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Jun 22 2020

What is Sales Enablement? [Podcast]

In Episode 7 of The Sales Way Podcast, we tackle the question “What is Sales Enablement”. Here is the episode in full, but we’ve also included a transcript of the episode below.

What is B2B Sales Enablement – Transcript

There are countless explanations about what Sales Enablement is or isn’t – and one thing I’ve found, is that the answer to this question is never that straightforward, and there are often conflicting views. So in this episode, we’re going to look at explaining what we mean by “Sales Enablement”.

Our perspective

Sales Enablement is enabling sales: basically, removing all the blockers that could prevent a sale from happening.

Here are a number of potential blockers we typically see in sales:

I don’t understand my customers
I don’t know who my customers are
I don’t know enough about my product to sell it
I don’t have the sales skills to effectively sell my product
I don’t have the resources and content to share with my customers
I don’t have the tools to properly do my job
I don’t have a sales process I can follow to achieve success

So, there are obviously other, additional blockers that you might think of, but these are the common ones we hear from clients – and sales enablement seeks to remove these blockers, across sales training, sales tools (such as CRM, call monitoring and coaching), content (for both customers, marketing activities and internal training, such as Sales Playbooks), and sales processes and methodologies.

Where does Sales Enablement fit in an organization?

Sales enablement crosses into marketing, sales management, product management, sales ops and sales training departments – sitting across all of these areas. Sometimes an organization might have a dedicated Sales Enablement department, other times, sales enablement might be a multi-departmental network of people who come together to deliver a sales enablement initiative or program.

What does Sales Enablement look like?

If we take the previous ‘blocker statements’ we mentioned before, we can demonstrate how enablement might address each of those statements:

I don’t understand my customers – Sales training on different target industries and their motivators; Account Planning
I don’t know who my customers are – Training around identifying target customer profiles; Territory planning
I don’t know enough about my product to sell it – Product training and positioning
I don’t have the sales skills to effectively sell my product – General sales skill training and role plays
I don’t have the resources and content to share with my customers – Content creation; Marketing collateral; Product information
I don’t have the tools to properly do my job – Sales operations delivery of CRM tools, etc.
I don’t have a sales process I can follow to achieve success – Company defined processes; Sales operations processes

Bringing it all together

The Sales Enablement function brings all of these different areas together to provide an ‘engine’ by which all sales training, content and process activities power.

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Jun 10 2020

Creating Effective Sales Messaging – Podcast

Hey – we made it to Episode 6 of The Sales Way Podcast!

In this episode, we go into a super simple framework for how to create effective sales messaging – and provide a simple framework for how to build your own sales messaging from scratch. Here’s the podcast episode with the edited transcript below:

This week’s episode follows on from Episode 5 from the podcast where we looked at how to tailor your sales messaging, across Company Messaging, Industry Messaging, Product Messaging, Buyer Messaging and more.

A framework for Sales Messaging success

Here is a simple framework we use with clients to help them start to build their Sales Messaging:

The types of organizations you are focusing on
- For example, are you targeting the Education sector? If so, then what types of educational institutions? Primary schools? Or universities?
- For each organization ‘type’, your messaging can be tailored to best target that particular organization so that the messaging best resonates with buyers.
The buyer roles within those organizations
- Who are you targeting within those organizations? What messaging will you use for the Finance Director at your customers versus the IT Director?
- What issues are these buyers focusing on? What are they talking about online? What are they trying to do?
Challenges your customers are facing
- Your sales messaging needs to align to your customers’ challenges – and these challenges can be segmented into the different organization types that you’re targeting.
End points that your customers are trying to reach
- By this, we mean the aspirational end position your customers want to reach – what does life look like when they’ve achieved their goals?
- Where are they trying to get to? What does success look like?
- How does your sales messaging speak to that?
How your product aligns
- Of course, everything comes back to aligning your product to these challenges and aspirational end points for your customer.
- Try to align your product to each individual challenge and objective if you can.
Keywords and industry terminology
- What industry buzzwords should you be using in your sales messaging?
- What important keywords do you want to focus on for your SEO efforts? (As your sales messaging should flow down hierarchically from core sales messaging, to web copy, to campaign content etc)
Sector trends and news
- What are the big sector trends and news items that you need to touch on in your sales messaging? It may not flow into your core messaging, but you will need to touch on key industry trends in your web copy and solution messaging.

Want to know more about B2B Sales Enablement?

Sign up to our B2B sales enablement podcast, The Sales Way, to stay up to date with the latest insights and tips for anyone working in B2B sales leadership.

