The Importance of Coaching

Jessica Ly: I'm here with Shadi Buckland, who is the head of sales enablement at Zenefits. Hi, Shadi.

Shadi Bucklin: Hi, great to be here.

Jessica Ly: Yes, welcome to the show.

Shadi Bucklin: Thank you.

Jessica Ly: You're now at a company that has an HR and payroll mobile platform for the SMB market. It's a high-growth, fast transaction kind of company. So it's a great opportunity for you to make an impact at this early stage. But you have an experience that goes back to working at LinkedIn, working at Equinox and you were a consultant helping the Deloitte company, right, so you have a ton of experience. And I wanted to invite you to the show to talk about some of the best practices, some of the weaknesses you've seen in companies that may be spots they should look at. So Shadi, let's start with what are some of the major components when you when it comes to sales enablement? And then, we can go into some of the specific areas that you think should be more highlighted?

Shadi Bucklin: Yeah, absolutely. So sales enablement, I love being in sales enablement. I didn't start my career in sales enablement. Actually, I started in human resources and recruiting, which led me to LinkedIn because I had that background. And they saw talent solutions and Recruiting Solutions. And I was in a customer-facing role there, using my knowledge of recruiting to sell to clients and then moved into sales enablement. But prior to that, I also have a strong training background, being an HR and recruiting. I also had been training people on how to interview how to like, you know, just doing learning and development type of work. So a lot of best practices there. And in sales enablement, what I find to be some of the best practices is effective training. And effective training needs to be interactive. So there might be an online component in-person component. But there needs to be some exercises engagement. It can just be someone talking at you. So the training needs to be effective, the content needs to be good. So great content is super important. And especially in sales where salespeople are super busy getting that content to them just in time, at the right time and the right content. And also, an element that is not always looked at as important, but it's actually quite important, is coaching. So manager coaching, sales leader coaching in reinforcing the good behaviors of selling, that's a key part, you can train people as much as possible. If the managers aren't coaching to it, it's not going to become repeatable. So coaching is another key element.

Jessica Ly: Right. And I think sometimes very good sales reps get promoted to a managerial role, but they’re not necessarily prepared, are trained to be good coaches, right?

Shadi Bucklin: Exactly. And that happens quite a bit where the top sellers get promoted into management. And they're the super sellers, who then have these large teams, but they're used to winning by being involved and closing the deals themselves. So instead of coaching the reps to be effective, they're actually in they're closing the deals. They’re on the same calls with the customer. But rather than listening and being kind of letting the rep take the lead and coaching them in, you know, after the call on what they could do differently, they're actually jumping in there. They’re taking the lead as a seller because they're used to doing that. And I think people who've been great at selling can actually be great as managers, but they need to learn the coaching piece.

Jessica Ly: Okay, so coaching is an important aspect of how can the sales folks learn about coaching? You know, where would they get that skill?

Shadi Bucklin: Yeah, I think most sales enablement programs need to offer that as part of their overall, you know, all the learning programs that they offer. So there need to be programs for sellers, but there needs to be a program for math programs for managers as well. So they need to learn that when they get promoted into management. I know a lot of organizations have manager training, helping managers be successful, and HR offers a lot of those, you know, what they should be doing around performance reviews, how to manage, but from a sales coaching perspective on organizations are just starting to scratch the surface on that now. So I just know some of the better companies out there that are starting to do that more and focus on that more, but it should be part of the sales enablement charter.

Jessica Ly: Okay, so they can always have an external consulting firm, maybe come in and help with the coaching, right.

Shadi Bucklin: And that could be part of it. It could be working with a consulting team, and a lot of times, you can actually like, bring something in and make it more branded to what your own needs are. And if you hire the right people to run your manager, coaching programs, they might have prior experience and those could be internal sales enablement managers that have helped. You know, they've actually built coaching programs for sales coaching before and they can come in and Build that in-house. So if you hired the right person, you don't even have to hire a consulting company to do that.

