Sales Enablement Strategies

Talent Acquisition Support

SiriusDecisions helps sales enablement leaders realize sales talent acquisition goals through the partnership of sales, HR and marketing. Our sales processes support efforts to balance time to hire while maximizing the quality of the candidates hired.

Key Issues

1. How do you attract high-performing sales reps?
2. How do you differentiate your organization in order to attract candidates who have the option to choose from thousands of sales openings?
3. How can sales enablement most effectively interlock with HR and sales leadership to define hiring profiles and execute effective recruiting?
4. How do you sell the importance and appeal of sales to Millennials?
5. How can sales enablement leaders help managers consistently and efficiently identify the best candidates?
6. How can sales enablement satisfy the rising demand for faster sales onboarding while maintaining quality training?

How SiriusDecisions Helps

• We help you understand how to define, target, nurture, qualify and hire high performers who have the competencies you need
• We help fine-tune your hiring profile to map to the competency needs of your sales roles and territories
• We define processes to help companies build and manage a talent pipeline
• We help you use insights gained in the hiring process to optimize the onboarding experience of individual reps
• We provide insights into optimal techniques for interviewing and qualifying candidates
• We provide insight into effectively interlocking with the recruiting organization

The SiriusDecisions Advantage

We demonstrate the benefits of blending sales, marketing and HR to realize hiring goals. We apply demand creation techniques to the recruiting process to deliver a flow of desirable candidates. Our recruiting process enables faster, more effective hiring, and our techniques enable hiring managers to more effectively interview and qualify candidates.

Sales Onboarding

SiriusDecisions helps sales enablement leaders take their onboarding programs to the next level.

Key Issues

1. How do you balance speed to productivity with speed to competence for new hires?
2. What blend of training delivery options is optimal?
3. Does your organization have an established learning cadence for new staff members to learn, practice and certify all the skills required by their job roles?
4. Does your learning cadence include active learning practices that enable reps to apply what they learn?
5. Do you differentiate competencies hired vs. competencies to be developed during onboarding vs. competencies to be developed post-onboarding?
6. Do you ensure that sales managers have their own separate onboarding process?

How SiriusDecisions Helps

• We provide processes by which to define, design, develop and deploy effective competency-based onboarding programs
• We provide a framework and guidelines for instilling learning and reinforcement, and promoting retention
• We review onboarding materials, provide feedback and identify gaps
• We provide benchmark data and insight into what similar companies do and what high performers expect in onboarding programs
• We help navigate the technology landscape that can improve onboarding results when thoughtfully executed

The SiriusDecisions Advantage

We help organizations create and execute highly effective and efficient onboarding programs that are consistent, scalable, repeatable and measurable. We do this through with step-by-step guidance for development and execution that is sales methodology agnostic and built on the foundation of proven knowledge retention learning cadences.

Sales Enablement Functional Design and Development

SiriusDecisions helps sales enablement leaders clarify their roles and responsibilities within the organization, identify the competencies they need to succeed in their role, and link their efforts to the overall success of the sales function. Our unique model outlines the roles and responsibilities of the sales enablement function and helps executives prioritize and collaborate on key efforts. Our overall approach and functional models are informed by hundreds of practitioners in the sales enablement space, which allows us to formulate best practices based on extensive, in-depth research.

Key Issues

1. How can you define the sales enablement role?
2. How can you improve sales productivity by bridging the various roles and responsibilities within the sales organization?
3. How can sales enablement show its value?
4. How do you juggle the various responsibilities and agendas of the sales and marketing teams to create alignment and ensure buy-in?

How SiriusDecisions Helps

• We help codify the tasks and responsibilities of sales enablement leaders using our dedicated model
• We understand the responsibilities sales enablement leaders must master to succeed in their roles
• We help sales enablement leaders prioritize what their function owns vs. what they must procure from other functions
• We help sales enablement leaders prioritize their efforts and build business cases to enable better collaboration

The SiriusDecisions Advantage

We offer companies a concise, best-in-class model backed by extensive, time-tested research to help sales enablement leaders perfect their functional roles, defining and reinforcing their integral value within the enterprise and to the sales organization.