May 28 2020

How To Tailor Your Sales Messaging

In Episode 5 of The Sales Way Podcast we look at how you can tailor your B2B sales messaging – to have more impact and deliver greater results. Here’s the podcast episode with the edited transcript below:

We’ve also included an edited transcript below about how to make your sales messaging more bespoke to your customers so that it resonates more with prospects.

Let’s get started with looking at the different levels of sales messaging through our Sales Messaging Hierarchy.

Sales Messaging Hierarchy - B2B Sales Enablement - Contemsa

Company Level Messaging

So firstly – we have your Company Level messaging.

This is where you position your company as a whole, and the aim is to help your buyers understand where you fit in the market, as a company.

So what are you known for providing?
What differentiates you from the competition?
What value are you, as a company, bringing to your customers?

I also like to think of company level messaging as being about helping customers to place you and figure out where you fit in their ‘needs’ ecosystem.

So as an example, I’ve been following a company on LinkedIn who help businesses with podcasting.

So immediately, as a potential customer for them, I am trying to figure out where exactly they fit in the podcasting ecosystem to understand how they can help me. Are they helping companies with launching a podcast, or are they helping with recording and editing podcasts? Or perhaps they help with marketing podcasts or repurposing content from podcast episodes into other marketing materials?

Sales Messaging - Where Do You Fit - Contemsa

So the aim of their Company Level messaging helps me, as a customer, to understand who they are, what they do, where they fit, and how they can bring value to me.

Solution Level Messaging

Ok, let’s move on to Solution Level messaging.

This is where you’re proposing a method or solution option for the customer – and it’s the stage before they have fully decided on the type of product they are going to purchase. You could also think of this messaging as ‘Customer Challenge’ level messaging.

Sales Messaging - Solution Challenges - Contemsa

I’m going to use an example of ‘outsourcing your IT’ as a solution. Underneath this solution header, you might have multiple products or services that you would use to deliver that solution to the customer (such as IT hosting, IT support services and so on…)

Now, your customer could also be considering other solutions to their problem, such as keeping their IT running in-house, instead of outsourcing the IT to an external provider. So, when we talk about solution-level messaging, we’re positioning a method, approach or journey to customers – therefore we want to demonstrate in our messaging how our proposed solution would help the customer to overcome their challenges and enable them to meet their business’ aspirations and goals (which is the core of how we build out Sales Playbook content).

But, the important thing to recognise here is to make sure you’re delivering the right message at the right time – if your customer is still at the solution stage where they’re deciding what route to take in order to solve their business challenge, it makes no sense to be positioning your products here.

Likewise, if your competitors are positioning their sales messaging at a solution level, you need to make sure you’re not responding with product level messaging.

Take this example:

Imagine you’ve decided that you want to find an alternative way to get to work instead of using your car each day.

You’ve decided to talk to a company who sells electric bikes, and a company that offers an on-demand carshare service.

You’ve not yet decided which option you want to go with, never mind being ready to decide on a specific supplier or product.

The company offering an on-demand car service has sales messaging focused on the benefits of moving away from owning your own car and the benefits of paying for travel just when you need it, instead of investing capital up front in a car.

However, when you speak to the company selling electric bikes, they start telling you how their latest electric bike goes twice as fast as competitors’ bikes but uses half the energy, and has 20 gears.

These are two different levels of messaging, and the detail about the bike’s features is only relevant once you have decided that you are going to purchase a bike.

Instead, the electric bike company should focus on selling at a higher level – focusing on the benefits of moving away from car journeys towards less pollutant modes of transport, or why the exercise benefits of non-car journeys deliver amazing health benefits to their customers.

Then, once you decide that an electric bike is the right choice, you can look at product level messaging to make your choice about which bike to buy.

Product Level Messaging

So, that leads us nicely on to product messaging. Like in the example I’ve just been through – it’s about positioning how your product delivers value to your customers, how it aligns to their challenges and business objectives and what it enables them to do or achieve.

Each of your products will likely need their own sales messaging that forms the basis of any product briefs, brochures or sales presentations that you deliver.

Now, let’s look at how you can further tweak your company, solution and product messaging to make it more relevant to your customers.

This first way is by making your messaging Customer Industry specific.

Customer Industry Sales Messaging

This is about tailoring your messaging to align with the different sectors in which you operate.

For example, you might sell outsourced IT services into the Financial Services Sector – in which case, you might create specific messaging about why Financial Services organisations should choose your company to work with. You might also develop specific messaging about how your solutions support financial services organisations’ specific industry challenges, and have specific messaging in place for each of your products so that they align with the challenges, objectives, initiatives and perspectives that are bespoke to the financial services sector.

