Stacey Wells Justice gave a fascinating insight into the world of sales enablement from her unique perspective. Having worked in the sales marketing team, she went on to create a new enablement team at Workfront.
Here's what she found.
"I didn't know what I didn't know."
"Being in the sales organization was incredibly eye opening. It helped to build credibility because we were focused on the same goals. One of the first things we did was build a charter. We needed to know what we needed to do to be successful."
"Three things that we think are really important to gain executive alignment; create a charter, measure what matters and build partnerships."
The architect and filter
"Enablement needs to be the architect and the filter of all of that information. Â That's exactly how you align to the business. It's how you work with those other departments."
"They don't know what they don't know. We help them to understand by building credibility and having the respect of the sales teams. They show up when we do training, we give them the information they need, and we relate it back to what matters to them. This is how you can help us do that."
"We create true partnerships with those teams, and we filter what goes to them. Because if they're overwhelmed, then the likelihood of them even using the information is going to fail."
"In our organization, every team has a commander's intent. We publish this to everyone internally. We leverage this commander's intent. We align directly to that. We create this at the end of every year and we use this to drive our strategy."
What is the single most important thing to do?
"Drive growth revenue and a net renewal rate that exceeds the company's metrics. We align directly to those numbers. That gives us a lot of credibility with the sales team, because we're not measured on QSO's or qualified leads. We're measured directly to those top line numbers. Then we break that down into key performance metrics that matter to the business."
Measure what matters
"We knew that we needed to align ourselves with the revenue within the business. What matters to the business? What are the key metrics that we're using as a company to drive our success? What can sales enablement do to align our programs and our activities to the ultimate success of the business?"
"We settled on five things. Well, five plus one."
New hire ramp
"We define this as the time to close two deals. One deal can be luck, so we try to close two deals."
Average sales price
"How do we increase our average sales price? We publish a recipe card to our sales team at the beginning of every year that says 'This is your recipe card as an Enterprise Sales Rep. You need to close this number of deals at this average sales price. Ultimately, you'll meet your number.'"
Overall quota participation
"How many of our reps are making quota? How can we help to get everyone hitting this target?"
Increase partner attach rate
"We have really focused and have dramatic goals to go from a 20% partner attach rate to a 40% partner attach rate."
Conversion rates
"We look at our conversion rates by stage. Specifically, stage one to stage two. We've zeroed in on where we see the biggest fallout between a discovery call and qualifying as an opportunity that results in a demo."
Overall win rate
"We look at that by cohort. We align our metrics and have one source of truth with finance, with marketing, with sales leadership. We drive all of it through tableau."
"We have a sales pulse that we, along with sales operations, send out every Sunday night to sales leadership and executive leadership in the company. We have a revenue committee that includes enablement, marketing, finance, sales, executive leadership and operations. We go through that data and that's where we find the best alignment in terms of our programs."
"We, as a team, identify 'Hey, we're having a really hard time with stage one to stage two conversion.' Then I come back to my team and say 'Let's talk about how we do this. Let's talk about how we can help improve this.'"
"We align our goals because it matches with those five overall goals that we have. We meet as a cross functional team to go through all of the data together."
"That's had a huge impact, because we're not fighting over data. There's no friction. Nobody is overwhelmed. It was a long time coming, but it's probably had the most impact on anything that we've done in the organization to get aligned on what success means."
This article was adapted from a speech Stacey gave at the San Francisco Sales Enablement Summit. Stacey is Vice President, Sales Strategy & Enablement at Workfront.
