How to Move from Sales Enabler to Sales Performance Consultant

“What have you done for me lately?” It’s a question running through the mind of the sales executives, sales managers, and sellers you work with daily.  Suppose you’re a sales enablement practitioner who answers this question with the number of programs you facilitated or the results of level 1 surveys you collected. In that case, you may soon realize others don’t share your excitement over such data.  If you’re honest with yourself, those results may mean something to you, but they probably don’t translate well into the day-to-day workflow of your internal clients.  In light of the current economic times, the last thing sales trainers want to do is bring hollow data to the table because hollow data doesn’t translate well or mean much to the sales team. 

Why?  Because they just can’t see how the data you provided will help them succeed with their clients or customers!

It stands to reason that changing the questions you ask will change the responses you receive.  So, what questions should you ask, and what type of data should you collect to gain more influence and drive change with your sales team?  The answer to those questions lies in understanding what data helps client-facing, revenue-generating team members drive more sales results.  If you can gather the information that ties your development efforts to tangible performance improvements or quantify the real-world impact on the audience, then you are one step closer to establishing real influence through your work.   This influence garnered through action and impact can begin to facilitate the change you are looking for while simultaneously providing a personal payoff.

What is a Sales Performance Consultant?

Sales professionals are most accountable and responsible for driving revenue and wear different “hats” throughout a day, a month, or a year. Choosing the right role at the right time is truly the crux of the matter—correctly interpreting customer demands and how to respond. This is how world-class sales organizations should strive to operate—but they can only do so if salespeople have already been equipped with the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities to meet the demands of the roles that they must play. 

For example, 

Consultant: 

• leverages expertise and resources to build strong advisory relationships
• suggests best courses of action based on data and helps with rational decision-making
• guides the decision-making of others, including internal or external customers
• recognizes opportunities for products, services, or solutions to bring parties together to create a mutually beneficial relationship
• acts as the point person in negotiating transactions, fulfilling documented agreements, and building relationships essential to long-term partnering. 

Strategist: 

• envisions ways of operating or achieving goals that do not currently exist
• articulates the vision in a way that facilitates its transformation to operational reality in response to challenges or opportunities
• applies or leads innovative ideas and systems to create a competitive advantage for the organization.

Analyst: 

• collects, synthesizes, deconstructs, and reconfigures information (e.g., ideas, facts, raw data) to provide insight to others
• works with customers to determine and document business needs
• documents requirements, processes, or methods in the most appropriate manner
• understands technology, systems, and tools for use within the sales environment.

Get a Fast Start

Understanding these three roles will help you become a more effective sales performance consultant.  To get off to a fast start with your sales team, you need to focus on building your foundational skills, such as

• Partnering:  The goal here is to position yourself and clearly define your approach so you earn trust as a partner with the key stakeholders. One of the easiest ways to do this is to be conversant in understanding the current situation and the existing gaps. Be prepared to ask thought-provoking questions to elicit a better understanding of the source of the gaps.  And make sure you know just as much about the selling environment as your sales team members.
  
  
• Gaining and sharing insight – In your job, you can get involved with your internal customers.  You are also in a unique position that allows you to observe skills in action during “ride-alongs” in the field, listening in on customer class, observations in the field, role-plays, and one-on-one interviews with salespeople, sales managers, and even customers. It would help if you also bridged the sales and learning professions. Your ability to gain and share insight on adult learning principles, change management approaches, coaching strategies, and training delivery and design can help fill critical performance gaps in your team.  You can also share the latest trends, best practices, or benchmark data that can help you help your customers.
  
  
• Providing solutions – Internal customers will view “training” as the number one solution to close performance gaps. If you cannot influence others through questioning, partnering, and gaining and sharing insight, you risk being told what to do instead of being asked for an opinion.  Your job is much like a doctor who diagnoses before they prescribe! Use your knowledge of selling and learning to recommend solutions that get results, close performance gaps, and fit within the sales team’s existing workflow. You're on the right track if you can provide relevant solutions while equipping sales team members with robust sales tools that build customer trust.
  
  
• Maintaining personal effectiveness – One of the best ways to achieve the impact you’re looking for is to maintain a high outputs-based tempo.  In other words, your work outputs and deliverables allow you to show momentum while branding your efforts.  Solid execution, thorough follow-through, and rock-solid analysis of results show your ability to get the job done.  You must manage your time, improve your business acumen and skill, leverage technology, and manage knowledge to do this.  You also need to run sales meetings that are on-point, focused, and meaningful.

Below is a five-step process to help transition from sales enabler to sales performance consultant.  Remember, the key is to leverage partnering, solution, insight, and effectiveness competencies within the three sales performance improvement roles identified above:

The 5 Steps to becoming a Sales Performance consultant

Following is a simple 5 step process you can use to assess if you’re moving from sales enablement practitioner to sales performance consultant:

• Step 1:  Know Where You Are Going
• Step 2: Understand Sales Performance Gaps
• Step 3: Select the Performance Improvement Approach 
• Step 4: Roll Out Solutions
• Step 5: Measure the Impact

Let’s review each in more detail.

