Implementing Sales Enablement with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

[Music] [Applause] welcome to the SBI podcast offering CEOs sales and marketing leaders ideas to make the [Music] number welcome SBI podcast listeners and video podcast viewers my name is Greg Alexander and I am the CEO of SBI a sales and marketing consulting firm dedicated to helping you make your number this is the weekly SBI podcast and its purpose is to help you make your number by getting your peers to share with you how they make theirs today's guest is Bill Quinn and he is the Chief Operating Officer of the global sales organization at broadridge Financial Solutions the leading provider of investor Communications and Technology Solutions for wealth management asset management and Capital Market firms the company employs about 7,400 people and does just under 3 billion per year in annual sales Bill welcome to the show thank you very much glad to be here okay today we're going to ask Bill to help his peers set their companies up for success by discussing how to drive excellence in the sales enablement area when this episode airs it will be mid to late q1 of 2016 and many of our listeners and viewers will be coming back from the sales kickoff event and we'll have turned their attention to the execution of the sales strategy we're going to use a section of sbi's Revenue growth methodology to guide our conversations specifically step five sales strategy phase 11 which you can find on page 181 and 183 if you want to follow along at home download a copy of our methodology at salesbenchmarkindex.com sl2000 16-h report okay let's jump into it so Bill my first question for you today are or is I should say what are the objectives of your sales enablement team sure so so the way we're set up is uh we Define sales enablement as really everything that supports uh the sales organization and the Frontline sales teams and we have established a process where we have uh really three centers of excellence within the sales strategy and operations group is which is what I run um that's really made up of sales support enablement and Effectiveness which is the direct support of the day-to-day sales process uh sales reporting and analytics and sales Learning and Development those are our three centers of excellence and within sales enablement our focus is really um how to streamline and support the sales activity for the Frontline sales rep and that that really revolves around everything from content development and delivery direct inale support business business case analysis uh standard operating procedure and process Improvement around large deal management contract management project management uh business case development um and overall sales planning at the account level when it comes to sales uh account profiling um so that's that's really our primary focus within the direct sales enablement area fantastic I love the concept of this center of excellence and you were able to articulate three centers of excellence and um you know that's a great framework to use and I would encourage our listeners and viewers to ask yourself the question you know if somebody asked me on a television show or a podcast like this one what's the objective of my sales enablement team would I would I have that crisp of an answer and sometimes if you can't articulate what your primary mandate is then the sales enablement function can get awful hazy and it's not clear as to what the Mandate is all right let me move to my next question so where does sales enablement live inside of your organization and who owns it so it lives directly within my group and and again my group is is global sales strategy and operations and that's a shared function across all of the selling segments and business units uh that supports all Frontline sales account management and and product specialist functions that are touching clients directly um we've populated that group I've built my team uh with a cross-section of people who have analytic iCal skills but also who've actually carried a bag um who've done sales and Sales Management who bring a a specific perspective on how to deal with clients how to touch clients what type of content is needed what kind of type of process is needed to streamline and facilitate the process so um you know we're really focused on on having people who've who've walked the walk and talk the talk and not just having uh a bunch of junior level sales analysts sort of you know trying to assist a large or complex sales process who may not necessarily have experienced it themselves yeah so I understand that it sits in your organization which is great and I and I love the level of importance your company is placed on the concept by giving you a title Like Chief Operating Officer and that signifies to the entire company um how important this function is but my question in terms of where it sits you know sometimes our clients and people that watch and listen to this show that even aren't our clients haven't invested yet in a centralized sales enablement or sales Ops organization and when I advocate that they should and that it should be a shared service and staff it with highly experienced people like you just talked about there's some push back there and where the push back comes from is who's going to pay for it especially in a big company like yours you have 7,400 people roughly and in an organization that's set up by business unit so you would have general managers of business units I'm assuming that run independent p&l of one another that roll up into the you know the big company objective is that did I articulate your organizational model correctly that's absolutely correct right so then you're a shared function that goes across business unit right which elevates the need for cross functional capability quite a bit but you're also a cost that gets charged back to those business unit leaders so sometimes that is what stops the creation of sales enablement as a shared function dead in its tracks is that uh charge backage if you will so how have you been able to overcome that yeah one of the things that what that I'm trying to do is is exactly what you're describing is changing the mindset