Shortening salespeople's time-to-confidence

Russell Zack, Head of Revenue at Second Nature, gave this presentation at the Sales Enablement Summit New York in March 2022. You can catch the replay with your SEC membership via the membership dashboard!

In this article, I'm going to be talking about something very specific in the realm of sales enablement personnel: how do you track the confidence around your sellers?

Second Nature is a sales simulation application that enables salespeople to role play in two way conversations with a virtual persona that you define, and that’s fit to your company's buyer personas and different sales cycles.

What we allow these sellers to do is practice in a safe space.

The importance of measuring seller confidence
Seller confidence and buyer trust go hand-in-hand
Key ways to improve seller confidence
Key takeaways

The importance of measuring seller confidence

Sales enablement’s responsibilities are everpresent

We all know that we're dealing with uncertain times, and that uncertainty is going to continue.

But all of us in sales enablement know that uncertainty doesn't matter.

You have your sales goals and you're all faced with a whole variety of different programs that you need to implement, support and showcase to the heads of sales.

Then you need to talk to the sales managers about new ways in which you're going to help build the sales pipeline and grow the business.

You may have a new product, a new message, new pricing to compete against the latest competitor market and increase your revenue at the company level, or maybe a new methodology.

And of course, we see people leave the organization, and have people join the organization - we inevitably hear a lot about the need to hire and onboard people as fast and efficiently as possible.

There’s also a need, based on your expectations and your responsibility in sales enablement, to showcase that the sales team members who are ingesting their courses and taking your training are improving:

“Hey, look at what we've done with all our initiatives to make these people more productive, more efficient, and more effective in their selling.”

Where does sales confidence come in?

But that's only part of what you need to do as a sales enabler.

What do you do about confidence? How do you measure confidence within your sellers?

We know that having confident conversations with buyers will drive them to have a relationship with your sellers that drives proficiency and productivity.

I'm saying: “Oh, confident conversations? Great, easy!”. But one thing that we’ve seen is that it's not simple.

If you're going to measure proficiency and competence, you also have to be able to measure confidence, in addition to tracking the quantitative side of the effects of sales enablement initiatives.

Seller confidence and buyer trust go hand in hand

So let's take a step back and talk about what confidence is. Very simply, the definition of confidence is the measure of certainty that you can accomplish a task and be able to complete it.

But one thing that we hear a lot is that competency and confidence are very different from self-esteem.

You can have an individual with very high self-esteem who isn't confident in what they're doing on a certain task - and we're not just talking about new sellers or individuals who are in the early stages of their careers, we're also talking about established sellers.

Tony Robbins has this statement around confidence, which is:

“If you don't know how to sell with confidence, customers won't trust you.”

And that's the foundation of the relationship. We know that confidence and trust come hand in hand.