Sales Enablement and Your Buyer, with Doug Winter [Episode 723]

Doug Winter, Founder and CEO at Seismic, joins me on this episode to talk about sales enablement and your buyer.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Seismic Sales Enablement provides content to help sellers educate themselves quickly about the buyer and the buyer’s needs and also assembles content that answers the buyer’s questions in the most relevant way.
• Sellers today have much less time to perform discovery. If competitors have information the seller doesn’t have, they have a big advantage with that prospect. The sooner, the better, when presenting a value proposition.
• Tech is great, but what do we still lack to improve sales win rates? Doug predicts that tech stacks will consolidate with fewer vendors solving more pieces of the puzzle. Do those who adopt tech close more than those who do not?
• If you are settling for a 20% win rate, you are training your sellers to lose 80% of the deals. This is often driven by tools that pour unlikely prospects into the top of the funnel. Seismic looks at every step of the funnel.
• Seismic focuses on conversion rates in the funnel and looks for places where the sales process could be improved. They suggest changes and then track them for measurable improvements.
• Andy would like to see more emphasis put on winning the sale rather than the process of selling. Doug suggests putting less focus on data and more focus on relationships. We sell to people, not personas.
• Failure in the discovery/qualification stage is the cause of the loss of the sale, in most cases.
• Why is it hard to sell the concept of sales enablement to a CEO? Shouldn’t enablement be the right direction for sales? The business case for Seismic is the quick accessibility of relevant content to the sales rep.
• Companies spend money on developing content that goes unused. CRM software reports on account status but does not supply sales content. Marketing supplies content, but rarely gets feedback unless the content fails.
• There are three legs of sales enablement: coaching, content, and training. Doug says Seismic is sometimes sold to a sales enablement team, sometimes to marketing, and sometimes to sales operations.
• In Seismic’s sales department, sales tech is a high priority. They observe what tech works best for each task, in integration with the Seismic product. Companies are needing to sell more with less cost and enablement helps.
• Can you reasonably raise your company’s quota by 10% without raising your sellers’ abilities by 10%? Use the data, but reps need to get better at their jobs, not just have better tech.