This makes your messaging more compelling and allows you to drill down into specifics for each of your customers’ industries.

Secondly, you can tailor your messaging to fit specific buyer roles.

Buyer Role Sales Messaging

You can also customise how you position your products to buyers in the HR Department, for example, compared with how you position the product to buyers in the finance department – and so on.

In our Sales Playbooks, we typically include three Buyer Roles for each product or service to help sales reps have more credible conversations with different buyer profiles across their customers, using the right language for the specific buyer role.

So if we’re talking to finance, we might discuss the CapEx versus OpEx benefits of our service, or if we’re talking to marketing, then we might focus on how our service will deliver more brand exposure for their company.

You can tailor sales messaging across departments or even across Managers versus staff – for example, an IT Administrator will have different motivators to the CIO. The key is obviously creating sales messaging for roles which have an impact on your sale – so either your sales messaging is targeted at decision makers or contacts who can influence the sale in some way.

Customer Challenge Sales Messaging

You can also create sales messaging that is organised into different customer challenges – focusing on each challenge one by one, and aligning your product/service messaging to demonstrate how you help customers solve this challenge, in detail. This can be really useful if there is a handful of very specific customer challenges that your product is great at solving, or if there are a wide variety of applications for your product then it can be a good way to get your sales teams clear on how to sell your product so that it aligns to different buyer requirements.

Customer Objective Sales Messaging

Like the Customer Challenge Sales Messaging, we can also create sales messaging focused on how our product aligns to specific customer objectives. You might call these ‘Sales Plays’ – where we take a specific objective such as ‘Reducing business operating costs’ and then align sales messaging to demonstrate how your product or service can deliver results for customers wanting to reduce their business costs.

In future podcast episodes, we’re going to go into more detail about how to craft your sales messaging, from start to finish.

Sign up to our B2B sales enablement podcast, The Sales Way, to stay up to date with the latest insights and tips for anyone working in B2B sales leadership.

May 18 2020

Here’s Why You Need to Involve Salespeople in Your Sales Playbook Creation

Involving Salespeople in the Sales Playbook Process

In Episode 2 of The Sales Way Podcast, we look at why it’s crucial to involve salespeople in your Sales Playbook creation process.

Take a listen to the episode here, and we’ve also included an edited transcript of the podcast episode below. (If you want to hear more B2B Sales Enablement insights, subscribe to our podcast to get notified when we launch a new episode).

Episode 2 – Transcript

Involving Salespeople in the Sales Playbook Creation Process -What’s the issue?

Sales Playbooks often start their lives in the Product Management department, and it can be months before a salesperson ever sees the sales playbook – in fact, it’s often only when a product is actually launched that salespeople get access to the sales playbook.

And then it’s usually too late.

We’re not saying that Product Managers can’t create fantastic sales playbooks – it’s just sales playbooks will always be better if sales teams are involved in its creation early on.

There’s a few reasons for this:

Sales reps are front and center when it comes to engaging with your customers – they are hearing about the challenges your customers are facing, they’re working on support issues – in short, they are dealing with customers on a daily basis. They are your communication funnel into customers – so use their insights in your playbook.
Salespeople can tell you what objections they are coming up against regularly to inform your playbook contents.
Salespeople can word content in a way that appeals to other salespeople – it has to be grounded in real-world phrasing that sales reps can go in and use with customers.

By involving sales reps in the formative, developmental stages of your sales playbook creation process, you avoid the issue of executives often guessing at what customers’ objections might be. Instead, you can use real-life customer concerns and perspectives to make your playbooks as relevant as they can be.

You’re trying to avoid the playbook ending up being yet another sales training content document sat on an unused portal or intranet – it needs to be a living, breathing, valuable asset.

So what do we want to achieve with our sales playbooks?

Where we’re trying to get to is a sales enablement nirvana where salespeople are continually ploughing back content and feedback into the sales content creation funnel. This means that salespeople are involved in first creating the content, then they are involved in tweaking and refining the content based on their experiences when they go out into the world using your content in sales pitches and client interactions.

Involving Salespeople in the Sales Playbook Process - Funnel

This has results in two benefits:

More relevant content: Your content will naturally be more relevant as it includes real-world insights and perspectives.
More buy-in from salespeople: If you take out a Sales Playbook to your sales teams and say, “This is what our most successful and experienced sales colleagues have said works in a live customer situation – this is the blueprint they’re following to achieve success,” then you’re more likely to get buy in from your wider sales team.

What people often forget is that you need to sell your sales playbook to your sales teams. Tell them why this is going to help them, how it’s going to help them to be more successful, what value it’s going to bring them, in effect – it’s like creating a sales pitch for your sales playbook.

