How sales organizations justify spending sometimes baffles me. As a small business owner, there is no such thing as “poor utilization”. There is either “we use it, or we cut it”.
Here are the three topics this week:
1. AE’s LinkedIn Navigator = 12% Utilization – what’s your plan?
2. Enablement has fallen into the Project Management Trap. No IP innovation.
3. Case Study – how we’re booking meetings in the “Window of Change”.
AE’s LinkedIn Navigator = 12% Utilization – what’s your plan?
RevOps leaders, I think you’re running into an inflection point with your CFOs. I think the enormous LinkedIn Navigator expenditure vs. usage/utilization is going to shock the pants off the average CFO. I believe there are two (2) options:
Option A – accept Pareto’s Law. Accept your fate as a “we have extended these licenses as FOMO to be like everyone else”. The AVERAGE sales organization has a measly 12% utilization rate. That’s not even Pareto’s Law (80:20 law). 12% means that a handful of AE’s are driving all the results from the tool.
Option B – don’t be a Standard Operator. Be best-in-class. Enable your way through the challenge. Enable through the teach-back method:
- Teach a workflow/sales play from LinkedIn
- Have the team practice it in a game-time / live scenario
- Have each AE teach that very concept back to each other, a sales manager, etc.
Indoctrinating these workflows into the DNA of the sales team requires sellers to be able to continuously showcase game-time decision-making / strategic thinking using LinkedIn:
- Selecting & Prioritizing accounts based on Signals (job changes, Comments, M&A activity, capital raises, etc.
- Key Account Plan and “Socially Surround” the buying committee members.
- Engage prospecting using a structured cadence leveraging DM LinkedIn messages
- etc.
Results – the best-in-class sales organization has +50% of their sellers driving +20% of their pipeline each year from LinkedIn lead creation. That’s most likely 20% more than you’re getting today.
Enablement has fallen into the Project Management Trap. No IP innovation.
This is a call out to sales leaders, looking back at their sales enablement teams and recognizing that sales enablement has drifted slowly into a bit of an IP trap. Let me explain. Sales enablement initially had the idea to CREATE training knowledge IP, teach the IP to your sales team, and transfer knowledge to your sales team.
Now the original cohorts of sales enablement were former IP developers & sales trainers who created some of the best methodologies. They might have been from Franklin Covey, certified SPIN Sellers, Challenger Sale, or more recently Social Selling experts. Over time, we watched the sales enablement function become program managers.
In essence, they are no longer creating unique IPs. They needed to acquire IP from IP creators like Pipeline Signals and Sales for Life. They bring social selling in as a program and they would manage the programs. And every once in a while, really forward-thinking teams would proactively “train the trainer”, meaning that the enablement teams would actually become certified and licensed on a topic. So forever the IP sits within your business. Now every new hire that came into your business, Social Selling could be part of the culture. The IP was permanently in your business.
Unfortunately, sales enablement drifted away from this. And now we’re in 2023, we are in a tough market. Where is your playbook?
The call right now from CFOs is you had better create a lot more yield-per-seller because we’re not giving you more tools. We don’t have room for headcount, so you need to get 5% better from every seller. And how do you do that in the downmarket???
UPLEVEL!. Get everybody incrementally better. 5% better at scale can become a 20% more sales pipeline as a sales organization as a team.
But here’s the challenge. You have sales enablement teammates that can’t bring anything new to the table. They don’t have any unique IP.
Dud.
So, this is an opportunity for you. Grab sales enablement “We need a partner. We need you to be bigger!”
We need to ensure those partners teach us. And that we need to retain that IP and our business forever. Prospecting is always going to be important to us. We need to learn and apply “self-sourcing” forever.
Case Study – Case Study – how we’re booking meetings in the “Window of Change”.
We just created a sales opportunity today using what’s called the Window of Change.
Here is how it works:
- Every single month, we make a list of the accounts we want to target. And within those accounts, we are monitoring the CRO, CMO, SVP Sales, etc, that takes a new role and a new company.
- The clock starts. The window of change dictates that in the First 100 days, that new executive is going to acquire a budget. They’re going to go to their board by Day 100. align with the CEO, and acquire a budget.
- That executive within the “window of change” is going to deploy up to 70% of that remitted budget within the first 100 days. The window of change is magical.
Day 30 = Assess challenges in a company
Day 30-75 = executive looks for initiatives to bring into the business
Day 75-100 = prep for the Board meeting
Day +100 = deploy capital against their +3 top priorities.
When we message, we are SHARING. Sharing knowledge. We provide data, insights, competitive intelligence, and best practices.
We are NOT SELLING. We are informing of best practices in the First 100 days of their role based on our customers.
If we align to a problem they have, they will bring us in.
Today we booked such a meeting.
FREE RESOURCE – Self-Generated Quota Gap & Activity Tracker.
Are your AE’s struggling to meet sales quota?
They could have a QUOTA GAP.
Do they know what percentage of their sales quota THEY NEED TO SELF-SOURCE? (not driven inbound from marketing or the channel)?
For many companies, this is shocking. This could be 50%, 75%, or even 90% of every AE’s sales quota.
Ensure your sales team clearly understands where they need to focus their efforts.
Free Resource:
Self-Generated Quota Gap & Activity Tracker
Do your Account Executives (AE’s) need more leads than Marketing can provide?
Do your Account Executives have a sales quota that’s larger than your current Inbound Marketing lead flow?
Each AE needs to understand their “Self-Generated Quota Gap” – the percentage of quota THEY ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR not covered from inbound sources. They have to create this sales pipeline themselves.