Nick Salas gave this presentation at our Sales Enablement Festival in October 2021.
My name is Nick Salas, and I'm the Director of Sales Enablement at Mindtickle. Prior to my role here, I was Director of Sales Enablement at Workfront, which was recently acquired by Adobe.
I’ve also held quota-carrying sales roles, and have found that experience to be really helpful in my role in enablement.
In this article, I’ll talk about what an “ideal rep profile” means, and how to start building a framework to identify key areas to build on as you think about your overall enablement strategy, and how developing your ideal rep profile plays into that.
Here’s our main talking points:
- The crisis of enterprise readiness
- Is true sales readiness just a dream state?
- What’s the benefit of a well-defined ideal rep profile?
- What to include in your ideal rep profile
- How would you align your org to the ideal rep profile?
Let’s go ahead and jump into it. 👇
The crisis of enterprise readiness
Before we get into the specifics of identifying the ideal rep profile and what that really means, I want to lay the groundwork and explain why this concept is so compelling for us enablement professionals.
When you look at the convergence between sales reps and sales leaders, you can see the huge gap they believe exists in their ability to build a culture of readiness and learning.
In a study conducted by HBR, 75% of employees say their existing training doesn't enhance their performance. In another study conducted by McKinsey, sales leaders are finding significant gaps in that same training.
This is what we refer to as the crisis of enterprise readiness, which we're going to cover in this article. It’s creating a need for us, in enablement, to take a step back and analyze our programmes to identify those areas where we can make an impact.
Today’s reality
This report with 250 sales leaders polled shows us hitting quota is obviously a real challenge. How can we start making a difference in closing the gap between sales readiness and quota achievement?
We should always be looking at KPIs as an indicator of the quality of our programmes. Not to say we're driving the number, but we can have a heavy hand in influencing the direction of the number in terms of overall achievement.
How does the readiness crisis translate for CROs?
The 80-20 rule, where 80% of the revenue is being closed by 20% of the sales force? That's no longer sustainable.
With accountability being laid so heavily on sales teams to perform and be message-ready all the time, it's imperative that enablement takes a more heavy-handed role in ensuring those percentages are evenly distributed.
This 80-20 rule has even started to become hardwired into some hiring plans, CFOs are doing financial planning around it. The problem is that that 20% we've relied on for so many years may be shrinking.
As you can see in the image above, there's three readiness issues impacting the stats:
- The increase in ramp time: Caused in large part by complexity of product or market changes that a lot of the companies face. Any of us who enable against complex product sets understand that pain, and today, the average ramp time for a rep to reach productivity is almost 11 months, which is crazy.
- The decrease in tenure: With the average tenure of reps hovering at around 18 months, in large part due to competitive markets or lack of incentive to stay for a long time, reps tend to move on after they finally get settled in. That's obviously really disheartening for us to see in enablement.
- The drop in performance: From 2011 to 2019, quota attainment per rep fell from 63% to 43%. This readiness crisis, as it relates to CROs and sales reps is real and becoming more apparent, which is why we as enablers need to be crystal clear in our charters into what it means to be ready, and how we're going to impact a change in the current direction.
What is sales readiness?
Sales readiness is a continuous state of excellence to grow revenue by using a suite of tools and processes to increase knowledge, enhance performance, and adapt to change.
My favorite part of our definition is the “grow revenue” portion, probably just by nature of having been a sales rep before. I always tend to think in terms of revenue, growing revenue, and carrying quotas for us in sales enablement.
Our north star is always being able to correlate our efforts and our programmes towards productivity, competency progression and ultimately, towards revenue contribution.
Although we're not driving the number, we can have a major impact in influencing the number through our enablement efforts and by taking a more data-driven approach to gathering some of these metrics.
Readiness model
This model puts everything into a more visual perspective. Based on our definition of readiness, we see that defining excellence is the first step to building your framework.
The number one step, in orange, is what we're focusing on in this article and I believe it’s the cornerstone and the foundation to the other steps represented in the model.
What does ‘defining excellence’ mean? How can we get started on that?
This ability to define excellence is what I've been referring to as the ideal rep profile, and it'll drive all the other areas of your framework for readiness.
You'll see that once we have the groundwork set for what that excellence looks like, we can start to build our programmes around it.
Defining competencies, skills, and behaviors
How do we define competencies, skills and behaviors?
It's helpful to think of definitions because they are so closely related, but when we think about building a scalable rep profile, you'll want to identify where you are building programmes against at least these three areas.