Step 1: Know Where You Are Going.

Be prepared to sit down with your stakeholders to understand the goals of the sales group (e.g., sales results, new starts, growth, competitive takeaways, engagement, etc.). When working with your stakeholders, one of the most effective techniques for achieving a starting point for this is to ask: “Imagine that your people are doing the job perfectly and that you and all other stakeholders, including the performers, are satisfied. What are they doing and achieving differently from what is currently happening?” Probe encouragingly to draw out all aspects of desired performance. 

Key Actions:

• Identify and quantify stakeholder/customer goals
• Specify the sales performance required to meet those goals.

Step 2: Understand Sales Performance Gaps

You want to augment the data points you collected in step one with supplementary quantitative information based on direct observation, surveys and questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, and even performance tests you or an expert might administer. If you support a sales organization, you should have access to reports covering: the performance dashboard, weekly learning and performance metrics, staffing, customer satisfaction, new hire, and engagement scores.

The goal of the previous steps was to help you better define the existing performance gaps.  The more specific you can be, the better.  There are three dimensions to a performance gap: magnitude (how big and all-encompassing the gap is), value (how much the gap represents to the organization in terms of revenues, profits, or cost savings), and urgency (how quickly it must be resolved).

Key Actions:

• Assess the current level of sales performance
• Define the sales performance gap
• Identify sales performance gap factors

Step 3: Select the Performance Improvement Approach.

They are three key points to retain in identifying learning solutions. First, the better you execute step two, the easier it is to identify the most appropriate approach. Second, there is a limitless array of possible solutions you can use.  And third, as a specialist, you need to identify the best possible approach that attains the results you’re looking for.  This responsibility should fall to you.  But before you begin making choices, here is an important point to remember. Your list of potential solutions may, at first appearance, seem long. Consider that some of the solutions do not require a tremendous amount of effort.

Clarifying expectations, increasing supervisory support, or eliminating interfering tasks, for example, may be resolved through a few meetings and the cleanup of existing practices. On the other hand, a solution such as training may demand a greater amount of resources and time. So, don't worry about the number of potential solutions yet. Instead, focus on four criteria: 

1. Scope – based on the audience and the sales force size, is the solution being proposed to allow for efficient execution and deployment? 
2. Economics – is the solution within budget, or can the financial investment be justified? 
3. Feasibility – is the approach realistic? and
4. Relevance – will you get sign-off from stakeholders and support from field management?

Key Actions: 

• Identify all potential learning solutions
• Select the most appropriate learning solution based on the four criteria.

Step 4: Roll Out Meaningful Solutions.

It’s time to roll out your solution!  This requires three steps: design, creation, and prototyping. Design -- whether the intervention is training, job aids, process redesign, or a new incentive system, each must be initially designed. Creation -- it generally includes specifications for developing an intervention. Depending on the nature of the intervention, this creation phase may be performed by you or by others. Prototyping -- once you have a solution or set of solutions in a draft usable form, you need to ensure that it is valid and tested. Note: if your group has a formal design or curriculum standards process, this is where you would implement the process.

When implementing your solutions, you can break it down into three phases: planning, execution, and support. Planning -- implementation planning begins long before you arrive at step four. During the analysis, you collect a great deal of information about the gap and the context, the performers, the resources, and the constraints of the situation—execution -- little things mean a lot. Friendly event invitations, excellent materials ready and waiting, incentive and feedback systems operational, and even hardcopy and repressions must be in a “go” mode. Support - implementing any performance improvement solutions requires two types of support: implementing the interventions themselves and for the targeted performers.

Key Actions: 

• Tailor the learning solution to meet the need
• Effectively implement the performance solution

Step 5: Measure the Impact

Besides creating an actual learning development plan, the most critical step is ongoing engagement, follow-through, and progress monitoring (good or bad). This step will tell us what impact we are having, what's working, and what's not. The action plan should be completed and followed up after every formal intervention.

Key Actions:

• Identify how you will monitor the performance of your solutions 
• Develop a plan for maintaining over the long term 

CHECKLIST:

1. Have you identified and quantified customer goals?
2. Have you specified the sales performance criteria needed to meet those goals?           
3. Have you assessed the current level of sales performance?
4. Have you defined the sales performance gap?
5. Have you identified sales performance gap factors?
6. Have you identified all potential solutions?
7. Have you selected the most appropriate learning solution?
8. Have you tailored the learning solution to meet the need?
9. Do you know how you will effectively implement the learning solution?
10. Have you identified how you would monitor the performance of your solution?