Aaaand that’s a wrap. The three-day extravaganza that was the Sales Enablement Festival is over - but the insights don’t stop there.
We heard from over 40 sales enablement specialists from all over the world, and a wide variety of industries, as they lifted the curtain on the secrets of their success, shared stories and tips, and answered questions put to them by our community.
Looking to soak up some of that sales enablement goodness?
It was tough to cut down but we've picked our 5 top tips from each stage and packaged them up for you in bite size pieces. You’re welcome 😃
Deploying AI and Automation Stage
Takeaway 1: Cutting Through the Noise With Video
Tyler Lessard, VP Marketing, Vidyard
Video automation will create personal, transparent, friction-free buying processes: email cadences that include videos see a 5x increase in response rates.
Takeaway 2: How AI & Automation Enables 10x Leverage in your Sales Org
Elizabeth Knopf, Director of Sales Ops and Enablement, Axon
The move from low code to no code is improving the pervasiveness of talent support software, whereas historically it’s been very resource-intensive to customize and maintain these systems.
Takeaway 3: A Human Approach to AI & Automation
Lish Gates, Senior Manager, Global Revenue Enablement, Algolia
Human interaction is vital to get the most out of AI as it provides context in terms of: our competitors, which deals are winning (and why), and company priorities and mandates.
Takeaway 4: Accelerate Sales Intelligence with AI
Filip Descamps, Head of Sales, Lead Generation and Customer Success, ML6
Machine learning is the ideal technology to match the vast amounts of data of companies, contacts and events with capabilities and value offered by solutions/services.
Takeaway 5: Sales and Marketing Lead Optimisation
Josh Smith, Head of Sales Effectiveness, Guardian News & Media
You need to get complete buy-in and support from sales management at all levels to ensure sales teams follow automation processes.
Measuring Success - Metrics, Reporting & Analytics Stage
Takeaway 1: Measuring Sales is Easy - What About Measuring Selling?Felix Dumitrica, Head of Sales Enablement, Europe, Freshworks
Sales leaders and enablement professionals use the same metrics and KPIs, but come from different perspectives. Sales leaders focus on execution; they look at the ‘what’. Sales enablement focus on preparing; they look at the ‘why’ and ‘how’.
Takeaway 2: Enabling Sales Leadership via Automation & Data
Vishal Salunkhe, Senior Director & Head of Sales Operations & Enablement, Carousell
Share key data highlights with your sales leaders such as win rates, opportunities sources and where additional help is needed, to avoid overwhelming them with data.
Takeaway 3: The Nuts and Bolts of Sales Enablement in Uncertain Times
Priya Sachdev, Global Sales Enablement Director, GlobalStep
Nowadays, we can't play by the old rules - the game has changed and it's time to think like a start-up again. Only the businesses who figure this out will survive.
Takeaway 4: Enabling Services Managers to Unlock Customer Goals & Outcomes
Paul Curto, Head of Global Sales Methodologies and Samantha Moore, Global Services Director, Customer Success Strategy, Juniper Networks
Invest in Service Manager transformation to: align best practices,deliver consistency; link deliverables to customer success factors; improve focus on proactive, high value tasks; and build an effective closed loop process that influences quality improvements.
Takeaway 5: Enabling Cross-Functional Success Through Data
Vince Cardoza, VP, Sales Enablement & Solution Design, AutoVitals
To establish credibility for internal enablement, you need to have very well-structured data that allows you to derive clear conclusions and predictions. You also need to be intentional with your process and what you do with the data, including how you address internal relationships, requests for change and, importantly, address conflict.
Driving Excellence - Onboarding, Coaching & Training Stage
Takeaway 1: Starting from Scratch: How to Define Your Sales Philosophy and Shift Your Sales Leaders to Coaches
Dave Nel, National Head of Sales Enablement, Investec
Businesses with a strong coaching culture significantly outperform those without. Even world-class Olympic athletes have a coach standing on the sidelines helping them to constantly improve and push the boundaries.
Takeaway 2: Why Onboarding Should Be Your #1 Priority Right Now
Caroline Bray, Director, GTM Enablement, Iterable
Now that so many of us are joining companies in a virtual environment, it’s more important than ever that we get it right when we welcome new recruits to our teams, immerse them in the company culture, and get them ramped up ready to sell.
