As a sales engineer, I’ve faced numerous challenges while training hundreds of sales teams, engineers, and business owners on the technical and business sides of products and services offered by manufacturers and service providers. One of the most significant challenges was understanding and communicating the business value of the products and services on which I was giving training. I constantly asked myself why a partner would want to sell these products and services. What benefits do they provide to the customer that would make them want to buy? The upside of working with partners is that they will tell you what business value is for them, and they will also tell you what they use as business value for their customers.

As a sales engineer, part of the discovery process is understanding technical and business objectives when making changes to their internal networks, which are drastically affected by anything I would bring to sell. Without understanding a customer’s or partner’s business objectives, the technical challenges and objectives don’t matter because nothing drives the impending project that comes with adding or replacing technology with something better or more versatile. Despite these challenges, I’ve had the great fortune to be part of many successful projects.

At the start, I spearheaded the internal training for the USM Anywhere transition, a pivotal event when AlienVault was acquired by AT&T. I successfully trained approximately 350 internal technical sellers on every aspect of the platform. From business value to in-depth deployment functions, I was responsible for creating the content, scheduling the training sessions, delivering the training, and ensuring that everyone who took the training was retained and could deliver the message to future customers. I trained most of the personnel that migrated into the new cybersecurity operating company, from the VP level down to the level 1 front-line seller and the business development folks.

After I performed the initial five training sessions with a small group of sales engineers, my management recognized my passion for training and business enablement, leading to my appointment as the go-to SME for USM Anywhere and the task of training all the sales personnel in the new organization.

I have developed and implemented a sales enablement strategy in the past. Generally, when developing the strategy, I will schedule a round table with the sales leadership team, channel sales leadership, sales engineering leadership, and leadership from any other team that wants to receive the training. Getting buy-in on anything that will go in front of their respective teams is essential. Together, we will write an outline of the training they want to receive as a part of that outline and discuss the project timeline. This often requires brainstorming sessions outside the project kickoff or update meetings. During these meetings, we will create the business objectives that should be covered and discuss how we will wrap the products and services around them.

We will also engage the marketing team to discuss the organization’s use cases that can be integrated into the training or any use cases we may need to create to drive the messaging home to the individual sellers. I find that use cases combined with quota retirement and commission payout examples drive sellers to carry out a plan for growing the business the way the business needs to be grown. Driving the business value during this time frame is also extremely important because the business value teaches the sellers to start a conversation around the product or service they are selling.

Generally, sales training is divided into products or services, and each product or service is divided into the steps of the sales cycle process. The sales cycle generally looks like the below process:

1. Prospecting—Whether cold calling, warm calling, or prospecting via email and LinkedIn, this portion of the training should primarily focus on call, email, and LinkedIn direct messaging scripts. It should focus on opening the conversation only and getting to the first appointment with the prospective customer.
2. Qualification. – At this phase, we would define the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
   • Customer Demographic
     • Ideal customer type (Industry).
     • Company Size.
     • Buyer personas.
     • Geographic locations of offices that would roll out the product or service.
   • Drivers
     • Pain points that align with your solution.
     • Customer expectations of a solution.
     • Collateral Pain points or challenges.
     • Buying intentions.
     • Buying process.
     • Proof of concept/Proof of value.
     • Compliance requirements.
   • Ability to Close
     • Company revenue.
     • Dedicated budget for new technology.
     • Purchasing power.
     • Purchase Vehicle (State/Federal Contract, RFP/RFO/RFQ, PO, Cash, etc.)
     • A deadline and urgent need to purchase.

As many of the above questions should be identified and answered during the qualification process as possible. These are basic discovery questions, many of which should be answered through firmographic data channels (lead information), as information gathered by marketing through website hits and content consumption, or during the prospecting phase.

1. – In most cases, this is one of the longest steps in the sales cycle. There are four primary tasks to be performed during this phase:
2. 1. 1. Outlining engagement strategies for the account.
      2. Creating a business impact case highlighting the product’s benefits or business value over existing or competitive solutions.
      3. Creating personalized sales collateral for client presentations.
      4. Planning the sales presentation, meetings, and follow-up process.
      5. Engage technical resources to meet with prospects for technical discovery.
3. – This is the phase where all necessary information has been gathered, and the following tasks can take place:
   • Solution design.
   • Solution presentation.
   • Pricing presentation.
   • Terms of Service are covered.
4. – This is the phase where the customer decision-makers, the sales reps, and the respective legal teams discuss the following:
   • Discuss pricing options and variances.
   • Negotiate contract terms.
   • Establish legal red lines.
5. This phase is when the prospect becomes a customer, or the deal is marked as lost. From here, the deal or opportunity would move to the fulfillment process, or an after-action report would be completed to discover where the deal went astray.

