Best Practices in Sales Coaching of Value Messaging

Dheeraj Prasad: Good morning. Good afternoon, and good evening to all the viewers. This is your host Dheeraj Prasad. And I have a very interesting guest speaker on the show today. And he is all player who is the director for sales enablement on boring digital learning and certification. Paul, this looks like a lot of things altogether. But all the right things are welcome on the show. Paul.

Paul Bleier: Thank you very much for having me Dheeraj, very happy to be here and have a great chat.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. So you know, Paul, I think that the conversation today is very timely. I was just going through a very interesting book written by Daniel Pink. It's a best seller. It's about selling his human to sell is human. And he talks about three things, you know, primarily about key abilities that will drive the future sellers is really about the aspect of the pitch. It's also about the fact that how does one look at improvising the pitch, and also how to serve customers, you know, in the conversations. So I thought it would be it would be a good segue to really start off by asking you is to how you think the value messaging that sales reps today are expected to drive in the digital format of selling has really changed over the last year or so.

Paul Bleier: Yeah, it's a great place to start, and it's something Dheeraj. We at TELUS have been on a journey to conquer not just in the last year during the pandemic but also over the past five years, as our whole organization, our whole sales organization, has gone through a transformation of sorts. And what I mean by that is, you know, when I took on this role as director of sales enablement, tell us about five years ago, one of the biggest things we wanted to do was change the identity of our sellers. We wanted them to be more advisors, more consultants, to our customers, to diagnose their business challenges, and really become a partner to there to that shared outcome that shared vision. And so value messaging as a concept back five years ago was something that we anchored to Dheeraj to drive the transformation, both from a team member perspective as well as from a leadership perspective. And at that time, because TELUS is a National Telecommunications carrier that delivers both wireless solutions as well as wireline and Network Solutions. All of those solutions come together to do one thing, and that's to transform our customers to be more digital in nature, to move things from legacy services to the cloud, to essentially transform their business, find operational efficiencies, you know, the list goes on and on and on. And so, we anchored our value messaging construct around how to become a digital transformation adviser to the customers that you serve. And that was our starting place about five years ago, even before the pandemic.

Dheeraj Prasad: Fantastic. I'd be very interested to know how did you go about doing it? What was the execution framework? And what role did sales coaching play and what was the framework to actually make it happen?

Paul Bleier: Yeah, I mean, we're still learning a lot. We’ve made great progress, but either way, we kind of tackling it. Dheeraj was, you know, we brought together sales leadership. We brought together marketing leadership, we brought together product leadership, and we were guided through a series of discovery workshops, one on one interviews to understand the synergy between product marketing and sales. We know what we have to sell. We know how we're marketing externally about what we need to sell, but how do salespeople take that and turn it into what you said earlier, value messaging, insight-based selling. And so, we created frameworks together. Listening to the business, listening to the leadership teams, bringing in our high-performing sales professionals, our high-performing sales leadership teams. And we co-created a virtual playbook back in 2016 2017 that we call our sales messaging and transformation playbook. And really, you know, at the core of that playbook was trying to get the salespeople to move away from self-focus towards other focus, right? Shifting the mindset, right, we need them to not be focused on product capabilities. We want them to be focused on business issues. We want them not to be focused on the technical and competitive details. We want them to understand the customers’ vertical, the customers’ industry. We want them to focus on, you know, what's going on in terms of the challenges and pressures within that industry or that segment. We want them to become experts in their territory, right? So they can gather those trends, gather those insights, and lead the sales conversation with those value pieces that the customer is going to say, you know what? Dheeraj understands me and my business. I’m going to give that rep another meeting to continue this conversation. And I've earned the trust to continue that conversation. And so we started there. And the real simple framework we took, which is very similar to a lot of sales organizations, is when you're starting a customer engagement with a business, you have to convey three things to the customer, you need to convince the customer that now is the time to change. So why change? You have to show them why now. And you have to show them why to tell us why can we help you. And from those three, you know, stage framework, all the value messaging and all the sales process can follow in a very neat little order. And all of the enablement programs and all of the training that we develop really fall into one of those buckets as the customer goes through their own buying journey with our organization.

Dheeraj Prasad: That's great. And this is a really strategic execution of the overall concept. So beautifully explained Paul, I do see that you have the certification title in your role description. Did this all get tied to a certification program for all sales reps across TELUS globally?

Paul Bleier: Yeah, it did. And that was probably one of the most unexpected parts of my role. When I started it a couple of years ago, my mentor and VP, Louis Moran, was building a relationship at the time with Dheeraj with the Canadian professional sales Association, or CBSA, for short. And the CBSA at the time was reimagining the sales professional in Canada. What did the sales competencies look like? What did the modern salesperson of the future look like? And they were looking to partner with enterprise organizations like TELUS as well as post-secondary institutions to raise the profile of what it means to be a sales professional in Canada? I'm sure you've heard the expression before people, people fall into sales, they never start out their career, thinking like they're gonna go and become a sales professional, some do most don't. So the CPSA, in partnership with TELUS, was looking to create awareness about professional designations in sales. And what are the behaviors that a salesperson should demonstrate to show that they are a trusted adviser to their customers and that they're more than just hitting that quota and hitting that number? They're really in it for the long term, and they want to be a trusted partner. And so what we did was we looked at all of our training partners that we had at TELUS in the sales organization, as we were building our telesales Academy. And we said to them, we said, we want to accredit your program for TELUS so that as our sales team members go through the training, they earn professional development units and hours towards training that would qualify them for the CPSA designations in the industry association. And so we became 2018 a very proud moment for myself and my team and TELUS. We became the first Canadian organization to have an internal training program accredited by the Canadian professional sales Association. And as of today, you know, February What are we February 10, 2021? We’ve certified about 40 sales professionals across enterprise mid-market and mid-market small who have gone on to receive their professional credential and become an ambassador, not only for the CPSA. But for us aspiring sales team members that tell us who are looking to have a long and lasting career in our organization.

