How to Build Credibility in Sales Enablement

What are some common gripes you hear about sales enablement practitioners? Here's a sample list of what I've heard:

• They don't really understand how to sell.
• They sit in an ivory tower and the training is not grounded in reality.
• They just repackage content from product marketing.
• They make me sit through hours of online training videos, some are boring, many are stale.

That was my fear as I made my transition from product marketing to sales enablement five years ago. If you weren't formerly a star sales rep at the current company, chances are low people will bestow credibility on you from the get-go. On the other hand, just because you were the star sales rep doesn't mean you know how to teach people or have transferable skills.

So what can you do? Here are some ways I've used successfully here at Black Duck. I won't be offended if they are not useful for you.

1. Walk in their shoes

Early on here, after I worked with the sales leadership to define our sales process, I set about making sure it works and doing it myself. That meant I was:

• building target account lists to make sure our prospecting tools worked
• using LinkedIn Navigator to make sure the buyer personas we've identified were easy to find on LinkedIn
• running email and calling cadence to make sure our cadence tool worked
• making cold calls myself to make sure our scripts work as intended

Every inefficiency in our process was much more obvious because I personally experienced the frustrations or confusion. We refined our tools, processes, and content until I felt comfortable it flowed.

2. Train them as a sales manager would

The second phase of my approach was to look at enablement through the lens of a sales manager. It's quite different getting a team of business development folks to follow a process rather than doing it yourself. So I literally took on (adding 50% to my burgeoning workload) the role of a full-fledged sales manager running a team of 3 new business development reps (BDRs) and a new closing rep. I also took on the role of closing opportunities myself. What did I learn from this experience?

• What was obvious to me was not obvious to a new BDR. It led me to refine the onboarding process and to document so much of the details we take for granted. The results was a much faster time-to-full-productivity, reducing from an average of 6 months down to 2 months.
• By speaking with prospects directly and closing deals, I not only learned the intricacies of legal contracts and commercial negotiations, but built a tremendous amount of credibility within the sales team and tuned the messaging in a way that you can't get from a focus group.

The result is that new sales tools I create and launch have been personally field-tested and not foisted upon hapless sales reps. Typically, sales reps eye new tools and content with a great deal of suspicion. By being personally closing opportunities, I've built a natural bridge of trust with my reps and they actively come to me looking for advice.

Going from a push model to a pull model has been transformative for our practice.

3. Bring real value to the reps

A lot of times, sales enablement's role is to repackage content from SMEs across the company, make them pretty, and load them on a LMS or facilitate a classroom training.

To make a difference in this area, I make it a point to make sure I personally know 80-90% as much as the SMEs. That means I've personally:

• Installed our product on my home server.
• Use our product regularly and try out new features so I understand and experience them myself.
• Even submitted bug reports back to engineering!

I'm a familiar face to the reps on the floor, but they are unlikely to walk over to Engineering with a question. By being this bridge and personally experiencing the pros and cons of our solution, I can build much more credible content around objecting handling, describing our solution, competitive differentiation, etc., in a way that doesn't sound like "marketing-speak".

Bringing it together...

Credibility has to be earned and not taken for granted. I've seen first-hand the mistake of a new sales enablement person who said "I've done this job 3 times already, let me fix things for you." What they fail to realize is that every market is different, every company has different culture, history, and structure. To assume that you can parachute what you know from another company into your current company is sheer folly.

Take the time to earn credibility and to keep it. It will make your impact far higher and wider than you've ever thought possible.