Mind Mapping

1. Challenge:

As a Sales Enablement (training) Manager for one of the world’s largest tech  companies, my role is to ensure that our sellers are equipped with the knowledge they  need to be successful in winning in the market. The discipline of Sales Enablement  works closely with two teams in any organization, one, the sales team, and two, the  product/offering/services creation team. Our role is to take the information which the  product creators have, package that information is easily consumable content (PPT,  Videos, Case Studies, Online learning session) and ensure the sellers are aware of  these latest offerings which our company has.

The top challenges we face in sales enablement are –

• Sellers are busy running after quotas, so they have very little time to spare for

enablement activities.

• People who design products tend to get too technical while explaining it to other

people  which can get boring.

• The business unit I work for has over 8000 sellers globally. So, it is obvious that

getting everyone together in one place for face to face learning, is an extremely  costly and time-consuming affair.

• The evolving IT landscape is changing and many of our sellers are have limited to

no understanding to the latest products and services our company offers which is  making them inept in the market and we are losing business.

Selection:   The tool we decided to use on our journey to understand our client (the sellers) is mind  mapping. We believe that if we could understand their mindset, we could create  content and a delivery platform which they would be motivated to use.

Application:   In order to effectively use mind mapping, we selected 7 sellers from each of the 7  Geographies we have and one global sales leader. Every week our team got on a call  with 7 sellers from one geography and spoke to them for 3 hours over a Webex session.  The purpose of this session what to understand the following –

• What was their outlook towards sales enablement? Did they think that sales

enablement is something that is relevant to their role?

• How do they like to be trained, virtual sessions, face to face sessions, how long

should the sessions be for, should there be quizzes at the end to test their  understanding etc?

• What topics did they think are important and they need help with order to be

successful in the field?

Insight:

After completing the 7 rounds of interview, we understood a great deal about the  sellers’ mindset about sales enablement. Our findings were as follows –

1. Most of the seller training content was designed at global (at a company level)

which was sometimes not even relevant to sellers in their country. Eg- training  Chinese sellers on our company’s security products is useless since in China, only  the government owned companies can sell security related products and not  companies based out of other countries. Similarly, Cloud Computing services  cannot be sold in some countries in the middle east because the government  mandates client information to be located on systems within the country.

2. Most seller training used to happen over the phone wherein sellers are expected to

sit and scroll through decks while someone on the phones presents it. This is  inconvenient because if someone needs to step away for a moment, they end up  missing the session and there is no way to go back.

3. Sellers are constantly on the go, so it would be convenient to have a solution

wherein they can utilize their travel time to go through enablement content.

4. Sellers prefer to get trained over face to face sessions than digital means, but they

understand that for a company like our gathering everyone in one place is near  impossible.

5. Most sellers believed that seller enablement must be leadership driven. If they are

mandated to take an education by leadership, that is when they will do it. Keeping  enablement as optional is probably not going to work.

6. They want enablement sessions to be short and crisp and not something that

required huge time commitment. It would be good to have sessions which can be  broken down into several modules to they can make progress over time.

7. They were also honest to disclose two important things, one, enablement is  not

one of their key priorities, and two, they realize that the evolving IT landscape and  keep pace with the new products and services would be a key factor contributing  to their success in the future (which will happen through enablement). Thereby the  understand that sales enablement will be very important in the future.

Approach  In terms of approach, I think Mind Mapping was the right tool to use but there are a  couple of things we should have done differently.

The entire exercise was done as a single ad-hoc project, which limited the amount of  feedback we got from sellers. We have touched 0.5% of the community we are trying  to understand. We should have made this activity into a rolling work effort where we  talk to different sellers every time to get their opinion.

Having a global sales leader in the panel discussion should have been avoided. Some  of the sellers were probably not comfortable in being full honest about their feelings  and feedback due to the influence of someone they roll up to.

In order to scale the outreach, perhaps we should find an online mechanism for sellers  to reach back to us. It is not possible for us to reach out to 8k sellers, but if we can  make it easy for them to reach out to us, that would tremendously increase our  understand of what is important to them and what is not.