Competencies: Levels of knowledge that can predict behavior
Skills: Learned abilities to get the job done
Behaviors: Execution of the skills, abilities and knowledge
The bottom line here is that as practitioners, it's important that we delineate what we're going to enable against.
What is our programme? What are our programmes focused on?
In the context of building this ideal rep profile, it should be a combination or a mix of these areas that you and your leaders want to focus on and that your team has the resources to build programmes against.
Is true sales readiness just a dream state?
Or can revenue orgs really achieve it? Is this attainable? Can we move away from completion and adoption, and into the ability for enablement and readiness teams to truly predict when a sales rep or sales team is truly message ready?
Can we build programmes against that and start measuring against it to repeat success?
Additionally, how can we start as enablers to build KPIs that start showing correlation with our efforts to the productivity and the revenue of the field?
Achieving this dream state shouldn't be unattainable. It should be viewed as a reality and as something we, as an enablement function, can help drive and lead the company's perspective on.
Every sales deal has two sides
Every deal has two sides: the seller and the buyer.
Your marketing team has probably spent a lot of time identifying what your ICP (ideal customer profile) looks like and all the characteristics that go hand-in-hand with that ICP, such as where they want the seller to spend their time.
Some of the things we think about when building out that profile are: industry, geography, number of employees, pain points, etc.
What about our sellers?
We spend so much time thinking about our buyers, which is obviously very important, but in enablement, we should spend the same amount of time thinking about our sellers and our ideal rep profile.
When we think about ICP, the amount of research we put into it ensures we're spending the right amount of time, money and effort to grow our revenue, enablement and sales management. It's the same thought process.
How do we spend our time and effort to ensure we're focusing our resources on activities that will bring maximum return for our field sellers?
You start to have a better answer set to these questions when we can look at the ideal rep profile through a similar lens than the one we use for our customers.
Instead of ICP, it turns into a conversation around IRP.
Building out a framework that includes a set of skills, competencies, behavioral strategies, attributes, and metrics that you as an enablement team can start building and driving the perspective on as the gold standard is important. That’s what we're calling the ‘ideal rep profile’.
No benchmarks, no improvements
If we look at this through the lens of command of the message, it's important to take a look at some of the negative consequences of not doing this.
What does it look like if we don't spend time identifying what your ideal profile looks like?
The first thing I want to call out is training for the sake of training. This is what I call compliance and ‘check the box’ training. No sales manager wants their team on those incomplete lists.
CSO Insights reports that 72.5% of stakeholders don't feel like their enablement initiatives meet or exceed expectations and feel like they're doing it just for the sake of checking off the box.
Is it because there's no focus on sales rep qualities on knowledge and capabilities within enablement?
I believe it's heavily based on a strategy that focuses too much on that episodic, one-time compliance-driven training, that's not necessarily created to drive change. It could drive change if there was more emphasis placed on driving to ideal rep profile qualities.
The second is when coaching is looked at as extended deal reviews. The output here, which includes no improvements in rep performance, is a huge negative consequence to not building out that ideal profile.
Overall quota attainment has fallen since 2013. There's a strong reason within our own sales enablement teams to change how we approach our programmes and it starts with defining excellence, and defining your ideal rep profile.
What’s the benefit of a well-defined ideal rep profile?
The benefits vary by role, but when you think about the seller, if you put yourself in the shoes of a seller, knowing what good looks like, is an important component to what we do in enablement.
We would never introduce a new product line and pitch deck to our field sellers, without showing them what a good pitch looks like against that new product line.
This concept helps drive success for your sellers. They can see what they need to track towards to hit ultimate productivity and be field ready for sales leaders
The benefits of having a well defined ideal rep profile include: coaching topics, identifying gaps, and remediation techniques, that bring that one-on-one meeting to a state where the managers are able to help their seller become better at what they do by having a model to point them back to.
Lastly, for us in sales enablement, we benefit because now we have a roadmap of content we can prioritize. We can work with sales leadership to prioritize this content and drive our programme towards it.
Ideal rep profiles: set it
In terms of getting started with your profile, let's get a little bit tactical here. Think about the skills, competencies and behaviors that are agreed upon as ideal for your team to have.
One thing I want to emphasize is not every area will bear the same weight, so keep in mind that in some industries, and situations, it's more mission critical that reps, for example, have deep product knowledge over competitive knowledge, or even some behaviors and skills may hold more weight in terms of prioritization.
Make sure that when you're setting your ideal rep profile, there's consensus with sales leaders on what success should look like, and where you should spend more time prioritizing key target areas.
This is the first step towards creating your ideal rep profile.