Ongoing Learning and Development

We help organizations assess the current state of their ongoing learning against competency maps and adult learning models to discover gaps in effectiveness and completeness. We provide frameworks and data to help prioritize and justify the application of resources to fill these gaps. To support this effort, we help sort through the hype so you can choose from among the many available learning technology and sales methodology providers to understand what is possible and what is practical for your individual organization. The result is the delivery of optimal learning capabilities that ultimately bring improvement in revenue contribution.

Key Issues

1. How do you motivate reps to improve competencies needed for their roles?
2. How do you deliver learning and knowledge in context with reps’ daily activities?
3. How do you capture the attention of the sales force with compelling learning to drive retention of knowledge, skills and process over time?
4. How do you identify high-potential reps and help them develop skills to bring them to the next level?
5. How do you migrate to a coaching culture where good coaching is consistent and impactful?
6. How do you train reps without pulling them from active selling for extended periods of time?
7. How do you deliver on initiative-based training such as product launches and not lose focus on ongoing skills development at the individual level?
8. What technology can help drive learning and support coaching efforts?
9. How do you replicate the success of high-performing reps and drive their skills and behaviors into the broader sales rep population?

How SiriusDecisions Helps

• We give customers benchmark-based insight into what reps need for ongoing development
• We provide simplified frameworks to help assess gaps and instill and reinforce learning
• We assess current programs to identify gaps and opportunities for more effective learning
• We give guidance on effective types of sales methodologies based on a variety of organizational and offering attributes
• We help navigate the technology and vendor landscape to map capabilities to organizational needs

The SiriusDecisions Advantage

We don’t sell rep or sales manager training and therefore we are not bound by a specific sales methodology or approach. Instead we provide practical and proven frameworks and advice to help you make sense of what to train, how to train it, how to demonstrate impact and how to get sales reps and managers to ultimately own what is learned.

Sales Communications

SiriusDecisions helps sales enablement leaders establish a process for keeping sales teams informed, engaged and productive while encouraging their feedback. Effective communication with feedback from salespeople fosters the active involvement of high-performing sales personnel and informs initiatives to drive improvements across the company. This sense of personal investment improves rep retention and drives innovation at a faster rate.

Key Issues

1. How do you keep reps informed without overwhelming them with information and calls to action?
2. What is the best approach to consolidating communications and ensuring governance and compliance?
3. How do you cultivate the voice of the field and leverage sales feedback in a systematic and meaningful way?

How SiriusDecisions Helps

• We provide decision support on effective approaches to rationalizing sales communications
• We provide access to benchmark data to help you understand how similar organizations are addressing these challenges and what good looks like
• We provide process guidance and frameworks to inform communication governance and delivery
• We define field advocacy approaches, tactics and processes to promote actionable outcomes

The SiriusDecisions Advantage

Effective communication is always a two-way street. We help sales enablement leaders not only build a data backed case for communication centralization and governance but also establish mechanisms to instill the voice of the sales field as an on-going source of insight and innovation.

Sales Asset Management

SiriusDecisions helps sales enablement leaders understand the vital role that asset management plays in customer acquisition and revenue generation. We use our best practice knowledge, experience and insights to help sales teams understand how the assets used in sales process intertwine with the buyer’s journey.

Key Issues

1. How do you get both internal and external content into the hands of sellers precisely when they need it?
2. How can sales enablement ensure that content is what the sellers need and has impact with buyers?
3. How can sales enablement leaders aggregate, create, manage and measure content that is effective for both reps and buyers?
4. How important is technology in helping to solve this problem?
5. How do you justify the budget needed to solve this challenge?

How SiriusDecisions Helps

• We help organizations set up processes for organizing and delivering content that solves findability and usability problems
• We help sales enablement leaders vet and organize content by connecting it to the sales process and buyer’s journey
• We help build roadmaps to navigate the content technology landscape to facilitate the content finding the rep, rather than tasking reps to find the content
• We rely on fact-based data to pinpoint the content that both effectively empowers sales reps and drives deals forward

The SiriusDecisions Advantage

We help sales enablement leaders understand how to leverage sales asset management to help drive sales success. We describe the asset management approaches used by peer organizations, utilizing benchmark data to track the adoption of best practices.