Power up your revenue engine with Sales Manager Enablement that works
Let’s talk about a topic near and dear to my heart - the importance of Sales Manager Enablement.
What is Sales Manager Enablement?
Sales Manager Enablement is the programatic approach of providing sales managers with the skills, knowledge, tools and resources they need to effectively manage their teams. This includes: support for identifying areas of opportunity, diagnosing challenges, and implementing effective solutions to improve sales team performance and drive revenue growth. Sales Manager Enablement, when done right, is just as robust of a program as that for individual contributor sales reps.
Why is Sales Manager Enablement so important?
Many companies focus solely on sales rep enablement. In fact, this goes so deep in the culture of how many revenue orgs operate, that Sales Managers are often told upon hiring that they don’t have to go through any type of sales onboarding or receive any kind of structured coaching plans themselves! Which of course leads to a myriad of issues including, but not limited to:
Inconsistent deal coaching within the field across teams
Misalignment between managers and reps on expectations of what “good” selling is
Missed revenue targets without an obvious reason why (as you can’t measure chaos)
An inability to adopt new systems and best practices across teams
Overall stalled scalability and org maturity
As an analogy, imagine if your favorite restaurant only had 10 Head Chef’s and no Sous-Chef’s or Line Cooks…you’d have a mess of a meal with no clear identity of cuisine.
At the end of the day, if companies don’t provide the necessary frameworks, tools and resources that Sales Managers need to effectively coach their teams, they are left ill-equipped to identify and solve performance challenges.
And unfortunately for everyone else, no Sales Team failure happens in a void. When Sales Managers aren’t able to address issues as they arise, the burden of remedying the issue (and the pain of failure) affects every team in support of the Sellers, such as: Marketing, Sales Ops, Training and more - which is a sunken operating cost to the business.
Sales Manager Enablement is crucial for driving growth, achieving revenue objectives, and developing sales reps. So, how can this be done well?
Best practices for enabling Sales Managers:
Pro Tip #1: Streamline meetings for productive team success!
“On average, cutting unnecessary meetings could save a company $2M+ each year.”
- UNC Study, 2022
If you want your Managers to have control over the performance of their teams, you need to establish a consistent cadence of meetings for Sales Managers to run every month. This will ensure streamlined communication, goal and strategy alignment, and most importantly - accountability - across the team. Just like how sellers need frameworks to guide them through deals, Sales Managers need a similar structure to guide them through coaching. Here is a recommended list of meetings to implement:
Global Metrics Check In (Weekly): This is a 30-minute meeting held every Monday morning (or start of a week) for the global sales team to attend, and is run by the Head of Sales. This meeting's objective is to give an overview of current revenue targets, select shoutouts to employees for the previous week's successes, quick updates as needed on operations, and most importantly - set and determine the team’s goals and actions for that week on a mass scale for individual teams to implement.
Team Performance Debrief (Weekly): This is a 1-hour meeting held every Friday afternoon (or end of a week) for each team to coordinate independently, as it is run by each team's Manager/Leader. This meeting’s objective is to provide an overview of the status of that individual teams progress against their applicable revenue goals. This also includes having individual reps report on their “highs and lows” of the week, and space for the team to seek assistance or feedback from their peers on their next week's objectives.
Rep:Mgr One-on-One’s (Bi-monthly): This is a 1-hour meeting held every other week between each rep and their direct manager. This meeting’s objective is for individualized skill or process coaching, career planning, and pipeline reviews.
Global Team Deal Desk (Bi-monthly): This is a 1-hour meeting held every other week for the global sales team to attend. This meeting entails having 1-2 sales reps present on their strategy (in the framework of your Sales Methodology) of an in-motion deal, in depth. The meeting overall is run by the Head of Sales, but the designated reps own their own presentations. The objective of this meeting is to live discuss and strategize on active deals as a cohort, in a collaborative format.
GTM Learning Corner (Bi-monthly): This is a 1-hour meeting every other week for the whole global GTM to attend (however, attendance should be optional, unless otherwise stated to avoid schedule fatigue). The objective for this meeting is to provide space for educational opportunities to improve a sales reps' skills, better collaborate with GTM partners or enable operational change management. The meeting should be run by whomever the main Subject Matter Expert of that week's topic is.
Pro Tip #2: Ensure the right technologies to enhance coaching!
“Organizations that use sales coaching tools and technologies report a win rate of 54.4%, compared to 49.9% for those that do not use coaching tools.” - CSO Insights
Technology can be a manager's best friend when it comes to coaching. With the right tech stack and thoughtful implementation, Sales Managers can greatly increase their effectiveness by better identifying opportunities for rep improvement, and serving up solutions that drive revenue - one deal at a time!
