According to Salesforce research, sales reps spend only 28% of their time actively selling. So, how can organizations help cut through the noise and maximize rep efficiency to drive success?
Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.
Here to discuss this topic is Kevin Lewis, the global director of sales enablement at Milliken & Company. Thank you for joining us, Kevin. I would love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.
Kevin Lewis: Thank you. Sure would be happy to. So I have been with Milliken for a little over 40 years. Started in manufacturing for a short time, spent some time in corporate HR, corporate training, but then spent 30 plus years in one of our divisions as a salesperson, sales manager, marketing manager, and then about the last 10 years of that in a sales enablement role. And then currently, and for the last four years have been the enterprise-wide sales enablement director, which was a new role that was formed about four years ago. So I’m the first.
SS: Well, congratulations on the new role. Now, given your experience in the manufacturing industry, I’d love to understand from you, Kevin, what are some of the unique challenges that reps in that industry face and how can enablement help them navigate these challenges?
KL: So, I’m not sure if it’s unique to manufacturing necessarily, but the majority of our products. Our ingredients go into other finished products. And so because of that, the supply chain is a very long supply chain and we have to be involved. At multiple points within that value chain. And in many cases, the value we bring, our products bring are not necessarily captured at our direct customer level.
They tend to be more at further downstream in the downstream customers. So that’s a real challenge for our salespeople to be able to. Navigate through that supply chain and have the ability to call on the various points within that chain. And those customers are very different type of customers. They could be a very large chemical manufacturer.
They could be a cut-and-sew operation. It could be an end user like a Walmart or a Starbucks. And so the capability of our sales force has to be Such that they can effectively call on all of those various points in the chain effectively. And so, Sales Enablement allows us to provide the coaching, the tools, the assets that they need at those various points.
So that they can be more successful and not spend their time creating or locating those necessary tools to be successful.
SS: Absolutely. And I know, and you mentioned it just now a few times, but how important sales efficiency is. And I know that’s a key goal for you. Why is that a top priority for your company this year?
And what are some of the initiatives that you’re focused on to help achieve it?
KL: Yes, it is a priority for us. We are challenged to grow just like most any company and many of the industries that we in are not necessarily growing industry. So it’s a real challenge. And so we have to be more effective and efficient without adding SGNA and adding more headcount.
So we have to improve our efficiency and our effectiveness of our sales force. Two of the real key things that we’re focused on this year is sales training. We have implemented a lot of sales methodology, training, market training, product training, as well as a lot of other types of. Sales focus training, and then I would say that the other thing that we focused on is marketing and how we can connect our marketing efforts to our sales force in a much more streamlined way.
Big part of that is both of those initiatives is the utilization of our sales enablement tool, Highspot which allows us to provide that content, whether it’s training or assets or whatever it may be to our sales force at their fingertips.
SS: Well, you may have already answered my next question then. I’d love to get your perspective on the strategic advantage of having an enablement platform for boosting sales productivity.
KL: I would say just like with having CRM as the one place to go for salespeople when they want to talk about or understand their customers, their contacts, their sales opportunities, having one enablement platform where we have the ability to house all of our assets and our content. And give our salespeople tools and functionality to communicate with our customers, like utilizing pitches, digital rooms, things of that nature.
And having the two of those connected is one of the key ways, in our opinion, that we have the ability to, again, improve that efficiency and effectiveness so that we can cut down on that time spent looking for things, creating things. And give them more time to effectively prepare and then go out and execute. Obviously it’s what the ultimate goal is.
SS: I love that. How do you effectively collaborate with key stakeholders, such as some of the cross-functional partners you mentioned, like marketing, maybe the frontline sales reps themselves to continue to enhance sales efficiency?
KL: So I mentioned that the role I’m in is a new role that was created about four years ago.
Prior to that, I was in this role in one division, but we have four divisions and the other three divisions did not have a sales enablement leader, nor was there a corporate person. And part of our digital roadmap was we wanted one CRM platform across our organization. And at that time we had seven across four divisions.