Takeaway 3: Competency-Based Coaching and Development
Aaron Evans, Director, Sales Enablement, GlobalData
Competency frameworks may not sound sexy, but they're one of the most valuable tools an organization can build to deliver effective coaching and sales success.
Takeaway 4: Making Learning Bite-Sized and Deployable for Sales
Steve Goebbert, Senior Manager Sales Enablement, GE Healthcare
Ongoing development needs to happen at regular intervals, and be accessible and repeatable. However, avoid piling on too much training, death by webinar and training without clear objectives.
Takeaway 5: Elevating Your Operating Cadence for Results
Maggie Callahan, Director, Revenue Enablement Convercent
Everybody has some greatness in them. Your responsibility as a coach and as a leader is to help them find it, and help them soar to whatever level of success they want to accomplish.
Building and Scaling Enablement Teams Stage
Takeaway 1: Closing the Gap Between Revenue Teams
Louis Jonckheere, President, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder, Showpad
90% of B2B companies expect ‘customer experience’ to be the next battleground, trumping product and price. However, 77% of B2B buyers feel that making a purchase is too complicated and time-consuming. We need to change this by breaking down silos between sales, marketing, CX and services.
Takeaway 2: Fit to Win and Scale: How Sales and Buyer Enablement Complement Each Other
Mary Tafuri, Chief Sales Enablement Officer, VP - IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM
Enablement should be the catalyst for proactive, experiential learning, and provide a platform where sellers not only learn from what you share, but what others in the ecosystem around them can share, too.
Takeaway 3: Designing an Enablement Brand Identity
Bryan Grobstein, Director of Revenue Operations & Enablement, Garten
Sales enablement needs to define & design a collaborative, impactful culture of learning that’s both memorable & measurable. To do this, your enablement charter needs to have cross-functional buy-in, establish clear KPIs, drive lateral, peer-to-peer content development and delivery - and continuously evolve.
Takeaway 4: Building an Effective Sales Enablement Team From the Ground Up
Jennifer Leary, Head of Revenue Enablement, Shift Technology
97% of employees and executives believe a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project. Meanwhile, 99.1% prefer a workplace where people identify and discuss issues truthfully and effectively - but less than half say their organization does this.
Takeaway 5: Building Your Team to Develop the Products that Sales Leaders Want - How to Construct an Enablement Org That Looks Like a Product Development Org
Chris Grebowiec, Head of Global Sales Enablement and Productivity, Square
Enablement is historically under-resourced. Why? ROI is difficult to show, impact is dispersed across multiple actors, and it’s essentially considered a support resource. How do we change this? Develop learning and enablement solutions that have clear ROI drivers for the business - and set up your teams to deliver products that will enable that.
Sales Content Optimization Stage
Takeaways 1 & 2: Immersive Content Experiences that Sellers Love
Jam Khan, VP Product Marketing, Seismic
The term ‘experience economy’ was coined over two decades ago, but perhaps has never been more relevant due to technology and circumstance. It means businesses must orchestrate memorable events for customers - and this memory itself becomes the product.
Unite sellers and marketers by measuring content performance at the bottom of the funnel, where data is often murky at best.
Takeaway 3: Harnessing the Power of Video - Connect, Convert and Close (Roundtable)
Aaron Evans, Director, Sales Enablement, GlobalData
Video is such a good way to build rapport with a customer, to transact your value proposition and, ultimately, to secure meetings. So much is lost in an email. A great sales pitch should be like you’re talking to a friend in the pub - a conversation. With video, you get to see the enthusiasm and excitement of the person and hear their tone for a 2.5 second investment of your time.
Takeaway 4: The Dream Team: Product Marketing and Sales Enablement
Alex Virden, Senior Manager, Product Marketing, EVERFI
Product marketers still own a lot of the tasks that fall under sales enablement: 93.7% of product marketing managers say they’re responsible for creating sales enablement content at their company, such as battlecards, product comparison sheets, or one-pagers.
Takeaway 5: The Journey From RFI to ROI – From a Practitioner’s Lens
Abhinav Saxena, Former Associate Director - Sales Strategy and Enablement, Tata Communications
Use discovery and research to arrive at a problem statement that serves as a guiding pole, for example: “Our sales reps are unable to find and share content due to limitations with our existing content hub”.
And there we have it!
Your ultimate checklist of takeaways from the world’s finest sales enablement event. But we couldn’t let you go without a special shout out to Sage, who we crowned Sales Enablement Team of Year during the Festival. Read about what makes them so inspirational.
