It’s common to associate storytelling with brand building, but it's unfortunate that mainstream marketing has confined storytelling to the channels of Twitter, YouTube, byline articles and ad campaigns. The art of storytelling extends itself beyond marketing communications to anyone that has customer interactions.
Salespeople, for example, strive to have meaningful conversations and leave memorable impressions. They are expected to be the consummate storyteller. So wouldn’t it make sense for storytelling to be the foundation of sales enablement?
Revergy hit the nail on the head in their article, “Is Today’s Definition of Sales Enablement Turning Reps into Paper Pushers?” How many of us have delivered binders full of one-pager sell sheets, data sheets, whitepapers, etc. and called that sales enablement? When was the last time a salesperson was able to advance a deal because of marketing collateral?
I’ve been a part of plenty of sales enablement initiatives. Some were grassroots and others were corporate-wide programs that involved a robust cross-functional team. Regardless of the size of your sales organization and who leads enablement strategy, salespeople need to practice telling the story. Here’s how they can do that:
This is critical to every sales enablement strategy. Salespeople need to be able to demonstrate that they’re capable presenting the messaging and can defend it through every stage of the sales cycle.
Pair the salesperson up with a “prospect” and act out realistic scenarios that require them to think on their feet and overcome challenges, ideally in front of a live audience. It can be awkward in the beginning, but most will leave with a renewed sense of confidence and undoubtedly better storytelling skills.
Completing a test before training begins and after it ends is the best way to quantify whether or not the salesperson has improved their understanding of the messaging and positioning. Ask as many open answer questions as possible so the trainee has the opportunity to write the answer in their own words. You should have a pretty good gauge after 10-15 questions if your rep understands how to overcome fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD).
The test itself can be conducted online via something like Survey Monkey. Conducting this kind of testing measure doesn’t require an extensive team. I used to lead this effort as a lone ranger for our entire North American channel, which included nearly 20 rep organizations.
A sales enablement program is essentially dress rehearsal for a sales organization. It is their time to practice “getting it”.
As marketers, how should we allocate our time to support this? A lot of variables affect how organizations design their enablement strategy, so I am certainly not saying that marketing collateral is useless. What I am saying is if you had to prioritize the deliverables in your sales enablement toolkit, would it be a product brochure or live training? A datasheet or a test that proves that the rep has improved their knowledge?