around that because the way we look at it is is the sales enablement function as a shared service just like the sales organizations are you've described it pretty accurately we have business units that manage pnls our sales organization is a shared service that cuts across the business units and sells the relative products and services into the vertical market segments that they cover and like that shared service model for sales the sales enablement and sales strategy and operations group is is set up the exact same way and what we're trying to do is provide the metric around productivity gain so if we can provide tools process content and day-to-day support that um elevates the size of our pipeline that accelerates our sales process to get Revenue in the door faster we can justify the spend that we're putting in the infrastructure investment not just by hiring more salespeople the general you know objective is you can't you can't really uh you know really exponentially get to a better place on on your sales goal our our goal our stated broadridge goal is to double our sales Target over the next three to four years uh fiscal years we're not going to do that by just hiring more salespeople and asking them to cover a bigger quota we have to create an infrastructure and a process to make them more productive so every individual who is already out there and the new ones that we're bringing on are getting up to speed that much quicker they have the tools that they need to become more productive in a faster PA paced you know timeline and and environment and and produce results at an accelerated pace and we really think that is what is going to really Drive our trajectory for growth it's not just about asking people to do more who are carrying the bag and carrying the quota yep you know and I love the concept of the productivity number measured in Revenue per head so your company wants to double in the next three to four fiscal years right that's a big goal and there's two ways to do that you can either double a head count or you can hire but maybe not double and get more from each individual head and the way that you do that is the programs and the processes that you put in place let's exactly right let's stay on this concept of the the business unit organizational model for a moment you know and I've seen this work very effectively and we've worked with your company and you're very successful with this model which is great one of the challenges however is when you're a centralized group serving multiple business units who are your internal customers um you have to invite the sales team to tell you what their sales enablement needs are and collecting the requirements and Distilling the requirements from maybe things that might be noisy that aren't necessary but are being put forth to you by maybe some Lou loud or opinionated people you know versus maybe there's some needs that people haven't even voiced yet needs that maybe they don't even know they have so how do you collect the needs of the Salesforce so that you respond to things with them that they want yeah it's a it's a great question and it's something that I've been pretty focused on since I've taken this role is is making sure that I'm instilling in everyone on my team that their customer is essentially the sales organization um so everyone in my group who is in a sales Effectiveness or enablement function or or or L&D function or reporting and analytics function the sales leaders and their sales managers and their producing sales associates are our customers so we have to be very vocal about making sure we're asking them what their needs are what their requirements are what they're struggling with we do that both informally on a day-to-day basis we also do it formally through monthly and C quarterly uh business reviews um and the qbrs we actually do with the business segment leaders as well so we have the the spus aligned to their primary selling segment leaders and we have reviews of what's going on with sales reporting sales closed sales reports um as well as tools enablement um additional resources that they may need to help Drive sales results um and we do that on a regular basis I've also structured our group so that we have um sort of a matrix alignment to the sales leaders covering the market segments but also the business units who are actually producing the services and and are the delivery mechanism so we have sort of you know people that have uh inherent knowledge and subject matter expertise aligned to both the business unit and the sales leaders so they kind of know who the point person is around specific disciplines and we continue to build that knowledge base up yeah I love the structure you know I think a lot of organizations informally collect needs from sales forces as you do and that's a good thing to do because you want to be agile and responsive and things come up in real time but having this structured approach around the qbr in particular and making sure that you instill and your team that their customers the Salesforce and that qbr is a central area for them to understand what the needs are is fantastic all right we're going to take a short break when we come back bill and I will discuss content development and Playbook creation so stick around after the [Music] break you are watching SBI TV this is a monthly web TV show featuring guests just like you Executives trying to grow their revenues each month you can Peak behind the scenes and watch your peers discuss their strategies for how they make their numbers you are not going to want to miss [Music] this welcome back my name is Greg Alexander and I'm the CEO of SBI and my guest today is Bill Quinn the Chief Operating Officer for the global Salesforce of broadridge Financial Solutions today we are discussing the execution and executing of a sales enablement strategy we're using sbi's Revenue growth methodology to do it specifically Pages 181 to 183 if you're following along at home before the break Bill shared with us the objectives of a sales enablement team where sales enablement sits inside his company and how he collects the needs of the Salesforce during this segment we're going to hear from Bill how he creates