Sales Enablement Agency Methods & Results
The Focus of a Sales Enablement Agency
For most companies, the top 4 sales force goals are to increase customer acquisitions, improve salesperson productivity, increase quota attainment and accelerate revenue growth.
Johnny Grow is a Sales Enablement Agency that applies best practices in the areas of content, training, coaching and technology to help clients improve any one or all of these objectives.
We use the Ascend methodology to apply specific best practices for predictive results.
We're essentially aligning and optimizing methods with outcomes.
A Best Practices Approach
I'll share some examples of how this alignment works.
I can't tackle all the combinations in one post. So, I'll start with how content can be used to increase customer acquisitions.
Increase Customer Acquisitions
Sellers gain trust, improve engagement and increase conversions when they apply winning content. That includes verbal messaging, written correspondence and collaterals such as offers, presentations, case studies and proposals.
But accessing content is a pervasive challenge. Sellers struggle because content resides in many different systems. When reps don't know where it resides, or even if it exists, they use dated, inferior content, or create their own.
Technology is the springboard for content accessibility, utilization and automation. Applications such as CRM and CMS (content management system) provide automation and benefits, such as the following:
- Technology makes content easily accessible. This may be done by centralizing it or making it accessible via a search tool that queries all relevant repositories.
- Technology can prescribe the best content based on prospect and opportunity characteristics. This can be done by marking up content with meta tags or descriptors. You can then use CRM software to automatically push content suggestions to sellers. CRM applications can recommend the best content based on things like customer pain points or where the customer is in their purchase journey.
- Technology tracks and ranks content for effectiveness. This includes tracking email and collateral engagement. It shows which content is working and which needs improvement.
The payback is time savings. Sellers can spend 20% of their day looking for content. The above technology best practices can free up this time for more productive efforts.
Improve Quota Attainment
This time I'll share how coaching can be applied to achieve the important goal of quota attainment.
Harvard Business Review reported that selling organizations have invested more into coaching in the past five years than the prior 50. It stated, "This makes sense as research by the Sales Executive Council reveals that no other productivity investment comes close in improving rep performance."
The report also stated that coaching achieves the biggest gains for sellers in the middle. That is the sellers below the top producers who don't have as much to gain and above the lowest performers who may be in the wrong profession. According to the report, coaching improves performance results for 60% of the reps in the middle by 19%.
Here are a few of the ways we've used CRM technology to deliver more effective coaching.
- We often start by configuring alerts that identify real-time coaching opportunities.
- We then configure CRM to distribute push-based coaching suggestions. This includes automated next-best-action recommendations. It may also include the delivery of buyer insights and customer intelligence.
- We configure special coaching use cases. For example, to suggest relevant offers or other content to reengage stalled accounts.
- We use generative AI to create highly specific opportunity win plans. Win plans are proven to increase close rates by 5%.
- We integrate Plays from Sales Playbooks to improve or accelerate sale opportunities. Plays are powerful as they shift guidance from loosely delivered suggestions to fact-based recommendations. They are precise, prescriptive and personalized. Playbooks can be integrated with CRM software for automated push-based contextual delivery.
- We've more recently begun implementing AI-fused coaching agents with clients. These agents use autonomous AI and LLMs to coach sellers. They help reps improve their pitches, refine their value propositions and better solve for their customers. Like a human coach, they engage in role-play sessions, review presentation materials and identify areas for improvement. Their feedback and advice are extremely pointed and accurate.
Coaching delivers a significant and sustained payback.
It improves team quota attainment and delivers a force multiplier impact. When more sellers achieve their target goals team morale improves, staff turnover decreases and sellers invest more of their discretionary effort into their careers.
A research study by CSO Insights revealed a link between coaching and quota achievement. When coaching exceeded expectations, quota achievement was 10 points higher than when coaching was rated as needing improvement.
Accelerate Revenue Growth
In our experience with clients, we've found dozens of methods to apply content, training, coaching and technology to improve company revenue growth.
Here are a couple high impact examples.
- Grow Customer Lifetime Value
To grow customer share and value it helps to know a lot about your customers.
Technology can provide a 360-degree customer view, buyer interests, account insights and voice of the customer feedback to name just a few things.
AI agents can then engage customers or alert sellers to buying opportunities.
Generative AI can produce relevant, personalized and contextual content for those opportunities. This could include compelling conversation topics, tailored emails, customer-specific content assets or high impact value messaging. It can also align different types of content to each stage of the customer's purchase journey.
- Improve Customer Retention
Customer relationships get better with good communication.
Technology can help. It can create content that shows how the brand is innovating or how the customer can get more value. This may include best practices, customer case studies, new product releases or thought leadership content.
Even better, the technology is excellent at creating customer specific content that carefully weaves in your competitive advantages, unique value proposition and collective core competencies.
It can then sequence content delivery. This can be automated with drip messaging or nurture marketing campaigns.
Sometimes clients become dissatisfied. If that persists, they become flight risks. Automated coaching can identify customers at risk of churn and propose actions or remediations to retain them.
This combination of content, coaching and technology helps strengthen customer relationships. That's important because the strength of your customer relationships is a leading indicator of customer purchases, referrals, lifetime value and retention.
Customer relationships also create a competitive advantage that can withstand competitor encroachment and the erosion of other competitive advantages.
We're Sales Enablement Agency Specialists
There's no shortage of techniques to help companies achieve their top sales goals.
There are dozens of things you can do with content, training, coaching and technology. And every one of them delivers a different result. But revenue leaders don't want to experiment over extended periods to figure out what works. They want to quickly know the shortest route to their goals.
This is where a sales enablement agency like Johnny Grow can help.
We can quickly compare and forecast which best practices and technology levers will achieve those goals in the shortest time. We apply a data-driven precision approach. It's an alternative to investing in arbitrary strategies or best guess explorations.
For clients seeking expert help, our sales enablement consulting specialists can bring research-based insights, evidence-based best practices, prescriptive methods, technology accelerators and the most important key performance indicators to achieve your most important objectives.