Upfront Contract

In this article I will be sharing a high level introduction to Revenue Intelligence followed by a brief snapshot of the evolution of traditional sales tools, and the reasons that led every SW vendor to embed “Revenue Intelligence” in their messaging.

In the second part of the article I will be sharing a few best practices that I have developed, refined and mastered over the last 10+ years. These best practices have helped me to build & manage Sales Enablement functions from the ground up (Imperva, Sisense, WalkMe and other successful SaaS businesses).

During this time, I realized that I needed to expand my responsibilities beyond the traditional scope of Enablement, and at the same time, I felt I am missing critical data & visualization capabilities to do my job effectively. All in all, this led me to develop “Project Moneyball” which is the fundamental work behind this article.

Part 1 – Introduction

Scaling the business usually comes with growing pains, that’s a fact and a challenge leaders deal with reluctantly and in some cases – successfully. What’s their secret sauce? How & where can Sales Enablement & Revenue Ops step in to help?

To begin with, we need to identify WHAT are those growing pains. Next and most importantly, we need to calculate the resultant business impact that slows down the business. I usually explain this with the following simple tasks:

• Surgically identify WHERE the growing pains arise (market specific? Product specific? Team or individual? are they specific-stage related or felt across the entire funnel?)
• Surgically identify WHY & WHEN the growing pains arise (GTM readiness, Competencies, ineffective process? Too many apps to deal with? Digital fatigue? etc.)
• Quantify the impact on your business (risk assessment, predictive assessment)

That’s in a nutshell what Revenue Intelligence is all about.

Personally, I prefer to use the term Vector when discussing Revenue Intelligence and Business Impact. The reason resides in the fact that different GTM Playbooks may experience a different impact due to reps’ competencies (i.e. GTM Readiness) and other parameters beyond our control.

When we think in a directional (i.e. Vector) or multidimensional (Multi Vector) approach, it broadens the scope of our analysis to the point where we can actually explain the WHATs with WHYs. To accomplish that, we need to factor in other parameters such as conversational patterns, previous experience, agility and time management skills. The outcome is a more accurate analysis, improved decision making and shorter time to outcome.

Here are a few common examples for analysis vectors:

• The sales org may have multiple segments with a different strategy: SMB, ENT, Strategic, Commercial, Land & Expand, Field, Inbound & Outbound, and so on.
• The product portfolio (i.e. Offering) may require reps to execute on a different GTM per product, to maximize the Product-Market fit.
• The competitive landscape may depend on the market, region and product.
• Our product is too complex (not self-service), demonstrating our capabilities slow us down, customers churn when they realize the overhead
• Handoff between Sales Dev and whatever comes next

Each example above can be treated as a dimension or as a vector. When slicing & dicing (i.e. cross-referencing) these dimensions we can see a crystalized picture of where, why and what are the business risks across the funnel (Lead To Cash To Renewal).

These are no news for the traditional BI or Sales Ops teams that run BI reports. However, based on my experience so far, these reports are missing important factors and data, mainly because of the following reasons:

• Sales Ops and BI analysts are not responsible for enabling the sales reps, therefore they are not familiar with the actual level of their readiness, competencies, skillsets and performance gaps. This makes it harder for them to include the data in their reports.
• It’s easier to pour the data into well-defined buckets or categories rather than invest more time to restructure the existing analysis methodology.
• Sales Ops & BI analysts are driven by Leadership and tend to have very little bandwidth to address “out of band” requests coming from other functions (i.e. Sales Enablement).
• Onboarding & Ongoing Enablement is usually orchestrated outside of the Sales Ops & BI tech stack. In other words, data from Gong, LMS or CMS is not imported & analyzed by default, and hence – not represented in those traditional CRM reports.

Fortunately, leading Sales Enablement & Sales Engagement Platforms have reached a similar conclusion as well:

Enablement Leaders struggle to correlate Enablement Achievements with GTM Readiness & CRM reports.

In simple words – enablement leaders started to realize that as the business was growing, so did the number of apps they needed to orchestrate within the Sales Stack.

Consequently, reps found themselves replacing selling time with a lot of housekeeping, redundant data registration, and self learning assignments.

The result was usually more data to extract and analyze by Sales Ops, BI or someone outside the Enablement function.

