Mike Kunkle on The Building Block of Sales Enablement

There’s a lot that must be done to optimize the performance of a sales force. While it can be intimidating and sometimes even overwhelming, it’s also what makes sales enablement so powerful and valuable. My approach has always followed a key theme. It’s better to learn a formula to figure out what’s right for you than to be told what to do. And that’s what I’m going to share with you today.

If you can move the needle on the metrics that matter most, it makes you an invaluable asset to your leadership team. To do it, to really move the needle, you need a sales enablement plan that will support your organization’s strategic goals and objectives and enable your sales force to reach its highest potential to realize those objectives. This is exactly what the building blocks of sales enablement will help you do.

So, what are the building blocks of sales enablement? Good question. Let’s dig in. The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement is a framework of 15 elements, including a dozen performance levers you can pull to get better sales results. Let’s take it row by row.

It all starts with buyer acumen or a deep understanding of your buyers and customers. This is the market you serve and your ICP or ideal customer profile. Who are they? What are their roles and goals in their “Coinop” or their challenges, opportunities, impacts, needs, outcomes, and priorities? This includes building great personas with the metrics that matter most or how they’re measured, emotional factors, people they work with internally when they’re buying, their buying process, or what’s often referred to as the buyer’s journey, the decision criteria, and more.

Having this information allows you to create buyer engagement content to attract the right buyers to you, based on the problems they have, that you solve, or the opportunities they face that you can enable, and to help them make good decisions at each stage of their journey, culminating in a purchase decision. Then you can build the playbooks and sales support content to help your reps sell to these buyers effectively. Those are the first three building blocks: Buyer acumen, Buyer Engagement content, and sales support content.

The next three blocks are well-understood: Sales Hiring, Sales Training, and Sales Coaching. We know these are critical and blend perfectly. All three blocks have specific systems that support them in ways to implement best practices effectively that will help you get the best possible results.

The 3rd row includes Sales Process, Sales Methodology, and Sales Analytics and Metrics. These blocks aren’t always owned by Sales Enablement, but they’re important to get right and have a massive influence on sales performance. Sales process and analytics or metrics are often owned by Sales or Revenue Operations. Methodology varies but is increasingly owned by enablement in any case. Sales Enablement influences their adoption and orchestrates progress through effective cross-functional collaboration. Sales process, methodology, and analytics are important building blocks to support high performance.

In the last three core blocks are Sales Technology and Tools, Sales Compensation and Recognition, and Sales Manager Enablement. Tools should support the effective execution of the process and methodology or make the Rep more efficient after they’ve become effective. Compensation must reward the behaviors and outcomes you want to see. Interestingly, with comp plans, avoiding dissatisfaction is equally as important as fostering satisfaction. Sales manager enablement is a topic unto itself. It’s critical, too often ignored, and far more extensive than this small block size conveys. It also has an entire system dedicated to it called the Sales Management System.

Next is Communication Management with both the sales force and cross-functional collaboration with the Sales Enablement Charter for alignment. Many enablement teams are the communication conduit to the sales force for consistency of timing, where to find communications, formatting, and messaging. Cross-functional collaboration with alignment through a charter and with top-down support is key to aligning around your buyers and customers and how the organization will support the sales force to get the best possible results serving those buyers and customers. Expanding your impact since you can’t do everything is part of the purpose behind this cross-functional collaboration. It’s a force multiplier.

Next, while it’s not something that’s done everywhere, is Sales Support Services. This includes things like RFP support, presentation support, research support, or even coaching services.

Last is Systems Thinking, which is key to getting results. For this reason, let’s dive a little deeper here. The building blocks are the framework, the pieces of the puzzle, or the performance levers. The systems are how you execute to maximize the blocks and drive repeatable, replicable, and predictable results.

In terms of the systems, there are many possible ones you can build to support the building blocks in your sales force. The systems I work with most frequently— because over many years I’ve seen them make the most impact, are the Sales Hiring System, the Sales Readiness System, the Sales Training System, and the Sales Management System, which includes an embedded Sales Coaching System.

Speaking of embedded systems, notice that the sales training system is actually a subset of the sales readiness system. I find that it’s important enough to call it out specifically. In addition, you’ll notice that the five stages of sales mastery and behavior change are nested inside the training system. This is how systems work. They are interrelated and interdependent, joining to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Again, a force multiplier.

For that reason, let’s look at the sales coaching system as well, which is labeled as the sales coaching framework inside the larger sales management system. The sales coaching system is the detail behind the sales coaching framework. In the sales management system that I just mentioned, there is a framework that includes inputs, people, a process, and outputs. It models field training, sales coaching, and how to lead an individual coaching session to produce an action plan that will lead to improved results. This is the sales coaching system.

Here is another view of how the blocks and systems intersect. I won’t review this in detail now, but I wanted you to have it in the slides to refer to later.

This is one of my favorite quotes: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” In communication management, we talked about cross-functional communication and collaboration. John Kotter calls this building a guiding coalition in his books on Change Management. To do this, you start with what I call the bricks in the wall. By identifying all the stakeholders and functions that you’ll work with to support your sales force, you need to get aligned with these cross-functional collaborators on how you’ll support your sales force in supporting your buyers and customers.

As you look at this chart, I can’t tell you whether these are the exact functions in your case. This is just an example. You need to determine which functions and who in them it is that you’ll work with in sales enablement at your company. Once you define these stakeholders, you will build a Sales Enablement Charter. You start with why – to answer the question, why are you starting or evolving your sales enablement function? Next, you determine how you will define sales enablement in your company. Sales enablement is not always exactly the same everywhere because context matters a great deal. What’s required in a startup would be different than what’s required in a stable mid-market firm or in a large corporate enterprise. Here, you define what sales enablement will mean for you and your company.