However, as with everything discussed in this article - training your managers on how to use these technologies to enhance their Team’s performance is KEY! It’s not enough to have the tool available, you have to implement it with Manager Enablement in mind.
Here are some basic technologies that you should use to better enable your Sales Managers:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): If your company has been selling for a few years, you probably have a CRM of some type, so this isn’t to talk about why you need a CRM.
Instead, we’re here to talk about why you need to ensure your CRM is set-up in a way that best enables Manager to gain helpful insights into performance.
Here are some questions you should be asking yourself, and if the answer to any of them is “no”, be sure to add this to your to do list for remedy:Have we built into our Sales Process all the data points of information that we need to capture for knowing a deal’s progress at a glance?
Have we created “easy-to-update” and access Dashboards and reports directly tied to field required metrics and coaching meeting agendas?
Have we trained our field team and managers on the above?
Conversation Intelligence: There is no denying that AI is the future of Sales Technology! As of today, the best AI-based sales coaching tool is that of Conversation Intelligence platforms. With these data-extensive tools, you can see real-time analytics and insights into how a team or an individual is performing, on both a micro-scale of an individual call, and on a macro-scale of a whole deal - in a matter of minutes. This type of on-demand insight enables real-time coaching and data-driven decision making on targeted training and enablement. Some of the most popular vendors for this are Gong and Chorus.
Forecasting Intelligence: Another newish player of AI tools, is that of revenue forecasting technologies. Tools like Clari and InsightSquared, use machine learning to predict future sales performance, allowing managers to identify trends and make data-driven decisions. These tools can also help automate the forecasting process, all while reducing administrative burden for both the rep and their manager. Imagine how much more impactful pipeline conversations can become if a Sales Manager could jump straight into “next steps” for strategizing versus spending most of the time hunting for the “why” and “where” of a deal?
Pro Tip #3: Equip the right field resources to enable coaching impact!
“Organizations that provide their sales managers with coaching templates and guides see a 14.7% increase in the number of sales reps achieving quota.” - CSO Insights
Finally, it’s important to remember that Sales Managers are just like any other employee, and despite all the right processes and technologies, they need easily accessible resources and guides to help them consistently bring best practices to life.
This means equipping Sales Managers with things like: Presentation deck templates to enable Deal Desk conversations, and Sales Coaching Guides that visually take a Sales Stage Map document and lists manager verification questions aligned with each stage as a way to help managers guide sellers across the finish line.
Without these kinds of resources, managers often (accidentally) forget to enforce certain desired behaviors or worse - go a bit rogue and reinforce “bad” selling behaviors that don’t align with the companies desired strategy.
Pro Tip #4: Leverage training programs as a tool of alignment!
You may have noticed I didn’t mention anything directly about training and onboarding yet. There’s a reason I left it for the end - it’s the easiest one to solve!
In general - with the exception of teaching Sales Managers how to use and implement the tools and systems listed above (and of course any traditional L&D Performance Leadership courses that Enablement likely doesn’t own), Managers don’t need any special Sales Skills and Knowledge beyond that of the same onboarding and continual learning courses their Sellers attend.
The role of a Sales Manager is to enable the success and behaviors of “good selling”, which (should be) defined in any onboarding and educational programs that Sales Reps are the main audience for.
If you want your Managers to be good field coaches and leaders, it’s best practice to have them participate fully as a learner in these programs, alongside their direct reports, including: attending all sessions, undergoing certifications, and more. For if a Manager can do from the POV of their direct reports, they can also reinforce how with confidence.
In the end, the tools and resources listed in the previous sections are all there to enable managers to implement the lessoned best practices of your Revenue Org, that is established across the various training programs your company deploys. Successful Sales Manager Enablement starts with alignment, and finishes with reinforcement.
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By implementing these strategies, sales managers can be empowered to effectively coach and develop their teams, leading to increased sales team performance, improved coaching, increased employee retention, and better alignment with company objectives.
Need more help creating a Sales Manager Enablement Program that has impact? Contact GTM Enabler for a free consultation today!
GTM Enabler provides emerging B2B software companies with highly customized Revenue Enablement services, covering: strategy, content, training, and more. With GTM Enabler's expertise, clients experience increased win rates, shorter sales cycles, and better go-to-market operations. Choose GTM Enabler as your trusted partner for accelerated business growth.