sales enablement content and the creation of sales playbooks plus a few other items I'm going to be sure to throw in here so Bill let me come back to you and let me ask the the question which is something I get asked all the time which is how does your team develop sales enablement content yeah so I think it happens in a couple of different ways there's there's a bit of a informal process and then there's a formal process so so we have um a full support team what we call sales analysts that are are predominantly responsible for supporting in sales activity with the direct Frontline Sellers and and part of a big part of their job responsibility is content development specific client facing content development we're obviously a B2B sales organization we're dealing directly with large institutional Financial clients um and a lot of the content that we develop is very customized to the client engagement based on their business objective their strategies what we're trying to solution with them and we have a team that specifically focuses focuses on the development of content for the the the direct onetoone client engagement level um but we also have a very formal process with marketing where we've developed program management uh process and guidelines around how we're going to develop specific Market facing content aligned to Broad rd's corporate strategies um our corporate strategies may be things around um uh digitization uh mutualization of cost um data management and big data we create um very focused content around those themes around our corporate strategy and then we create what we call programs or campaigns around those and we we push that into the sales organization on how to use it um how to how to Target the right Market segment within their book of business for that particular level of content and then we track a lot of that stuff through Salesforce to understand how is this content being used is it gonnering the right conversations is it creating leads are those leads then translating into Pipeline and then obviously we can track how that's flowing through the potential Revenue yeah fantastic the thing that I love that I heard in your answer there was this collaborative relationship that you have with marketing so content creation um is a must I mean that's something you have to be good at to do sales enablement well and it's content creation it's there's like a a NeverEnding desire for more and more content and having the internal capability to be a production house to produce this content is key and sometimes those resources sit in marketing which is great all right let me move on to my next question so now you have this content how do you package the content into sales playbooks and then distribute them to the team do you believe in sales playbooks do you have a formal sales Playbook or is is it informal what's your opinion on that we do believe in sales playbooks and we have them we we create them around specific initiatives or offerings or Solutions where we think we have something unique in the marketplace that's that's differentiated where we have a really good story to tell we will create a sales Playbook methodology around that which is is essentially sort of the the road map for the salesperson to be able to go out and talk to the offering but also understand what the business driver is in the marketplace it could be a potential regulatory change it could be Dynamics in a specific client base um we we kind of educate them on the background the driver and then how to derive the conversation and how to lead that to what broad's solution is um so we do that we do that a lot around specific product Solutions and specific initiatives that are going on um we're doing one right now around um the utility approach to back office clearance and settlement processing and and sort of the mutualization of cost and what that means in the marketplace for large tier one Banks and we think there's a there's a really good story that broadridge has around that and we've created a whole Playbook process again using this program management approach to to manage you know how to get it out to the Salesforce and then measure what's going on with it um we sort of uh think about things based on the level of content and the type of of Playbook that we're creating and the complexity of the offering we will do formal sort of training where we'll get the salespeople in a room and we'll walk them through the content and explain the industry Dynamics and the background the target market what we think the market potential is and then the actual content that they will use with the client uh interaction sometimes it's just a uh a simple communication a broadcast communication we do that you know through chatter in Salesforce um Andor through email and then sometimes it's just uh a distribution mechanism where we have the ability for them to link to the content if it's something more more uh transactional or tactical at the product level so we kind of we kind of follow a bunch of different methodologies depending on what we're talking about okay so let's talk about communicating to the Salesforce so let's say you have a series of sales enablement initiatives okay and you you've mentioned the term program management several times which something tells me you have a a schedule or a project plan that says you know we're going to Market with these things and when I say sales enablement initiatives it could be big things like maybe rolling out a new sales methodology it could be small things like maybe you've developed a new play that you want to run for a particular product offering and it's an easy play to execute maybe put a behind it Etc there's all of these things that are happening well salespeople who are your customers are very busy and they're easily distracted and they're suffering from information overload so how do you communicate these sales initiatives to the sales team so that they don't ignore them yeah it's a great question and it's one of the things that we continue to sort of refine and work through one of the things we've done recently with marketing as well again collaboration with marketing is creating a calendar a fiscal year based calendar that