So the first part of that business case was to create this sales enablement team so that each division had one and there was a corporate one that was going to at least initially drive adoption of that one platform, but once that was in place, which it is, to continue to drive sales efficiency, sales effectiveness across within their division and across divisions.
And so that hub and spoke model has been very effective for us in the fact that our sales enablement leads, and myself, we see our role as how can we make salespeople better. And when I say that we really focus on process systems and people. And so we are across the entire spectrum. So whether it’s people meaning sales methodology or training processes, improving internal processes, whether it’s things like sample requesting or things of that nature, and then systems, which be our CRM system and our sales enablement platforms and making sure that we connect all of those together. So that has been very effective.
For us as a team to work together, but then to take that out to the field so that it’s someone within each of the divisions that’s really driving that. And then the other thing I would say is we work hand in hand with our corporate marketing team, who is driving a lot of the demand generation and a lot of the marketing automation work they’re doing that obviously is feeding into our salespeople in the form of lead generation and things.
That collaboration is truly a hand-in-hand effort that we have been working together for the last couple of years once we got that initial CRM platform in place.
SS: And that is a massive undertaking. So congratulations to the team for getting that all underway in the last few years. Now, I want to shift gears just a little bit. I still want to talk about rep efficiency, but I want to talk about it in the context of content governance. Because we’ve heard from a lot of our customers and enablement practitioners, how important that is in helping to improve rep efficiency. Can you share a little bit more about your strategies for content governance and how that helps your team optimize efficiency?
KL: Sure. So what I would say is the sales enablement platform actually fell under one of our corporate marketing folks. When we initially started utilizing Highspot and quite honestly, it was about number 18 on their priority list, probably. So I would say it was not given a lot of focus and effort. And the governance was extremely ad hoc, if at all, we made some changes and a sales enablement tool seems natural to be in the sales enablement team, very logical.
So I, and our sales enablement team, we actually assumed that responsibility about eight to nine months ago. And since that time, we’ve tried to do a lot of cleansing of assets and of the platform in general. But in the last two months, actually, we have put a focused effort on governance around that to move it from that ad hoc to where we now have a full-time admin working on sales enablement that one of the focused areas is around governance around our sales enablement tool around training around an improved utilization to also provide additional functionality because our tool has been so underutilized up until we’ve assumed this responsibility that we see a lot of potential for improving that. But part of that improvement is a strong cleansing effort that we’re doing right now, but then putting in specific governance with not only that admin, but specified admin within each of our divisions to ensure our content stays fresh and relevant.
SS: Well, in addition to helping reps find the right content, you guys are also helping them to leverage it effectively.
You guys have seen a 58 percent increase in adoption of external shares. Like pitching, like digital rooms. What are your best practices for helping reps effectively engage their buyers?
KL: One of the things that we do is we track and measure and share out that information. Salespeople are highly competitive by nature, and so anytime you can measure and share out how salespeople are doing, that will tend to stimulate some competition just naturally. So we track and measure and we share that information. It’s not in the form of a KPI necessarily, but allowing our salespeople who are not utilizing it to see others are doing this. And by the way, I happen to know that that person’s being successful, so maybe I should take a look at this.
So that’s one of the key things that we’re doing is measure, tracking, and sharing. The other is training. We put a renewed emphasis over the last few months. On training and it’s only going to be enhanced because we’re actually going to be adding a number of new sales reps who currently are not licensed, but will be in the next few weeks.
And so there’s going to be an even new emphasis, renewed emphasis, I guess is appropriately way to say it on training of not only those new associates. To the platform, but our existing ones so that we can ensure that we continue to drive that utilization of the tool and the functionality that’s there.That’s we’re seeing success. And the other thing is within the divisions, we have 1 division that tends to be at this point, our highest utilization, and they’re seeing a lot of success and the. Admin or the person in that division that’s really driving that has certainly been very instrumental in sharing out those best practices with that sales force.
So it’s a combination of those things.
SS: Amazing. Well, you talked about this. You touched on this a little bit at the start of your last answer, but I’d love to revisit a little bit more and dig a little deeper. What are the key metrics that you track to measure the impact of your programs on sales efficiency and effectiveness?
