Defining the Building Blocks of Sales Enablement: w/Mike Kunkle (VP Sales Effectiveness Services-SPARXiQ)

By Tom Pisello | February 8, 2022

We were so lucky to have the wonderful Mike Kunkle, one of the top sales enablement thought leaders, author of the new book “The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement” and currently Vice President, Sales Effectiveness Services for sales growth consultancy SPARXiQ as a guest a short time ago.

When you want to evolve and elevate an existing sales enablement program, or set up a new practice from scratch, where do you turn for a blueprint?

In this interview we discussed the elements of an effective sales enablement blueprint, with building block details on how to think about your content, sales hiring, sales training and coaching, measurement and how to optimize your sales tech stack. His many years of experience provided much insight and advice.

“There’s an old joke, Tom, that when you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there, right? And, I think last time we may have talked about what I call the Master of Disaster. It’s that senior sales leader or other executive who is always over reacting to the last thing that went wrong. I’ve been inside enablement positions where there was a real strategy, and tactical plans, and everything was being executed with discipline, and I’ve been in other Organizations where ‘Masters of Disasters’ or other misalignment caused you to bounce all over the wall. And you never get results that way. So, I recommend an organized approach. It starts with things like a charter, objectives and goals, which are tied to the organizational strategy, then the tactical plans that are needed to achieve those goals. I like the phrase that I hear some using, “You need to run sales enablement like a business inside the business.” I don’t know why we have to say that about sales enablement, because everybody in a business is running a business, right? But that thought process is the right one.

You know, you’re teaching something that isn’t going to be done every single day or isn’t going to always stay top of mind, and if you provide a great playbook, a great job aid, a great pop-up tool in the workflow…something to support and help your sales force in selling the way that you know will be most effective to their buyers… that to me is a huge piece of how enablement can step in and help the salesforce, and I think that sometimes we just start tossing out content and then we wonder when we do studies, why 65% of content that marketing produces doesn’t get used. It’s missing the buyer acumen, it’s missing the way that we want them to translate into selling. I think about product training the same way. We can train products until we’re blue in the face, but until we start training people how to diagnose why that product is the right product for a customer and put them into selling scenarios and case studies where they can demonstrate their expertise on how to use and sell the products, that’s where the rubber meets the road. “

Check out the full episode here! https://open.spotify.com/episode/5C7Xagyii2sKUyC8YmjB33

Be a Master of ENABLEMENT, not disaster, peeps!

Keep evolving, EVOLVERS!

Until next time…

#salesenablement #contentenablement #salestech

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