To bridge these critical gaps, the software vendors decided to upskill their platform’s offering (& messaging) with new functionalities such as Revenue Intelligence, Risk Analysis, Deal Reviews etc., in hopes this would empower Sales Enablement Leaders to become more self sufficient and less dependent on traditional & tedious Extract-Transform-Load BI queries.

Part 2 – Infrastructure

(skip to Part 3 if you’re happy with your Sales Enablement Stack)

Following the reasons and complexities mentioned earlier, some of the traditional LMS and CMS platforms have blended into the Sales Enablement & Engagement Category with great Revenue Intelligence capabilities, built-in enhanced reports, and content indexing to shave off search time and enable reps to engage with the right content, at the right time with the right prospect. Here’s a short list of my favorite platforms (Alphabetical order):

• Highspot – they have come a long way since first introduced, offering today CMS capabilities with a great CRM integration to provide reps with content recommendations per stage and GTM attributes.
• Mindtickle – Intuitive and competency-based Sales Readiness platform, offering LMS, CMS, Conversational Intelligence and Coaching capabilities. All you need in one package.
• Seismic – Leading the Sales Enablement Platform category, they are offering an enhanced combination of training/coaching , micro learning & AI guided selling (Buyer Engagement).
• Showpad – Showpad offers LMS, CMS and Buyer Engagement capabilities with intuitive UI and built-in analytics.
• Guidde – Not necessarily a Sales Engagement tool by definition, nevertheless this amazing Software Enablement Platform is quite intuitive and self-service focused, it enables users to record “How Tos” across the entire tech-stack and hence reduce the common friction and time-wasted efforts usually spend over reading long tutorials outside of the sales stack perimeter.

Since the scope of this article is Revenue Intelligence, we have to dedicate some significant time to talk about the Conversational Intelligence Platforms which recently transitioned into the Revenue Intelligence Category. The leading vendors today are Gong & Chorus who started their business at the same time but have come a long way since then.

Chorus was recently acquired by ZoomInfo “to transform the voice of the customer to actionable insights…”. This acquisition emphasizes the recent & most important trend in the Sales Enablement space – Conversion Data alone is not helping decision makers, let alone Sales Enablement. On the contrary – too much data (too many calls to listen to) slows us down and delays our decision making.

The last category I’d like to focus on is the AI-driven sales coaching tools. In my opinion, this is one of the most fascinating trends in the enablement space, not because of the AI technology but mainly due to the value it provides to both Leadership and reps. The idea behind tools such as Second Nature is to save time (& money) for managers who reluctantly need to listen (and score) the first pitching attempts of their reps.

To measure the impact of the wasted time, think about all those frequent GTM changes you need to train and align everyone with. Take Competition for example, let’s say there’s a new competitor which reps lack the skills to handle well. The impact is seen in those CRM reports (i.e. >> Rev Intel), therefore you design new playbooks and push it down to the teams. Usually what happens is, reps would take self learning modules and then record their pitch, and wait for feedback. The challenges with this approach is the number of iterations, feedback and Manager’s time it consumes.

AI-driven sales coaching tools (i.e. Second Nature) improve the onboarding & ongoing enablement by boosting the performance curve with a virtual AI Driven Prospect that pops up the right challenge at the right time. All those trial & error simulations are automatically scored and reported. When you engineer your GTM simulations properly, you can accomplish a faster Competency-Based Enablement and faster impact visualization of GTM readiness on your business.

Part 3 – A few challenges

When we consider the fact that Sales (or Sales Enablement) have to manage tens of applications, the inevitable result has become a fact – in most cases we struggle to leverage the data & platforms’ capabilities to full effect.

From a personal point of view, I often found myself spending hours extracting CSVs from point solutions & features across the sales stack, gluing together an improvised dashboard only to be able to reach one single conclusion at the time.

So I decided to meet with other Sales Enablement leaders, Sales Ops and Revenue Ops leaders and surprisingly they all shared with me the same conclusion –

They all had the best technologies implemented but they could not afford the time it required to manage them to full effect. As a result, they were using the bare minimum tools and actions which resulted in half backed reports and lots of blindspots (“it feels like flying blind while sitting in an F35 cockpit…”).

Long story short – with the help of remaining part of the article below, I hope to help those who seek an easy and effective way to connect the dots and glue together CRM & Enablement data, identify what works and what doesn’t, and wrap it all with a competency-based enablement.