KL: So the number one, I mean, salespeople are in the business of closing business. So the first key metric and number one key metric is one opportunities. We are, that is by far the number one thing, because that’s ultimately the objective is to make the sale. So one opportunities is certainly one of the keys that will always be in place. Tracked, measured, shared very frequently. In addition to that, we are looking at win rates, we’re looking at cycle time, we’re looking at lead conversions, we’re looking at things like time due to convert leads, how many leads we get that are not acted upon within 24 hours. So a lot of those types of things that we track and some of which are actual KPIs.
But like I said, one of our focuses is sales training, and so we’re tracking and measuring sales training courses that our folks are taking. And it’s actually a KPI for all of our sales people this year that they have to take a minimum of X number of classes. So we’re tracking and measuring that. And we’re also looking at things like our website, how our customers are interacting, but then how that flows through to existing contacts and tracking that for our salespeople, which is something that is relatively new to the salesforce. So a lot of things, but bottom line, still top of the list, one opportunities. That’s the name of the game.
SS: Always, always. Since you’ve implemented Highspot, do you have some key results that you might be able to share with us already? Any wins you can share?
KL: I would say one of the biggest wins is within one of our divisions. We have a sizable number of sales reps in that division that are constantly interacting with the A and D community. So architect and design community and that community, of course, even though they’re not our direct customer, they’re a heavy influence in that marketplace. And what’s important to them most of the time, not 100%, but a large majority of the time. Our aesthetics and looks, those soft things, it’s not specifications, and it’s not price, and it’s not hard things, it’s the soft things.
And so, our reps in that division have been very successful in utilizing pitches to that community to share with them a lot of the design work we’re doing with the products that that group sells, as well as our capabilities of creating new designs. And that has been very well received in the A& D community because again, they’re all about aesthetics and looks and art.
And creativity. And so getting that word out to that group of Customers has been very successful with that group as far as influencing the sale.
SS: I love that. That is a fantastic win. Kevin. Amazing. Last question for you as you’re looking ahead, how do you plan to evolve your enablement strategy to continue to drive sales efficiency?
KL: In the case of our sales enablement platform, as I mentioned earlier, we have a renewed emphasis this year. Adding people training, focused admin efforts on cleansing, governance, training, new functionality, all of the sales training that we’re doing. And so this year we’re really about executing, that’s kind of the word that I use the most often internally is this is the year of execution.
This is not the year of let’s go find another new tool or that kind of thing. We’ve done a lot of that in the past five to eight years. We’ve built the ecosystem in my opinion, very well, and we’ve done a pretty good job. We’re not quite there, but we’ve done a really good job of integrating our ecosystem.
So now it’s about execution. And so I think as we move forward, we’re going to need to continuously evaluate how are these things doing? Are we getting the value that we need? What do we need to change or pivot to or from to make it more effective? We have a sales advisory board that we utilize on a regular basis as a sounding board for the sales organization.
So in addition to our sales enablement leads interacting on a daily basis, that’s another way that we can collect that feedback to ensure that the strategy and the execution that we have in place, it’s working and whatever we need to tweak, we can tweak. And if we find a major hole somewhere, whatever it may be.
Then let’s go address it. But right now we feel pretty confident that we don’t have any big holes. We know we have some little ones here and there that we’re always going to be trying to work on, but. It’s really about execution and then changing our strategy to make sure that that execution is going well.
Our sales enablement team deals with so many things, sales training, we deal with customer journey mapping, we deal with customer segmentation, we deal with customer surveys and customer experience things, we deal with CRM and all of the systems. So, I mean, it’s such a broad spectrum that it’s always going to be evolving, but we feel like we’ve got it at a place now where we don’t need any major changes.
It’s more about execution and tweaking, I think.
SS: I love that. You guys are focused on executing with excellence. I think that is phenomenal, Kevin. Thank you again so much for joining us and sharing your perspectives with our audience. I really appreciate it.
KL: Thank you. Glad to be here.
SS: To our audience. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Win Win podcast. Be sure to tune in next time for more insights on how you can maximize enablement success with Highspot.
