With last month’s Future of Sales Fest well and truly wrapped up, we wanted to share with you a few of the top audience questions – and our speakers’ answers – on all things sales enablement.

Catch the festival replays here, and don’t forget to check out our SEC Slack community to peruse the Q&A at your leisure and join in the conversation with your sales enablement peers.

Let’s dive in!

Werner Schmidt, Vice President, Sales Enablement, Sage – Werner’s presentation tackled the all-important issue of how we use technology to drive sales enablement priorities, focusing on 5 key areas: Sales Onboarding, Sales Communications and Content, Skills and Product Training, Salesforce.com Effectiveness, and Social Selling.

Q: Why did you choose NPS to measure the success of your onboarding program? Do you also measure any 'hard' metrics like ramp time? If so, what has been the impact of your onboarding program on revenue?

A: "We wanted to standardize on a metric that could be used across all the regions. We do look at ramp time and it’s one of the success metrics we used to build the business case to invest in the SalesHood Platform."

Q:...About the Sales Portal...was curious about how to feed it and who should have ownership on the topic? Can anyone contribute or should content be locked and limited to "official guidelines"?

A: "The sales portal structure and framework should be owned by sales enablement but the content needs to be owned by the product owners or product marketing to ensure it’s always aligned with the product strategy. This is easier said than done as lines blur quickly. It’s important to have excellence programs in place that clearly define accountability for sales content."

Q: Extra question then, apart from connections/accesses how do you measure efficiency of such a portal? Is there any other metric than "usage"?

A: "I fall back on NPS as a high NPS score ultimately means you are doing something right and generally would correlate to higher performance, and it's hard to maintain a high NPS score with more and more people unless it’s working."

Sophie Paternotte, Global Head of Sales Enablement, Vodafone Group – In her talk, Sophie covered how Sales Enablement functions tackle some key B2B sales challenges, as well as the journey to world-class sales enablement.

Curious if when you talk of Sales assets, is the creation of these something the SE function owns or is that within marketing/product marketing and you own just the governance part of that?

A: "In our organization, it is something Marketing owns, but we ensure that it's aligned to what salespeople want to see as well, and what makes sense for their customers."

You mention getting Sales Managers on your side. Any top tips for how to do this?

A: "A lot of things that can be done.. spend time with them, communicate with them, trial new things with them (they will always be excited to listen to the new things that can help them deliver a better job)... Also, help them prepare their presentation to their management for example, on some of the projects that you are working on!
The current situation doesn't help as it is much more difficult to run by their desks and have an informal chat! But maybe you could initiate virtual coffees to understand what their main painpoints are and offer to help where you can!"
Catherine Young (Head of Global Sales Enablement Strategy, Xerox): "Yes, know what you mean. I get so many ideas and reinforcement from people I bump into at the office. During these times working from home, its easy to stay in touch with your team, but less so those who you are not on project with. Because chatting to ‘others’ can be where great collaborations start I’m going in instigate a ‘random meeting generator’ to try to keep those informal chats going!"

Nick Persico, Director of Sales, Close – Nick’s talk focused on how to build a sales process that scales using inbound sales techniques, and all with just a small handful of sales reps.

In the current climate, are your team finding it easier to get on the phone with the 'right' people or would you say the opposite?

A: "In general, we’ve seen that folks actually have more time to talk… so we’ve had to be more protective of our time. But like all things, it depends on your target market. Two counter examples:
A lot of folks I know that sell to traditional offices, so cold calls to those office lines are seeing bad results right now because people aren’t there to pick calls up.
Budgets are effectively frozen everywhere, so trying to initiate conversations around buying a product make no sense. Salespeople should be initiating conversations to share insights about their industry. Build the relationship to be in a great position when the budget opens up."

Thought might be the case! Have you added any additional filters/KPIs for who gets the phone time since lockdown?

A: "We recently implemented a weekly office hour that I host every Thursday for the smaller folks that may not get the specific attention from our sales team.So this has given sales the ability to push folks there without feeling guilty.
Sometimes 20 people show up, sometimes it’s 2 people. But I feel like it’s worth it. Those 2 people equal 1 hour of my sales team’s time. Those savings add up."

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And as mentioned be sure to check out the SEC Slack to engage with like-minded sales leaders and keep these conversations going