be using more in the marketing you?
Dani Buckley:know, yeah, I love that Great, okay, um, so just starting to wrap us up a little here, um, people love like real examples, so can you share with us an example of something that you've worked on with a client? Um, maybe recently it could be a campaign or just specific piece of kind of like, what is just one thing that comes to mind that you think is notable?
Maryanne McWhirter:in sales enablement like what's a recent project.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, a recent example of something you worked on.
Maryanne McWhirter:Yeah, I'm thinking of a sales training that I did for a client recently and it was how to share content on social media Making really focusing that sales enablement on social media and how and what content to share. It was really specific and, again, short enough to make a big impact. It was 30 minutes. I had some actionable takeaways of exact things that this company could be sharing. Yeah To me help themselves be more thought leaders on social media. It was fun for me because I'm connected with most of the sales team. I got to see their posts popping up on LinkedIn and how they counted it and what they took into account from what I taught them. It was rewarding for me on that level. Then getting to see the interactions that they got, which sales people got the most there. It was like the live version of all the social media screenings.
Dani Buckley:Yeah, I love that.
Maryanne McWhirter:I like social media screen. That was really fun. Then, on a bigger level, I would say my sales playbooks are always so fulfilling. I recently delivered a sales playbook to a sales director who started after we had started the sales playbook Brand new sales directors stepping into a role, trying to learn the ropes, getting to know his team, making improvements, getting his footing at the company but he was really excited to have it as a launching place for his sales team. For all the sales hiring and growing with it was really fun to get to equip a brand new sales manager with a playbook to help them. Awesome, I love that.
Dani Buckley:Great, just to close us out, because we are at about a time, is there any burning insights or thoughts you want to share with our audience that might be thinking about starting or elevating their sales enablement efforts? Anything that we haven't touched on?
Maryanne McWhirter:I just want to. I think it's important to end this the same way we started it, that is, to get started now. Don't come up with excuses for why it would be too complicated. It does not have to be too complicated. Creating a sales enablement strategy for your company is not going to look like others. Starting small with just one sales play or a basic CRM for your sales team or a basic deals pipeline to outline your process. It does not have to be all three of those things. Just starting somewhere is going to be the best advice I could give anybody. If you don't think you're ready for all the things, start.
Dani Buckley:I love that, yeah, great. Thank you, marianne. So much for your time and sharing your expertise. Such a pleasure finally having you on the show. For those that want to connect with Marianne, you can find her contact information in the show notes. I know she'd love to connect on LinkedIn. You'll follow up questions. She's your girl. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Until then, happy selling.