About This Episode

Let’s talk about sales enablement. 

Specifically, what good sales enablement is doing for your sales reps. Is it helping them or hindering them? 

Are you setting them up to be the best possible sales reps they can be, or are you weighing them down with needless tasks and functions that are holding them back? Are you simply giving them too much of a good thing? 

In this episode, we talk to Cat Young, Head of Global Sales Enablement Strategy at Xerox, all about collaboration, making sure that sales reps feel heard, and how to leverage data to help make the best next decisions for your sales reps.  

Stop, Collaborate & Listen. 

So how do you drive collaboration, specifically at a larger company like a Xerox? Is it all about consensus in the decision making process? Or is it driven by opinions? What is the best way to get it done? 

We were taught that being agile and fast moving and delivering things quickly was a good thing. And in many ways it is. 

But there are two problems with focusing all our collaborative attention on speed and agility. 

First, if every department has the same attitude and doesn’t talk to any of the other departments, then you just continue to perpetuate this demand on the salesperson’s time. If  every department is focused on being agile and delivering quickly, but doesn’t stop to talk to all the other departments, the sales reps get caught in the crosshairs. 

And second, every time you take a salesperson away from being with their customer or their prospects, as this “now, fast, now” strategy does, you’re impacting their ability to sell. 

After you’ve invested the time and energy into getting something right, THEN you have to convince people to come be a part of it. The old “build it and they will come” strategy just doesn’t work anymore. 

Making Sure Your Reps are Heard

At Xerox specifically, they’ve got sales reps and channel business managers, and they have one thing in common.

They’re overworked. 

So Cat and her team went about helping to alleviate some of that by implementing 2 things: 

First, they have regular interviews directly with the salespeople. Doing this helps reinforce understanding and as simple as it may sound, allows the higher level executives to get a better grasp on just what’s being asked of those reps and managers. 

Second, they have a direct to rep communications campaign. 

Though it has many different components, the nurture campaign is the one Cat is most proud of. It’s outbound emails, personalized, and delivered straight to the sales reps. Making sure that they’re highlighting exactly what those reps are interested in hearing and learning. 

Leverage the Data

So once you’ve got buying from the teams and the reps feel like they’re being heard, how do you leverage all of the data in your CRM to help you make the next best decision? 

First off, everybody ought to be on the same CRM. 

Gone are the days when you get to have dozens of different CRM tools operating in your organization. 

But even when you’ve got a unified CRM, you’ve got to deliver that information to sales reps in intelligent ways, and this is going to require investment in IT infrastructure. To take data from multiple sources and bring it together. 

Start with the activity data. 

What tools are being used? What learning courses are being accessed? How often are the reps interacting with customers? 

Then pull that into a BI platform and focus on 2 things: 

First, make sure that you’ve got the salesperson listed out.

That way everything is tracked by person. By rep. This allows you to start to develop a heat map that can highlight trends, problems, or bright spots. 

And second, report on what’s NOT happening.

You can address gaps, run awareness campaigns, and gather the data and track usage and non-usage against specific individuals. 

There was so much more covered in this episode, so check it out!

 

This post is based on a podcast interview with Cat Young. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast.

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