talks to that we that we push out to the Salesforce so they can have on one page a snapshot of here's the things that we're going to be creating messaging and content and sales playbooks potentially around um based on again industry related events or based on where broadridge is developing new services or developing a new solution set that we think has unique capabilities or unique differentiation for a specific market and we have a calendar that shows when that stuff is going to to be launched into the marketplace and then when they should expect to get either training or communication on it when the content will be available to them who the target market is um because that's one of the things Greg to your point that's that our sales folks complained about early on um before I had even taken this role there was a lot of concern around there's so many things going on and I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to digest and what I'm supposed to use and how I then take it and and bring It Forward into the marketplace into my clients so we definitely are trying to get better at creating that sort of longer term view of that that content and those initiatives and giving that uh information out to the Salesforce earlier on you know I know you're calling me from New York City and I can hear all the sirens in the background if you need to jump out of the building let me know sorry about that that's okay no problem you're probably looking out the window saying come on really that's uh that's usually a bit of I don't even hear it anymore because it's such a frequent sound around here all right my last question in this segment right before we're going to take another quick break is technology so what technologies do you use if any that have made the execution of the sales enablement strategy easier yeah I mean we're we're a big salesforce.com shop uh and we tried to use salesforce.com one of my one of my biggest Focus areas is is leveraging the full capability of Salesforce I always sort of think about Sal sales force uh you know it's only as good as how much you adopt it and how much you get people to live and breathe within the system um and we are trying to make concerted efforts to improve the adoption level and improve the overall capability of what people are doing in the system but from a sales enablement perspective uh specifically we sort of use it as a as a a little bit of a crowdsourcing methodology where we we we have these libraries set up in the system for all of the sales content that we create whether it's with marketing whether it's oneoff for a specific client engagement and we my team is responsible for organizing tagging meta metadata tagging all of the content and creating uh folder metaphors and libraries on organization of all of our content and we and we really try to promote to our Salesforce as we develop or as you develop more content specifically for a client engagement send it back to us upload it to the library we'll tag it based on all the keywords client name specific products or solutions that are referenced things of that nature and then that becomes um available to anyone else in the organization who may want to look at it so anyone at anytime can go into Salesforce um and be able to do a keyword search on a client name on a product on a solution on an industry regulation um on any number of things and pull up any level of content that's been created and and approved for use in the marketplace um and we've had tremendous success with that in a very short period of time since we've rolled it out about 3 or 4 months ago and the and the sales teams love it because they now have one place within the ecosystem of their primary technology portal which is salesforce.com to be able to access whatever content they're looking for yeah I mean Knowledge Management is a really hard thing um and sales people get frustrated when you tell them they you have all this great content they go to the system whatever the system is your system happens to be sales for us they do what they think is a simple search and they can't find anything the reason why they can't find anything is because they don't they're not uh using metadata and they're not using tagging or if they are the tagging taxonomy if you will for lack of a better term is you know highly decentralized not organized not controlled and then one day you wake up and you've got a system polluted with all kinds of stuff that's not very useful so I love the concept of you know you have quote data stewardship if you will your team owns it they send it to you you manage the metadata you manage the tagging and that's what allows for this uh search functionality which is great yeah and the thing that's great about it is we've we've really instilled in the Salesforce it's it's as powerful as you yourself want to make it so the more content that gets developed and the more content you send back to us and we logically organize and tag and then upload to the library the more powerful this thing becomes um and and people have really bought into that we used to joke around there used to be you know several years ago the if you wanted to get a specific presentation on a specific product you'd sort of you know as a salesperson sitting out on the floor you'd pop your head up out of your Cube and say who's got the latest and greatest on XYZ product and you'd ask someone to go find it on their laptop and send it to you um and it's amazing how far we've come since since those days uh by doing stuff like this question you got to give to get right so the system is powerful if you contribute to it all right we're going to take another short break when we return we're going to shift our focus a bit and we're going to focus on driving adoption reinforcement and measurement so come back after the break making your number is hard your problems are complex complex problems need complex Solutions introducing the SBI magazine read in-depth stories written by award-winning journalists about how your peers have overcome their problems to make the numbers when you need more than a tweet social post or blog article turn to the SBI magazine go to salesbenchmarkindex.com to [Music] subscribe my name is