Part 4 – The M Factor

(How to fuel Revenue Intelligence with Competency-Based Enablement)

The M Factor refers to Moneyball. The main idea is to think and act in a multidimensional approach; to complement the traditional CRM reports with additional layers of data extracted from conversations, learning achievements, GTM Readiness etc.

Step 1: Baseline

Why do we need a baseline? What is it about?

My number #1 recommendation for anyone who’s about to assume a Manager role is – build a reference first, understand where you are today, see how the team is doing, feel their pains, understand what keeps them away from reaching their quota, don’t rush in with a new plan before you get to know the team on an individual level, professionally and personally.

You want to make sure that your strategic decisions are based on success with sufficient granularity. What you don’t want to do is to reach a conclusion based on flat reports with hidden patterns that may skew your next steps.

Establish a Performance Baseline to highlight to portray the patterns that drive success and detect reasons for which bottom reps lag behind others.

Here is a great example where and how a Performance Baseline could help you to make the right decision:

Imagine looking at traditional reports that categorize reps by the ARR they bring in. Those reports tell you how much each rep contributes to the revenue org, but what those reports don’t tell you is the reasons for which some great reps may struggle to adapt to a new gameplan. Some may claim – “So What !?, what do I care about it…they either make money or not….”. My answer is – that’s a short term strategy which usually fuels high turnover.

For the sake of argument, let’s pick on John –

John was doing great in his previous role selling a specific product (CRM) to a specific use case (Sales Ops), we refer to this scenario as a 1:1 (specific product to a specific market). Today John is required to sell cyber security to every possible market (“1 to Many”). Generally speaking, John is doing great (ranked #4) but he struggles to replicate success in the pharma space. Considering the fact that John is ranked #4 (out of 50 reps) and has been around half the time other top reps have, this can lead to important insights:

1. Focusing strictly on ARR to derive what good looks like can be risky when our GTM is complex and reps lack enablement resources to ramp up, brush up etc.
2. ARR reports do not show reps’ agility, skill sets and GTM readiness
3. Cross-referencing Sales KPIs (e.g. ARR) with Enablement paths can help other reps to boost their ramp up journey, remove friction, trial & errors and help the entire business to stay on track.

The biggest advantage of establishing a baseline today is the idea of using it as a reference for any GTM changes we’re thinking to implement in the near future, e.g. – this is where we were 2 quarters ago, this is where we are today after refining our sales deck….

Step 2: Prioritize your Business-Critical gaps

Every business has its own idea of business-critical gaps. Some may say Competition kills our business while others may say “We don’t have any competition”. Some may hire inexperienced reps with poor Negotiation skills, others may complain that “reps tend to discount too much and too early so they can meet their quota but it’s killing our business…”.

Prioritizing our scope of analysis can help us to deliver a quick win in the areas that are mostly impacted and needed by Leadership.

Step 3: Identify the Business-Critical gaps

To explain the idea, I will use one of the most common challenges reps experience – Parking time (Idle Time) – the time it takes to move from one stage to the next.

First, we need to visualize (or surface) the actual performance of the teams across the sales cycle, in simple words – how many days (or weeks) each rep parks in each stage.

Important note – this may sound obvious – make sure to compare apples with apples, there is no point comparing the performance of SMBs against other segments and vice versa.

Here are a few reasons for which reps tend to get stuck in a certain stage:

From Sales Dev to Sales’ 1st touch point

• No hand off process / notes – when meeting notes are not captured and shared with the next person in line (Sales), reps will fly blind, improvise, waste time asking redundant questions and bore to death the prospect who won’t show up to the next meeting. The common side effect is endless follow-ups (chasing rabbits down the hole) and a very long idle time (Prospecting to Qualification).
• Ineffective (or broken) implementation of the handoff process – we need to make sure we provide clear instructions and guidance to allow the Sales Dev reps to capture and report the right data, and avoid typing in “noise”. This could mean implementing easy workflows to register and report the data, alert in case of risks or missing data, invite the right sales rep and track who’s engaging and preparing using the registered data. Complex handoff or too much data (Noise) can lead to the opposite outcome where reps will ignore the captured data and fail to convert accordingly.
• Lack of reinforcement – whatever process you implement, it requires reinforcement. If managers cannot allocate time, use a DAP software instead. There’s no point in implementing a process without tracking engagement, readiness and friction. Lack of reinforcement will result in poor engagement and longer time to outcome (idle time).