Dheeraj Prasad: That's stellar. Absolutely, this is great, in terms of you know how you've taken this to a point where this is all tied to competencies, and then through the certification programs, it's a great endorsement for their careers, and also to the sales profession at large. One thing, which really comes into my mind about a lot of leaders is about return on investment here. And I'm sure what, or I've heard so far from you, you got the return the investment, maybe tenfold, but how do you really measure the ROI on this initiative that you're on for about five years now?

Paul Bleier: Yeah, so I mean, you know, in enablement, it's always hard sometimes to measure the direct ROI. I mean, there's a number of different areas I think we're looking at. I think our telesales Academy certification and designation program has been a really strong driver to attract talent to our sales organization. Our recruiters across the country are constantly sharing and marketing the career development opportunities that we offer. That has been what we've heard from, you know, interviews of candidates that have been successful in joining our sales organization that they liked, that they were going to get a formal onboarding program for three months, and that onboarding program was going to lead to a one-year development program that would set them up for future certification. So the attraction of talent, I think, is one return that we're also seeing, retention of talent, as well Dheeraj. I mean, especially in the telecommunications and technology sectors, as I'm sure you know, the war for sales talent is there. I mean, high-performing sales professionals are in hot demand, right? I mean, you know, I mean, when your base salary is tied to your performance, you know, I the variable component of it, there are a lot of organizations out there that are going to be, you know, fighting for your services to come and sell their solutions and their services. And so what we're seeing, and this has actually been another unintended, you know, the benefit of this is, we're seeing our top-performing sales executives that have been certified, stick around, right, they're sticking around, they're going to president's club, year after year, they're hitting their quota, they're hitting their targets, year after year. And that to us is showing them the return on the development investment that we've made, because not only are they staying, their performance is staying stable is not increasing year after year. Because one of the things that Louis, my mentor, always said to me was, you know, you have to look beyond the number in sales, right? I mean, a salesperson can get lucky one year and then have a couple of bad years, right? If you're developing the sales profession properly, and you're your business unit properly, you're going to get a consistency of behavior. And you're going to see the consistency of results. And when we look at our certified team members, comparing them to other tenured sales professionals, they outperform them on our cape on our key performance indicators, whether it's our wireless loading measure or it's our contracted monthly revenue growth targets, right. They're a couple of percentage basis points above the 10-year population that hasn't been certified yet. So for me, my VP, my team, the business, there's a really strong thesis there that if we certify and continue to invest heavily in the professional development of our sales team, we could move that Performance ranking and curve normal distribution a little bit more to the right, and start to see it normalize a little bit more.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. And I think that's a great statement from your mentor, Paul, that to look at sales beyond just the numbers, I think it is the human behind it. It’s really about the people’s side. And this also ties very well to what I started off by saying that look what you know, in Daniel Pink's book is to serve as human. So you have to treat sales, people also as humans, because no, and that becomes very important as to how we are able to build on on the career of the profession, and also give them a safe place to have them speak up and all aspects of psycho psychological safety. And how, how does that aspect of mindfulness actually help? Better outcomes?

Paul Bleier: Yeah, I mean, you and I think we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, but the psychological safety net, if you want to call it, I think today is more important than ever from a sales leader coach to their team. And I hear it, you know, I've heard it from our sales VPS over the past month or so. Some sales executives are really struggling with not being able to be face to face with their customers, the way that they usually have been when there wasn't COVID. Everything is over zoom or Google meet or Cisco WebEx, right? Everything is virtual. Now, how do you build relationships? Virtually? How do you gain trust? Virtually? How do you maintain curiosity and attention and, you know, in a meeting, like we're having right now, and we've had to make some changes like we're starting to pivot? But going back to your comment about, you know, and what I said earlier about sales is more than just the number of the individual, I think you're starting to see sales leaders be a little bit more thoughtful with how they open their one on ones. How are you doing such a powerful question beyond? Let's jump into your funnel and pipeline? And where's the risk? And where's the opportunity? And, you know, is that deal gonna close next week or next month? Right? Like, you know, all the pressure questions, I think, are still necessary. But I think you have to also remind yourself that, like you said, drive, it's a person and sales today, I think, is a much harder job than it was 365 days ago, before the, you know, the real start of the pandemic.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. Paul, this has been really insightful of learning about what you and the TELUS team has done to drive this area of a very high focus on sales coaching, driving this to real outcomes, investing in the people and the couriers and the ROI you mentioned is obviously it drives better numbers. But it is really about retention because the top talent if they are retaining, you're retaining knowledge, experience and relationships within the organization. Thank you so much, Paul, for your time today. It's been really good. And I would definitely like to stay in touch with you and have you back on the show sometime soon. And share some more insightful, innovative stories coming in, in terms of what you and the TELUS team are doing. Thank you so much.

Paul Bleier: It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me and, and I hope your listeners enjoy our conversation.

Dheeraj Prasad: Absolutely. Have a great day. Thank you so much.