Course recap + quiz

Lesson 1: Design Your Sales Playbook

A playbook should pre-answer the most common questions.

Also, sales reps aren’t your customer, sales managers are. A playbook is only as good as the case studies it contains, and keep yours brief—long playbooks tend to go unread.

Lesson 2. Build an Airtight Onboarding Flow

You never know what information reps are coming to the job with. Your job with building an onboarding process is to offer uniform, consistent training so nobody falls through the cracks. At minimum, you need an onboarding checklist that tells reps what to do at every stage throughout their 30, 60, or 90-day ramp.

If you want the greatest success from your onboarding process, you want salespeople to feel empowered and supported as people.

“Every startup wants hockey stick growth. That’s what the board wants. But what you often don’t see behind that is that you also need those people to feel successful and empowered.”

Rachel Ha’o

Lesson 3. Managing Change

From the moment you begin your RevOps or sales enablement role until the moment you leave, the sales organization will be changing. How you manage that change—how you help others survive and capitalize upon it—is how you’ll succeed.

To prepare your sales managers and reps for change:

• Publish a change manifesto
• Develop strong ties to sales leaders by doing favors
• Cultivate a culture where people share problems

“I learned this the hard way coming up the ranks at larger companies. We didn’t talk about problems in the open. If you did, you were considered a complainer. But then leadership would roll out solutions where you’d think, ‘What the hell? Who came up with that?’ Or, management would change things and not explain why, and it’d make things worse, but you didn’t feel you could tell anybody.”

Suresh Khanna

Lesson 4. Selecting Sales Tech

Resist shiny object syndrome in yourself and others. Keep your tech stack lean and tight. Build for a great prospect experience, but keep it minimal.

Every single system also needs an owner. If you aren’t sure who that person is going in, that tech is going to devolve and stop working. Also, know how you’ll measure success before you buy something, and if you can’t diagram it on a whiteboard, you don’t fully understand it yet.

Lesson 5. Get the Most From Your Tech

Every work system goes through an evolution from new and helpful to old and limiting. Some do it much faster than others. Your job—insofar as you’re responsible for buying, maintaining, and advocating for tech—is to prevent those systems from decaying, select ones that will continue to work well together, and build an elegant system that continues to work long after you’ve left.

Also, simplify things for sales reps, not for finance. Reduce the friction to deals getting done.

Lesson 6. Build a Capacity Planning Growth Model

Every sales organization should possess a spreadsheet growth model for how that team and organization is going to hit their goal. It should tell them precisely what levers they’ll need to pull to not just hit the goal, but exceed it—despite their present reality.

Your model should have:

• Measurable predictive power
• Formulas that reflect real-world relationships
• Inputs and outputs
• Inputs should be leading rather than lagging indicators

And importantly, it should reflect your reality, not your wishes. If you chart things and the graph is just a straight line up and to the right, your model isn’t accurate enough to be helpful.

Lesson 7. Train and Retain Your Reps

Salespeople resist change. But if you aren’t creating a culture of continuous learning and re-learning, the sales machine can slow to a grind, and it won’t respond to the changes in the market or business.

Top recommendations:

• Give reps exposure to the company’s chief storytellers (if only through recordings)
• Create content for every learning style
• Maintain ongoing tests and certifications
• Welcome the mess

And, that’s everything. Feel ready? Now’s your opportunity to go apply it. Best of luck out there!

Recap: Documents, meetings, and processes to create:

Lesson 1

• Playbook
• FAQ (to offload things that don’t belong in the playbook)
• Onboarding curriculum with itinerary by role

Lesson 2

• Sales cycle definition document
• You need a precise definition of (good lead, bad lead, stages, entry/exit criteria for each stage)
• Ramp assets you may need to create:
• Discovery certification—test and scorecard
• Pitch certification—test and scorecard
• Demo certification—test and scorecard

Lesson 3

• Create a sales advisory board
• Sales review process

Lesson 4

• Create an architecture review board
• Conduct a post-mortem on new tools

Lesson 5

• Bimonthly meetings and a quarterly tech evaluation

Lesson 6

• A sales growth model
• A sales comp plan

Lesson 7

• Create a page with links to your chief storytellers’ stories, pitches, and talks
• Record and share the best pitch certification videos
• An ideal sales rep hiring persona
• A hiring process that selects for the right characteristics