From Intro calls to a Business Case

Why do reps get stuck after delivering an amazing Intro Calls? We can flip around the question and ask – why is it that prospects go dark after a great demo (or whatever the agenda was….)? Many articles were written about this scenario, to save your time I’ll share the short answer – Relevance. When prospects find your content irrelevant, they don’t have a reason to meet again.

Here are common reasons (Pitfalls) that motivate Prospects to ghost:

• Lack of seller preparation
• Lack of listening time
• Lack of value realization
• Irrelevant pitch, questions, demo, etc.
• Relevant stakeholders are not addressed/involved
• Reps focus on FABs rather than business goals and gaps

These reasons can be used as Vectors in your analysis – simply try to surface them and cross reference the results with the time reps park at each stage.

Step 4: Transitioning from a Business Case to a PoC

This is the only case where delays might add values to the selling process – after all, we don’t want to rush into a POC unprepared, and then find out we successfully completed a POC but the prospect struggles to identify a use case, budget or values.

Moving too early to a PoC can be very risky, on the other hand – parking too long will kill the deal. The challenge is to find the right time it takes for both sides to discuss and agree on milestones, success criteria, use case etc., and at the same time – develop your sensors to identify risks of providing a free testdrive.

The help of the sales engineering team is most relevant here since they are the ones with the hands on experience and data. Ask the following questions and engineer your benchmark accordingly:

• What does it take to run a POC if we need to demo product A? Product B?
• What are KPIs? who are the relevant stakeholders? what is the timeframe?
• What are the early signs that could help us to predict success or failures?

The ideal outcome of this step should look like this (highlevel):

• We park X days when PoCing product A – deal closed
• We park Y days when PoCing product A – business lost
• Same goes per product / vertical / GTM
• Identified Patterns per vector (Competition, Pushbacks, Stakeholders, etc.)

Step 5: Bridging the gaps with Competency-Based Enablement

i) Build Competency-Based Modules:

We reached our final part of our Revenue Intelligence & Enablement work – bridging the gaps, or better said – upskilling our reps’ performance. If you succeeded in identifying the reasons for which some reps lag behind others, what characterizes success and what could lead to failures, all you have to do now is design a modular & surgical enablement program to allow individuals to practice exactly what is needed, and avoid wasting time on long learning paths. Two important guidelines to consider:

1. Be mindful of the total time needed to learn and practice – we don’t want to sacrifice selling time with too much of self learning (either way, 70% of content is forgotten).
2. How To tutorials can be replaced with in-app guidance (i.e. WalkMe). There’s no point in wasting time training reps how to create an opportunity in SFDC or build a proposal etc., simply add captions on your CRM to guide your reps how to complete their tasks.

Each one of the challenges (or vectors) that we covered so far can be referred to as your baseline for creating the enablement collateral. The final outcome can be a scoring system that allows reps to record themselves and ask for feedback (Mindtickle, Gong, Chorus, etc.), it could an AI driven tool that scores those trial and errors automatically (Second Nature). Whatever tool you’ve decided to use, make sure the learning paths are focused on Competencies – how to handle objections, how to handle negotiation, how to run Discovery, etc.

When reps are trained on a competency level, it allows them to resolve specific gaps faster and thus – reduce time to outcome (revenue).

ii) Measure engagement:

The other advantage of Competency-Based enablement is the granularity of reports. You know exactly what reps are doing well and what keeps behind their quota, therefore bridging these gaps is much faster from content development point of view, and from content consumption POV. Everyone wins.

iii) Cross-reference engagement with Sales Performance:

Think about Rubik’s cube where each face may represent different parts of what we covered so far. Simply measuring how reps are engaging with your enablement programs and cross reference that with the actual impact on your revenue. The outcome could help you to visualize the ROI of your enablement efforts and finetune what needs to be improved in a surgical manner.

Step 6: Replicate, Report & Refine

This requires no further explanation. Simply replicate what works, always aim to shave off friction and avoid areas that may slow down the teams. Always look back and fine tune your content, processes and infrastructure.

And remember to enjoy your work.