Category: Enablement

The Minimum Viable set up to ensure success for your sales team

In this post i’m defining sales enablement materials as internal artefacts that help make sellers more effective. They include decks, one pagers, guides, templates, etc. etc, and are used during onboarding and day-to-day by your sales team. They can be for internal audiences only or may be suitable for external audiences too.

I’m aiming this list at Enterprise SaaS Startups/Scaleups with under $5m in ARR and less than 10 AEs. There’s a goldilocks zone for sales enablement materials and processes at these companies; too little and sales people will be inefficient at best and fail at worst. Too much and you’re wasting valuable time, effort and resource that could be spent on selling on building things that won’t get used.

I’ve found the following items to be a solid MVP to keep the whole sales (and wider GTM) teams aligned and make it likely that new hires will be successful. I’ve also played agony aunt to multiple friends and ex-colleagues that have joined companies where most of these are missing – it doesn’t end well!

The list;

• Value Proposition, Personas and Pains Explainers; Why do we exist? Who do we serve? What do they care about (whether we exist or not)? What pains are they solving with our platform? What types of pre-existing initiatives do we fit into? How do we guarantee their success?
• Sales Process Map; How do our sales happen? What is the customer’s typical buying process, and how do we meet it? Ideally this should be customer centric and each stage should have a Customer-Verifiable Outcome to Exit (aka a CVO2E – a complicated way to say that deals move through the process based on what the Customer says and does, not what you do). Example CVO2Es: The customer verbally confirms that they have the pain we solve, or the customer confirms over email we’re the preferred supplier.
• A Sales or Qualification Methodology; How do you ‘do’ selling? How do you ‘do’ discovery? What makes a deal ‘qualified’? It’s usually easiest to use an off-the-shelf Qualification Methodology here to save you time and let you tap into existing resources/knowledge online. I like MEDDPICC.
• Sales Deck; A multi-purpose deck outlining what you help customers with and how, how you’ve done it for others. Balancing slides vs product demo vs discussion during sales calls is an art, but i’ve always found it useful to have some visuals to prompt discovery and discussion. Separate post on an MVP sales deck to follow.
• Business Case (aka Proposal); Used in the later stages. A clear, customer-focused document outlining the Why, What and How of what’s being proposed, along with the expected benefits and links to further reading (e.g. Case Studies, ROI calculations, Product Demos). Use the customer’s language and include the important things you’ve agreed and learned along the way. Nate Nasralla’s writing on Business Cases is excellent
• Best practice examples inc.
  • Selected call recordings from each stage of the sales process from discovery to negotiation and procurement
  • Emails from successful outreach, first call follow-up, thawing cold deals, multi-threading
  • Successful Business Cases
  • Successful
• Competitor Info; Without getting obsessed by your competition, your people should have an easy way to understand what makes you different and why that matters to customers. They should understand the types of customer, personas and situations where you’re the best fit (and you should go all in) and the ones where you’re not (and you should qualify out).
• Clear Case Studies with KPIs; A clear situation before/what happened/situation after (with KPI improvements) structure works best. Avoid narrative-only stories if you can help it. You might need these to be anonymous in the early days until you convince an early adopter to take the leap and back you with their name.

This list won’t cover everything you need, but is a strong start. As your company matures you’ll add things like ROI/Economic Impact Calculators and Forecasts, InfoSec Whitepapers, Deal Sheets and RFP banks.

You don’t have to go super fancy with the above. Excel spreadsheets and Word documents are fine to start. Adoption and value delivered are far more important than being the latest tech or being pretty.

In later posts i’ll dig into each of these more deeply. I’d love to know what you think i’ve missed, or what i’ve overstated the importance of.