After all, if you can’t sell a really valuable, insight-packed, success-charged sales playbook into your sales teams, then what hope do you have for selling your products?

Getting Sales Playbook Buy-In – Checklist

So here’s a mini checklist to focus your efforts:

Involve salespeople early on to find out what they actually want in a sales playbook, instead of guessing what they might want.
If it’s an existing product that the playbook will focus on, then ask sales reps what objections and challenges they have in selling that product, and build from there.
If the playbook is going to be used to sell a new product, then ask your sales teams about objections and sales play issues related to similar products, or what customer challenges are for the industries your product will be sold into.
Once the product is launched, have a plan where you revisit the playbook 1 month, 6 months and 12 months after launch to refine the content based on objections and insights coming back in from customers.

Creating a sales playbook is all about making the playbooks as relevant as they possibly can be. They are complex, and long documents – let’s not forget that, so you want to make the most out of your time and financial investment in creating a sales playbook by making it as useful and relevant as you can.

For a free guide on how to create a Sales Playbook – check out our Sales Playbook Guide which talks you through everything you need to know. And, if you want to create a professional B2B sales playbook, then take a look at our Sales Playbook Templates which include battlecard and playbook templates, plus all the supporting documentation and resources you need to create a dynamic and ready-to-go sales playbook.

Sales Playbook Template Pack

$89.00

Shop now

Subscribe to our podcast, The Sales Way, for B2B sales enablement leaders and sales managers to hear more insights on sales enabling your teams.

The Sales Way Podcast - B2B Sales Enablement

May 11 2020

A New Podcast for B2B Sales Enablement Leaders – The Sales Way

The Sales Way is a simple, bite-sized podcast for B2B Sales Leaders

We’ve launched a B2B Sales Enablement Podcast – providing simple tips and insights on all topics sales enablement related; from building your company’s sales playbook to building a successful reseller partner program.

Delivered in simple bite-sized chunks, we give you the info you need to be more successful in your sales enablement activities.

So, why did we decide to launch a B2B Sales Enablement podcast?

We’ve created sales playbooks and sales enablement content for some of the world’s most successful companies – and we wanted to share the knowledge and insights we’ve collected from creating sales playbooks, B2B marketing content and reseller programs with organisations who are looking to level up their sales and marketing efforts.

But wait, we’re trying to do something a little different here. There are already a number of really good sales enablement podcasts and sales success podcasts out there – but we wanted to create a simple, straightforward, bite-sized podcast for busy B2B sales professionals who need the info to do their jobs more successfully in a quick and snappy format. Listen to our episodes while making a coffee, then get down to putting our insights into action.

For now, the podcasts are quick snippets – but in time we are looking to open it up to feature interviews with sales leaders and experts if we think it can bring reliable, actionable and tangible value to our listeners.

What can we expect to hear about?

The main topic for our podcast is B2B Sales Enablement, but at times we will stray into reseller program building, content marketing, thought leadership building and sales skills. But what we can guarantee is that every topic is relevant to today’s modern B2B Sales Enablement Leaders and Sales Management.

Here’s an idea of what we’ll be covering:

Sales playbooks
Reseller sales enablement
Reseller programs
Account management
Meeting planning
Sales training approaches
Storytelling in sales
Account planning
Social selling
And more….!

Who should be listening to the podcast?

The Sales Way has been created with B2B Sales Enablement Leaders in mind, whether you’re a Sales Enablement Manager or working in B2B Sales Management – or perhaps you’re in B2B Marketing and you’ve been tasked with creating sales content for your company’s salespeople – we’ve got you covered with insights and quick tips to help you deliver more successful programs.

Why have you decided to launch this now?

We ADORE podcasts – we listen to them all the time, on lots of topics – both business and personal (maybe we’ll do a post on our favourite podcasts). And we felt there was a gap for Sales leaders who needed a fresh, snappy podcast which could give them enough tangible and actionable insights in the time it takes to drink a coffee (or, well, if you’re me, it’s a strong English Breakfast tea every time).

Who is the host?

Well – it’s me, Carrie! I worked in corporate sales for a multinational technology company selling enterprise IT to both Public Sector and Private Sector organisations, and also in reseller sales; looking after a number of growing technology resellers to help them grow their business. For the past 7 years, I’ve run Contemsa (formerly known as The Sales Way – which is where our podcast name came from!), creating sales playbooks and content marketing for companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, Pulsant and other large tech companies.

Carrie Morgan - B2B Sales Enablement Podcast

Where can we access the podcast?

You can access The Sales Way Podcast on all your favourite podcast apps and players…