What Successful GTM Training/Enablement Looks Like
The GTM Newsletter
Anyone else tired of hearing about Twitter?
If you open Twitter, every second post is about the Elon/Twitter fiasco.
Tweets on Twitter about Twitter.
It’s Twitter-ception.
Admittedly, I think it’s going to have some interesting implications for the broader tech industry. It seems to me that the whole thing is about bringing back a certain intensity to the tech industry as a whole.
It’s certainly a polarizing topic and what content performs the best on Twitter?
Polarizing content…(maybe this Elon guy knows what he’s doing)
I’m not sure where I personally stand on his approach but I don’t think it’s too far-fetched of an idea that in order to accomplish really hard things, you have to work really, really hard.
Anyway, here are two vibey tunes to to get you into the Friday mood:
🎵
Let’s get into it.
What Successful GTM Training/Enablement Looks Like
Training/enablement is getting tougher as the cycles of innovation exponentially increase. How do you keep employees informed when the landscape changes so quickly?
First, let’s hear directly from one of the best in the game, Suresh Khanna. Suresh was the Director of Inside Sales at Google before becoming the CRO/President of Adroll, now Co-founder of Pieces:
Generally, I find that new sales rep onboardings are not intense enough.
A few things I've done or seen that are really effective:
Pre-Start Date Call
During the "welcome to the team, congrats on joining" call (which should be done by their manager):
Send a folder full of call recordings, pitch decks, product overviews, company and sales team all hands, quota and commission overviews, etc etc etc.) - the more the better, and tell the rep it is optional reading before their start date.
Let them know to expect daily quizzes starting from their first day that get progressively harder.
Let them know the first week of training concludes with a Friday basic, plain jane intro pitch to their manager which gets graded according to a rubric.
Let them know the all-time fastest certification ever for a new sales hire is 3 days - meaning a rep moved their first pitch certification from Friday to Wednesday and passed.
You've now signaled around speed to ramp/intensity of ramp and set their competitive juices hopefully in motion.
Training
Generally their calendars should be pre-booked out for the first week or two, and the general spirit is that reps can absorb a LOT more info than you think and have a lot more free time than you think.
Lots of live pitch practice - record themselves in the mirror, practice with other new hires, practice with their mentor or manager or trainer. Start from basic intro pitch to basic qualified inbound prospect, then add in wrinkles (objections, outbound, competitive deal, larger prospect, etc etc etc). Then add in weekly or more frequent (if time permits) certification pitches until they are "certified" for inbounds and/or outbounds.
Lots of quizzes and because they are scalable. Quizzes include things like "write a cold outbound email" or "how is the accelerator on your commission calculated".
Celebrate progress publicly, manage failure privately and frequently.
Organize learnings as you scale around: product 101/102/103, competitors 101/102/103, industry 101/102/103, internal tools and processes 101/102, etc etc.
Follow Suresh Khanna for more here.
📈 How to take action:
*most of that was already very actionable but TL;DR version
Break your enablement into pre-start date material and training.
For pre-start build: a folder with everything they need to be successful from the jump, increasingly difficult daily quizzes, a final certification.
Pre-book their calendar out for two weeks upon start.
Focus on live pitch practice.
Celebrate progress early and often.
Organize learnings from beginner level to expert so you don’t overwhelm new employees.
Next up: Brian Weinberger, SVP of Sales at Cube former VP, Ent Fin Serv at Yext, has some additional value-adds on the topic:
For us, we handle a ton of enablement without having a person in seat as a “Manager, Enablement”.
We leverage a Content Management System, and perform frequent trainings for the GTM/Sales team on Sales training; such as Discovery Best Practices, Handling Objections (probably the most critical skill needed), Cold Call techniques, How to Demo the product, Executive Closing Presentations, Email best practices, and more…we also spend time teaching the sales org, the industry we are in (FP&A)…my Solution Architects (Presales Team) conducts a Monthly FP&A 101 training teaching the team budgeting and forecasting, consolidations, buyer and role personas, real-life situations of a company needing to do FP&A.
We have essentially boot strapped Enablement and the best part is other departments are watching our recordings of our sessions to learn what we are learning in GTM.
Enablement/Training is not just a person, software, or a function…it’s on-going and never ending. The best SaaS companies…actually the best companies are always enabling…meaning people are always learning to improve their skills.
Follow Brian Weinberger for more here.
📈 How to take action:
Don’t over-engineer it, particularly for start-ups, you don’t need to go hire a bunch of enablement folks in order to have a strong program.
Leverage a CMS.
Sales training must include: discovery best practices, handling objections, cold call techniques, how to demo, exec closing presentations, email best practices, budgeting and forecasting.
Invest heavily in industry training (led by your pre-sales team): buyer/role persona deep dives, macro industry trends, real-life situations and case studies
Know that enablement/training is never done, it’s a constant process (more on this below).
Building off of Brian’s point that enablement/training is never done.
I want to introduce the idea of “ever-boarding”.
The idea that on-boarding never stops.
I know I didn’t come up with that catchy phrase but I can’t remember who brought this idea to me but it’s been rattling around my brain ever since.
Holler if you put this idea into my head and I’ll happily give credit where credit is due!
James Kaikis, former Director of Solution Engineering at Salesforce and now Co-Founder at Pre-Sales Academy sees the world in a similar light:
Organizations tend to look at enablement in two lenses:
Communication Drivers or Change Agents.
Many ineffective enablement teams are just passing communication through organizations.
They potentially are creating solid content to arm GTM teams but it typically doesn’t apply to every team within an organization; hard to do at scale.
The organizations that are using enablement to be true change agents are few and far between.
Respectfully, many organizations don’t have the resources to allocate to these teams.
Additionally, start ups tend to emphasize speed so processes are typically lagging (yes a bit of a generalization).
All of this to say.. this is why communities like PreSales Collective, Enterprise Sellers, Pavilion, Sales Assembly, SDR Nation, etc.. are playing a role in enabling specific GTM functions through niche applications education and enablement.
Follow James Kaikis for more here.
📈 How to take action:
Support both formal and informal training.
Informal enablement exp. webinars, podcasts, roundtable discussions, mastermind groups and curated 1-1 coaching.
Formal enablement exp. role-specific intensive courses and leadership training.
Don’t go at it alone, leverage the idea of “outsourced enablement” and give your team budget for training outside of your organization.
Encourage team members to join niche communities of peers.
👀 More for your eyeballs:
Last week I shared a thread on the whole FTX fiasco which continues to get messier. Jason Lemkin has a slightly different POV that is well worth a read.
How about some offline reading?
Here are two books that I’ve recently got a lot out of (with two very different but strangely complimentary perspectives):
👂More for your eardrums:
Lars Nilsson, SVP of Sales Development at Snowflake, and I recently chopped it up on the pod. We talked about the origin/evolution of the SDR function and I asked him to break down his super power: connecting and bringing people together. If you’ve ever been in a room with Lars - he’s likely made an impact on you. And if you haven’t, then give this a listen and you’ll feel the impact through your headphones.
🚀 Start-ups to watch:
🔥Hottest GTM job of the week:
Head of Marketing at Document Crunch, more details here.
See more top GTM jobs here.
—---------------------------------
That’s all I got for ya.
Thanks for rocking with me.
Have a great weekend - see you next week.
*oh and if you’ve been getting value from these, please share it on social or with your friends/colleagues. It’s been humbling to see how quickly this has been growing - appreciate all your support and feedback is always welcome/encouraged.
Barker.
✌️