Skills are great but confidence is key!
“If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.” Cicero
We don’t know about the race for life but in sales, as with many things, it’s all about balance. Confidence without the skills to back it up is a recipe for disaster! However, in Enablement we spend a lot of time addressing skills gaps but how often do we pay attention to how confident our reps are in using their new found skills?
All too often people fall into the trap of identifying a skill gap in their team and spending valuable budget on sales training to address the problem. Congratulations, that’s step one complete - now to actually make that learning useful, useable and make a difference.
We read an interesting blog from Sales Enablement Pro recently in which senior enablement leaders from IBM, American Express and Cisco wrote about the importance of developing competencies to plant the seed of more confident reps. In the blog they also set out some ways you can further develop this confidence for lasting impact through:
Ongoing training and coaching opportunities
Encourage Peer Knowledge Sharing that Builds Competencies
Foster a Growth Mindset for Ongoing Competency Improvement
As Rebecca Reyes, VP of Sales Enablement at IBM puts it “Confidence is a really important part of how we show up…. It’s one thing to learn something, but it’s another to really have confidence in what it is that you learn.”
Now that’s really speaking our language!
These three points are all characteristics of a true ‘learning organisation’ - a culture that is becoming increasingly important as we heard from Andrew Barry in our recent podcast who predicted that “The companies that fail to learn will be the first to die.”
If we take a step back, there are two elements that underpin this and are the true building blocks for success:
Alignment - the best results will be achieved when there is true alignment between training and enablement, sales managers and sales reps. This begins with clearly aligning your competencies with strategic business goals which means everyone knows that improving performance in these areas will have a direct impact on what matters to them. If you are not sure where to start, take a look at our guide.
Measurement - You’ve identified a skill gap that is impacting business performance so it’s important to be able to measure the impact that your enablement has on the important business outcomes - you won’t get long term buy-in without it. Success also breeds confidence so being able to track improvement and attribute results to it will boost confidence and keep reps on the Enablement journey.
This ethos of focused, strategic and measurable development that give reps the right skills and mindset to achieve business success is the beating heart of e4enable. In fact, this continual and sustainable approach along with the metrics that the platform provides has been so powerful for one client that they no longer need annual appraisals - opting instead for continual development, measurement and support.
"Using the e4enable platform we have been able to connect right through the layers of our sales organisation, aligning our business goals to objectives that mean something to our sales people and focusing on the areas we want to improve. As a result, our coaching conversations have become more consistent and meaningful, progress can be tracked easily and the development of our SDRs has been quicker and more linear. We no longer have annual appraisals, instead opting for a model of continual development, measurement and support.”
Elia Giovanni, Director of Sales Enablement, Apogee Corporation
We’d love to hear from you if you would like to see how our platform can help your organisation and, in the meantime, here’s to a world of skilled, confident and successful sales people.