Then, it’s critical to determine who is going to do what. As I mentioned, in sales enablement, you can’t possibly do everything or own everything. For example, marketing is going to own content marketing, buyer engagement content, and possibly even sales support content, although that could be a training group if you have one of those, or it maybe you in sales enablement. This is why it’s important to define who is going to do what in your sales enablement function and how this work will be done and to what level, by answering these questions with your other stakeholders and collaborators. You’ll get the clarity and alignment you need to make an impact.

Look, a boat won’t go forward very well if everyone is rowing in different directions. Now, if you can’t answer all of these questions at the outset, that’s actually okay. If you take your collaborators with you on the upcoming journey you’re going to take, you’ll answer them by the time you’re done. Now that you have done this work, how can you build a business case to support your plan and get the budget you need to deliver the results your leaders want? Not surprisingly, a sales discovery methodology works exceptionally well here. In my Modern Sales Foundations course, we call it a situation assessment, and it can be applied equally as well to sales enablement planning with excellent results. Rather than using this as a buyer-facing discovery approach, you are now using it internally aimed at your own sales force.

Using a Current State – Desired Future State Framework, you will document “Coinop” and its impacts. “Coinop” means challenges, opportunities, impacts, needs, outcomes, and priorities. The general idea is this: Start from the context of how your sales force is structured and how they go to market. I call this “Who sells what to whom, and how?” Then understand the current state, including the challenges faced, opportunities available, and the impacts of either not resolving the challenges or not capitalizing on those opportunities.

Next, document the desired future state, including the desired outcomes and the priority of those outcomes. These outcomes should reflect your executive team’s strategic objectives and your senior sales leaders’ goals and objectives for the upcoming planning cycle. Then, conduct a gap analysis to determine what it will take to close the gap and reach the desired future state. These become the needs or what’s needed to move from point A to point B.

Next, conduct an impact analysis to assess the impact of the gap. What is the dollarized gain if the outcomes are achieved? What risks can be lessened or averted? What cost savings can be documented? Lastly, you can then work to dollarize these answers and compare the cost incurred and perhaps even the pain of change to forecast return on investment. This is how you identify compelling business issues.

Tie your initiatives to the strategic objectives and the metrics that matter most to your executives, which enable you to prioritize and execute accordingly. That is a situation assessment. Now that you know the desired future state and the desired outcomes and priorities, you can do a gap analysis of the building blocks too. There are a lot of building blocks, right? And you may not be able to get them all in place initially, especially if you’re starting an enablement function. Even if you’re evolving, though, it’s going to depend on what you’re evolving from and where you’re evolving to, based on your organization’s goals.

Some blocks may be much more important than others, and you may have some in place perfectly already, with much more work to do on others. This will help you prioritize the blocks relative to your situation assessment and your senior leaders’ desired outcomes. With all of that done, lastly, you can now conduct a force field analysis starting with the current state and the desired future state. From your situation assessment, you analyze the forces that are pushing you forward and those that are holding you back.

Once you’ve listed all of the forces from your previous analyses, you can ask yourself two questions to develop a meaningful sales enablement plan. One, how can I reduce or eliminate the restraining forces that are holding me back? And two, how can I strengthen or add driving forces when you consider the situation assessment, which is what your leaders want to achieve, and your building blocks gap analysis? This is what helps you create an actionable plan that ties back to the strategic objectives and metrics that matter most to your executive team and senior sales leader.

Here is a high-level visual summary of this planning framework that you can reference later. The big takeaway is that the outcomes and priorities of the executive team and senior sales or revenue leader are the common thread and dot connection culminating in the Sales enablement plan. You still need to execute well, but this is how you plan to make an impact with enablement.

Also, as a takeaway and for your reference later, I’ve included a more detailed chart on this framework, which I hope will be helpful as you work to develop a sales enablement plan that will deliver results for your company.

Hello again, folks. So, you know, there is a small appendix in the slides. First, the appendix includes a link to a more detailed ebook, normally $12.95 but free for you for being here today. You can download it at the link you see here, once you have the slides, or if you don’t want to wait, you can go to bit.ly/bbofse-ebook, all lowercase or take a picture and you can use the QR code to get the downloadable PDF of the ebook ungated and free.

There’s also a brief thank you note from me and some additional links to explore. I’ve also included my bio with my emails and the places you can connect with me and follow my content. Well, that’s it for today, everyone. Many thanks for being here. Subhanjan— thank you for having me. I knew this was a rapid-fire presentation, but I hope this content with the slides and additional resources will be helpful. This is Mike Kunkle. Stay the course, my friends, and make an impact with Enablement.

Subhanjan Sarkar   

As you would have presumed, it was a recorded session. In fact, the next one with Deb Calvert is also recorded. But it was also a way for us to experiment with the 18-20 minute format. And I am surprised at how much you can pack in 20 minutes and make the time worthwhile. I’m really glad that we are trying this.

Just in case some of you don’t know Mike, I want to give you a quick intro. He is the author of the book ‘Building Blocks of Sales Enablement’. He is a respected sales transformation architect and an internationally recognized expert on sales training, sales effectiveness, and sales enablement. He’s spent 36 years in the sales profession and 26 years as a corporate leader and consultant, helping companies drive dramatic revenue growth through best-in-class training strategies and proven-effective sales transformation systems. Mike is the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC, and today works as the Vice President of Sales Effectiveness Services for SPARXiQ, where he advises clients, publishes thought leadership, speaks at conferences, leads webinars, develops sales training courses, delivers workshops, and designs and implements sales enablement systems that get results.

We will be back in a couple of minutes with Deb Calvert. See you in a bit.

show less