Episode Summary
Adopting a sales methodology can help develop a successful sales process because it provides sales reps and managers with a scalable and predictable way of operating that ultimately determines the organization’s ability to improve win rates. Further, it is critical that as many people as possible in the organization should be fully trained in the sales methodology to apply it successfully.
But in many companies, even if the entire company has undergone comprehensive long-term methodology training by experts, employees may struggle to provide that level of training to others. In that case, the company has to allocate money from its budget to train new people on their methodology.
Dina Gallay, Senior Specialist in Sales Enablement at Relativity, suggests a scalable way to train employees in the company’s sales methodology. “It’s shadowing people, providing the resources (the talk tracks, the questioning strategies, objection handling), and a lot of role-play,” says Dina.
In this episode of Taking the Lead, Dina explains why she left people leadership and moved into the sales enablement sector. Dina and our host Christina Brady get into the similarities and differences between sales enablement and sales leadership and discuss the sales process and methodology.
Guest Profile
- Name: Dina Gallay
- What she does: Dina is the senior specialist in Sales Enablement at Relativity.
- Company: Relativity
- Noteworthy: Dina has been in sales enablement at Relativity for just under a year. Prior to that, she was in sales and sales leadership, mostly in the consulting space and staffing. Dina was in technology at LinkedIn for four years, and has also been a VP of sales for two companies.
Key Insights
- A consulting role versus a management role. For many who start their sales career, the goal is to reach a leadership position and manage people. In her career, Dina has been an individual contributor and has also been in management. However, she realized that people's leadership was not for her. "You have to love that; otherwise, you shouldn't be doing it. And it was sad at first, and actually quite unconscious, but then I realized that I had a lot more joy talking with clients, helping clients. At the time, I was working in sales consulting, and I loved helping clients figure out where the gaps were and talk about what was going well, so much more than I loved managing the team."
- Sales enablement versus sales leadership. Sales enablement is the strategic, ongoing process of training your reps to improve their skills and sell, and it can positively impact your business's bottom line and help your sales reps close more deals. According to Dina, enablement is a foundational piece of every organization and will help teams hit their numbers. "The role of a sales enablement person or a team is to help a sales team be as efficient as possible — help with training, help identify gaps, look for voids in the sales process. And these are all things that, in some companies, sales leaders are responsible for doing. And really, sales leaders should be coaches, cheerleaders, and strategists. And that's where I see sales enablement is so effective because it's not only an extension of sales leadership, but it's also a separate role with a slightly similar goal, but separate focus."
- How to adopt a methodology and determine if it's working. Some companies have a defined sales process, some have a sales methodology, and some have both. Dina says you need to have an ingrained, repeatable sales process in place to train employees on the methodology and points out that three things are critical to its adoption: providing the technology and the structure, using the data to understand things, and then holding people accountable. "Having an effective sales methodology is focusing on driving behavior change and adoption with the goal for a specific outcome because they have so many competing priorities. In an ideal world, you've got that process, you've implemented a methodology, you're measuring it by conversation intelligence tools, and perhaps your sales operations team can track, for example, length in the sales stage. So, if somebody is stuck somewhere, if there's good CRM hygiene, you could pull back and see if somebody is spending too much time talking to a non-budget keeper or did they give a price and then things suddenly went dark."
Episode Highlights
How Do You Improve Sales
“The very first place I would start is with a sales process. And I would go a little further to say, ‘Do you have a sales process with defined activities and exit criteria?’ because a lot of companies don’t. And so, ideally, it lives in your CRM, but somewhere is this, ‘Does everybody on your sales team understand how to move through the sales stages, and are they following these guidelines?’ […] This is the ‘What to do?’ Define the steps. Some companies have seven steps; some have five; it’s basically getting from prospecting to discovery to close to post-sale. Define that — step one, step two — define what each of those means and how to exit them.
And then, the sales methodology is a lot juicier. […] Now you’ve got to figure out how to overcome the objection. What’s a talk track around that? What are some questions to ask? That’s what a methodology is; it’s the guidelines to help you get through that — the ‘How to?'”
Adoption of the Methodology
“Senior sales leadership needs to create that culture of adaptability and embed the methodology into your KPIs. Have those discussions at all-hands [meetings], have them in your account plans, for example, ‘How are you leveraging it?’ Just create your sales tools with the embedded methodology. Then your frontline managers have to be the cheerleaders; so, consistent coaching, consistent feedback, constantly examining the health of an opportunity, asking hard questions. […]
Then there are the sales reps. They have to commit to learning. They have to do role play and practice and do the work. And then sales enablement and sales operations have to help identify those gaps and voids and provide the data, the heavy lift of creating the right platform if they don’t have it available yet.”
You Can Make Role Play Less Uncomfortable
“One of the first things we did was we uninvited managers; so, managers were not invited on this call. This was teammates only, team members only. And so that helped a bit for a safe space. And in the beginning, the role plays were easy. We started out easy, so we weren’t throwing curve balls, and so it just got easier and easier. […]
Sometimes I’ve seen managers join calls, and they get in the driver’s seat and they’re writing for them instead. I would argue that’s not a great way for sales reps to learn. And so that’s why doing a role play without the managers and figuring things in a safe space, figuring things out and making a mistake and doing it again without, ‘Well, here’s how I would do it’ — which sometimes could happen with the manager — is helpful.”
Marketing and the Sales Methodology
“Marketing is good at going out there and understanding the market, and scraping the market for data and predictive data of how this industry is responding to this and what they’re thinking, and this buyer persona is responding to this and what they’re thinking, and now I’m going to help you with the talk tracks around that that are specific to our industry, our company, our product, our service, et cetera.”