All information would be contained in a sales playbook, which would also be used as a training aid for the internal sales teams and crafted into a partner-friendly playbook for those partners who chose to use the company’s process.

If the partners were of sufficient status with the company, the partner playbooks could be customized to the partners’ liking, and specialized training could be delivered for their sales teams if required.

This data could be trained in a shorter training session (as little as 60 minutes) or a longer training session that could be used as a sales boot camp or sales certification primer.

Depending on the product or service, the sales playbook training could be recorded along with the appropriate demonstrations and marketing materials to create training videos that could then be delivered to a Learning Management System and delivered to the sales and partner teams via the LMS to track participation along with creating quizzes or tests to measure the efficacy of the training.

Most of the time, internal sales enablement is not much different than partner sales enablement training, with one real exception. Generally, the internal sales teams are more acquainted with specific products and focus more on the details of a singular product or service. Partners are usually VARs, Resellers, or MSSPs, and they have more products and services to sell than the single product or service we may be training on, so the partner’s training is generally a bit shallower than the internal sales teams. Even when delivering the same content, the internal sales teams tend to dig deeper for more information than the partner sales teams.

To alleviate the variance and, ultimately, the deficiency of training that the partner consumes, I like to write tests that are at least of medium difficulty to ensure that the learner has absorbed the comprehension of the material. In short, I want to ensure that the partners get as much bang for their training buck as possible, so I generally try to get detailed and perform thought-provoking training with engaging content.

• USE CASES – A regular part of my training or enablement sessions employs Use Cases to drive home details about the sales process, objections from prospective customers, and unforeseen challenges that may arise during the sales process. I like to use real-world examples of things that can go right and wrong in the sales process and how to overcome those challenges efficiently to earn or retain the customer’s business.
• ROLE-PLAYING – I like to test the learners’ mettle by having them converse with a prospective customer in a real-world scenario. I firmly believe that practice makes perfect, and the only way to build confidence is to practice and fail in many real-world scenarios.
• SEGMENTATION—I like to segment training sessions. I break the content down into short, palatable segments. Most people have short attention spans, and training on a single subject for four hours is a training killer. Sometimes, this can’t be helped, but I like to cover a topic in 30 minutes or less, have a practical application, and then move on to the next topic. Even during longer segments of 2-3 hours, I will break those segments down so we can have breaks between chunks of content. If I deliver video training, I like to keep content to 20 minutes or less, even if I must break the content into multiple parts.
• MULTIPLE CONTENT TYPES—I like to use different content types to deliver training. I love using PowerPoint because I know it well and am a professionally trained graphic designer. However, if not done correctly, PowerPoint is an audience sleeping aid. I like to use video and have been trained to do more professional videography and video editing, but it is very time-consuming.
• TEACH THEM TO CONVERSE—Most salespeople are not technical by nature. So, arming them with a complex technical drawing or presentation is not how they operate. However, they are often keen to pick up on clues and nuances in a conversation that help them lead it in their desired direction. A large of what salesperson depends on is their ability to do three things:
• The ability to relate to prospective customers.
• The ability to hold a basic conversation and lead it in a direction that will get them to the next meeting.
• The ability to deliver on their word.

The most engaging way to deliver sales enablement training is conversational or practical application-based. I tend to use a lot of imagery, key text, and animation to converse with the learners in a PowerPoint presentation or video. I often ask them questions, especially for a seller, because they want to build their confidence in speaking about a topic. Taking notes is far different from learning to interact and conversing with a prospective customer. Live interactive, two-way communication-based training is much more effective than creating short videos or exclusively reading content to learn a particular subject.

Creating a certification training or certification program requires detailed training on the topic, with excellent documentation, and usually a series of training videos to convey the content. While video training is the most popular form on the market today, I still firmly believe in written content to accompany the video. I think that live boot camp-style training is the most effective for most audiences, as video and written content lack the interactive aspect brought forth by human-to-human interaction. I also understand that in-person boot camp training is the most expensive delivery; therefore, most partners must settle for videos or written content.