Greg Alexander welcome back everybody I'm the CEO of SBI my guest today is Bill Quinn of broadridge Financial Solutions today we are discussing how to drive the execution of a sales enablement plan during this segment we're going to hear from Bill on how to drive adoption of the sales enablement plan his reinforcement approach and how he measures the success of the program program so Bill how do you make sure the sales teams know what sales enablement tools are available to them in my mind it's all about constant communication like we talked about earlier it's both informal day-to-day Communication in understanding the needs of the individual sales segment leaders sales managers and their Associates as well as formal process where you meet on a monthly basis or you do a quarterly Business Review with segment leaders and business unit owners to really understand are you is the stuff that's being created usable is it is it meeting your needs what else should we be doing how else should we refining it and you need to do both informal and formal communication process to really constantly be gathering that feedback and understanding what's working and what's what what's not working right so I want to go to adoption of the sales enement program which you mentioned you drive it through constant uh communication I also want to talk about the reinforcement of it so those are my next two questions really is how do you drive adoption and how do you reinforce it but specifically I want you to talk about the role of the Frontline sales manager here right so you're a shared service you give them the tools how do you make sure that all of this is being used yeah I mean listen one of the things that you mentioned earlier which I think is a critically important concept is you have to give to get so one of the things I try to do with the sales manager when we're trying to increase adoption of anything that we're producing um end or even you know usability of systems CRM systems like Salesforce it's always to it's always about understanding what is your workflow today how are you using it and then let me understand how to make it easier and if I ask you to do something slightly different um I know that sometimes there's some push back on that but I what I'd like to understand is what can I take away from you what could I what could I take off your plate or how could I improve certain aspects of this so I may ask you to to do something else but I'm going to make it easier for you in some other way um with the collective goal and mutual agreement between both the sales managers the sales leaders and my group that we're all trying to achieve the same objective um so I'm a big believer in that concept of of you have to give to get and we do that a lot it's so I mean the the broadforce libraries like we talked about the Salesforce libraries it's all about listen we're going to ask you to pull to give us information back but what we're going to give you in return is a much easier and streamlined workflow to access what you need when you need it and how you need it so you can you know save time in your sales process Y and to me that really helps the adoption if you're communicating that and you're working together to figure those things out in in the best way that's to me the best way to improve and optimize the adoption of anything you're trying to do yep yeah so okay I understand that give to get concept and in that case sometimes give to get in a bidirectional way right so you're delivering something to them and in exchange they're going to use it because of the the uh the promise benefit all right next question actually I'm going to combine two questions here is and that is measurement so you've got this organization it's a big investment we talked earlier about your Company's trying to double in size in the next three to four fiscal years Revenue per head is kind of the macro measurement how else do you measure the success of the sales enablement program yeah I think I think it's about productivity gain so what we're trying to do is is really look at some data around how much incremental activity are we creating at the individual level so instead of just looking at lagging indicators which is really where am I on closed sales versus my plan which has been the historical sort of way that this organization is looked at measuring sales performance or sales success what I'm trying to do is sort of say okay we need to look at more leading indicators how much sales activity are you creating and is the sales activity a result of the tools and the enablement that we're creating for you so you'll be able to get in front of more clients create more pipeline originate more deals um that's supporting your ability to deliver to your number and then that will ultimately lead to the lagging indicator of hitting our Target um so we're putting some some kpi and some analytics in on being able to track that activity and that's another example of where we're asking the salese hey we need you to log what you're doing um in all of your activity day-to-day with your with your accounts um and by the way to make that easier for you we're going to streamline the user interface in the system so you can kind of live and breathe within Salesforce log everything that you're doing make it a real productivity to for yourself but by the way that'll enable us to get data out of the back end to really see how much more productiv it and activity we're accelerating by building more pipeline to support the sales process yeah you know something I would offer the audience here as it relates to measuring sales enablement is think of your metric pyramid so at the bottom of the pyramid if you will is lagging indicators things like Revenue per head in the middle of the pyramid is leading indicators things that bill mentioned um things like pipeline creation maybe sales call activity at the very top of the pyramid is behavioral indicators Behavior indicators are has the behavior that we wanted to change actually taken roote and is there any demonstration of that are there new activities that are happening in the organization that weren't happening previously that improve the leading indicator that flow into the