In other words, what do we want our sellers to know, and what do we want them to do? How do we want that translated into prospect facing activities? How much weight do we want to give to those different areas?
Ideal rep profiles: measure, train, and coach against it
Once you have identified and you have consensus on all of this, you can build out your framework.
The reinforcement of it is critical, and this is why coaching is such a big component to the ideal rep profile.
It's not enough to set it and leave it alone.
In enablement, our efforts should go far, but when it comes to an IRP those efforts are extended even further when the managers are supporting it and coaching to it.
You can categorize the level of your rep profile and color code it however you want to track the progression, but make it obvious what good looks like don't let the sellers wonder - make it crystal clear.
Creating an ideal rep profile should not be punitive but it should be an opportunity to have better, more meaningful coaching sessions, and have an opportunity to work with the sales enablement team on more tailored and customized programmes that are ultimately going to help your sales reps succeed.
What to include in your ideal rep profile
When you're thinking about what to include in your ideal rep profile, you should think about using a combination of feedback from your reps, your call recordings, your quota exceeding field sellers and from the dream state that sales managers want to replicate on their team.
Don't build this on your own, this shouldn't be a sales enablement only activity. This should have a lot of involvement, product marketing needs to have a hand in it too.
Most sales organizations have standards that are broadly used across all industries, but the more specific you can make it to your sales process, the easier it will be for your end customer, your sellers, and your sales managers to understand what he or she needs to know to hit that ideal state.
It's not enough to show them what it is, we also need to show them a path to how they can achieve that and it's a journey.
We shouldn't position this as a quarterly activity that, after taking a handful of programmes within the quarter, that all of your field sellers are going to be at the ideal rep profile state.
It's a constant journey of learning, iterating and prioritizing what your business is trying to achieve within a given quarter. Then, aligning your skills, attributes, and competencies towards those objectives once you have gained that consensus you need.
Creating your IRP
As mentioned earlier, the agreed upon categories need to be identified and written out.
That's the first step. That way, it'll start to come to life and you can begin to categorize by importance, what programmes the enablement team can start thinking about to fill some of the ideal rep profile gaps.
Each of these example categories above could, in theory, justify an entire enablement programme.
You shouldn't think about this just from a new hire perspective, but you should be getting a sense from your existing field sellers and your frontline managers on where they stand with each category.
You can then start to calculate totals, see where scores are low, present a plan of action to leadership, get agreement on tailored and customized enablement programmes and build that into your process.
This ideal rep profile revolves heavily around prioritization for leadership that we, in enablement, will help drive and support.
Once you have those on paper, you can use a spreadsheet or ideally a sales enablement platform to build those in. You can build those in as tags and start tracking the progression of the programmes you're building against each category.
When you can start to show the effect of your enablement against that ideal rep profile, it becomes a lot more impactful and actionable which is something sales leaders will take note of.
This has a dual purpose too, because we can start looking at how impactful our enablement programmes are in the context of driving the ideal rep profile.
We can start asking ourselves: “Are these enablement programmes, the ones we're spending so much time on, meeting the expected outcomes to drive towards ideal rep profile qualities?” and “Can we quantify their impact?”.
Traditional enablement vs. readiness
Building this profile and aligning your content to it will take you away from that compliance and episodic driven strategy of enablement that we talked about. It'll drive you towards true readiness.
The differences listed above are all areas to think about when implementing a true readiness programme that aligns with your ideal rep profile. You can see it's shifting the enablement away from adoption into a state of continuous scalable and data driven enablement.
You can start to combine any work you've already done with competency matrices with other attributes you'd like to highlight in your IRP and come up with that gold standard. In doing so, you'll put yourself on a journey away from this traditional thinking of enablement into this state of continuous excellence.
How do you align your org to the ideal rep profile?
The most important part in all of this is including your end customer because your sales managers are accountable for the success of their teams.
It's important to get that alignment, but ask yourself how you can begin to align your sales department with ideal rep profile qualities and what you need to put in place for this to be successful.
On this template above, I defined each area under attributes, behaviors and metrics. You can think about how to separate them in your mind but the great part about building this out is you can begin to see how impactful our role in sales enablement can be here.
Think of all the possibilities of programme topics that can help drive:
- Qualities that must be present in each and every seller
- Activities you see repeatedly in each rep
- Metrics that will help the manager coach more effectively
- Justification towards your role in enablement on the metric side
To wrap up
You can start moving towards the other areas of enablement success and driving programmes to align with what excellence has been defined as in your org after a successful implementation and completion of this ideal rep profile.