lagging indicator so something to think about there all right listen we're going to take one more break but when we come back bill and I going to wrap all this up we're going to tell you exactly what to do next if you will focused on executing a sales enablement program so stick around after the break we' got some great takeaway value for you do you have too many things to do and not enough time to do them is finding time to learn best practices almost impossible the SBI podcast is your solution turn time spent exercising commuting and traveling into productive learning time with a subscription to the SBI podcast SBI podcast listeners get unique insight into real world Sal sales and marketing issues through interviews with your industry peers every week find us on iTunes by searching for sales Benchmark index podcast And subscribe today welcome back everyone bill I would like you to conclude our time together with some practical advice so let me ask you one final question that would allow you to summarize your thoughts so here it is if you were tasked with piecing together a bunch of sales enablement tactics into a coherent sales enablement strategy and told to go implement it what would you do first second and third sure I think it's it's pretty simple actually when when I think about it it's sort of the methodology that I followed it it you know the first number one thing I think for anyone thinking about this and it really applies to sort of any business objective is understand who your customers are understand the sales segments what products and services they're selling how they sell what their typical workflow is and ask the questions about what their needs are and what they're trying to solve for to help them be more productive that's that's first and foremost if you don't understand that you don't understand who your customer is and how they work you're not going to be able to solve anything um the second piece to me is develop both near and long-term objectives and deliverables I always like to think about as you understand the needs and you gather that data there has to be quick wins that you can identify um and the quick wins are critically important because it's about building credibility with your customer who's the sales organization to say hey I've identified some real simple things here that just by based on listening to you I can deliver back to you and make your life easier but by the way I do hear that there's longer term larger things that we ultimately need to work on together and we're going to put a road map together to make sure that we March towards delivering those as well so that's number too that's critically important as far as I'm concerned getting getting sort of the near and long-term objectives and deliverables defined and then being able to find those quick wins and deliver them um and then the third is monitoring progress um along the way monitor what you're doing you know it's it's the age age old adage you know say what you're going to do do what you're going to say and then repeat what you just did to make sure that you're monitoring it and and you are true to your word um so monitor your your progress along the way ask for the feedback along the way you may have set an objective based on the feedback you heard early things you know things change and skew along the way and sometimes that stuff gets off track you know ask for that feedback make sure you're able to get it back on track and then monitor the success and then monitor the you know the sort of overall efficacy and effectiveness of the program through the measurements we talked about earlier that's a great one two three punch I appreciate you sharing that with us all right audience let me give you my two cents if you are like most sales teams you think you have a sales enablement strategy but you do not not what you really have is a series of tactics masquerading as a strategy this causes all kinds of execution issues and sales enablement becomes a discipline that is fractured across sales marketing sprinkle in a little Learning and Development maybe a little from HR let's go bug product marketing and it's this incoherent series of tactics the goal of a Sal enablement program is to increase the revenue per sales head everything else is noise and this goal cannot get accomplished unless you address these issues and this is why you care about developing and executing a sales enablement strategy hopefully Bill's example today will help you get started in the right direction however if you're looking for a little bit more how-to advice you want to do a deeper dive here's two re sources for you get a copy of this year's research report called how to make your number in 2016 you can find it at salesbenchmarkindex.com turn to Pages 181 and 183 which is what we use today and put yourself through these exercises after you do that go back and listen to Bill's comments again and you should be off and running also you can have one of our experts lead you through a workshop which will detail how to do do this so if you're doing it for the first time maybe somebody holding your hand would be helpful and would' be glad to do it if you're interested in that sales Benchmark index.com 20106 Workshop request a workshop and we'll follow up with you Bill I really want to thank you for being on the show today you really got your act together and you articulated the points very well so thanks a bunch for being on the show thank you for having me it was my pleasure great and I want to give you our audience a big thank you uh I appreciate the attention you give me every week I know you're busy our show is doing extremely well I want to give a personal shout out to Brian White who lives in Silicon Valley who uh told me this week that every Monday morning he rides shotgun with the Greg Alexander podcast for 45 minutes so Brian big shout out to you and thanks for tuning in I wish you much success as you try to make your number and we look forward to seeing you on the next show this has been the SBI podcast for more information on SBI Services case studies the SBI team and how we work or to subscribe to our other offerings please visit us at salesbenchmarkindex.com [Applause]