Jessica Ly: Let's talk about content because any code, you need to have content and coach those reps, what to do. And one area that I have noticed this, making sure you have content that is in small bite-size so that it's easier to consume, to learn. And then, the content needs to have analytics behind it. So you actually can measure the impact of the content at a granular level, yeah, then you know, okay, this content, you need to invest more time or this one, you need to just grab it, you know, it's like, then you can have intelligent decision making and investment into the content.

Shadi Bucklin: Absolutely. And there are good platforms out there that allow you to do that. So I think that should be part of the sales enablement. Strategy is like investing in the right tools. So that you can measure the impact of the content, and then the reps are sharing with customers. And also seeing what content is really, you know, having the most impact in what stage of the sales process and helping close deals. So definitely like having a good content solution. And mapping that to the CRM is huge so that their reps can also get it at the right time. So they don't have to go searching a lot of different places for it, because they're super busy. You want to keep things as streamlined as possible for them.

Jessica Ly: And content often I see is like, companies have silo systems so that maybe one team is creating content, and then a separate team creating another content. And then, after a while, you realize they're just overlapping content another efficient, right? So I think one best practice would be to make sure that that content that's being created can be leveraged by different teams for different audiences, whether that content is for the external direct sales rep or the partner sales rep. I thought it could even leverage my the, I guess, marketing team, in this case, sharing that to the prospect as they're learning about the product. It’s the middle of the funnel conversion. Leveraging the same content, exactly. Even customer success, sometimes I say they take that content and use it to educate customers on upselling. And cross-selling opportunities.

Shadi Bucklin: Absolutely. And my team actually is now taking over, enabling customer success as well. So that's a huge part of like, how do you upsell, what's the right content for them, I feel like we're really lucky at Zenefits. Because we're still smaller, we're still about 500 employees right now. And sales and marketing have a really close partnership. So that's been great. So I just came back actually, a couple of days ago, from a messaging workshop that our CMO was leading, and we, you know, the product marketing team and this senior sales leaders were all there. And we're really focusing on what should our go-to market message be in 2020, and a lot of content that's going to, you know, be produced. After that, we're going to be in lockstep developing that together and rolling that out together to sales. So yeah, there needs to be a great partnership between sales and marketing to build the right content. Sales leaders can provide input during the process to make sure that content would actually work so that it's not irrelevant content that's being built that's not going to get used. So yeah, producing the right content is super important. And then measuring it as you mentioned.

Jessica Ly: Okay, so we cover content. We cover training and coaching. So these are some really key components.

Shadi Bucklin: Yes. And coaching is actually really interesting because some people feel like they're coaching because they're telling someone what to do, they're telling the rep, okay, now, you need to go set up this call and do this, but it's not really empowering the rep to learn how to do it themselves. So coaching should be done more in a questioning way. So managers should invest time with a rep to sit down and ask the questions to let the rep it's kind of almost like a selling skill. Like when you let the prospect talk, and they realize what they're doing currently and where their pain is. Same thing with the rep when you're coaching the rep, like, if a manager is on a call with a rep, then after the call, they can talk about like, Okay, how do you think that went? What do you think, you know, why do you think the customer said this, getting the rep to start thinking about like, okay, what's really going on with that customer and how they should pivot in terms of their sales motion, what they should be doing? So I think this coaching piece is like the how part of it managers need to get right. And then obviously, as you mentioned, coaching them on the right content, all of those things are part of it too.

Jessica Ly: Well, how do you measure the managers’ effectiveness?

Shadi Bucklin: Yeah, so you measure it basically, you know, you can do surveys on the reps if you're doing it, but also there are a lot of tools out there right now where managers can do, you know, coaching exercises at a staff meeting with their team have some interactive stuff that they can do. And then you can measure, like who's completing these? And how is that impacting their quota? So there are different ways of measuring. And seeing, like if the reps are doing deal if the managers are doing deal reviews or pipeline reviews with their reps and like, what's really going on?

Jessica Ly: And do you actually monitor the coaching so that you can give feedback to the managers the way they are coaching?

Shadi Bucklin: Yes, you can. I actually we're small enough. We’re lucky at Zenefits. We're small enough where I'm starting to have one on-ones with a lot of the managers on a regular basis to kind of understand what they're doing and give them coaching on what they could try differently. A lot of the managers actually come to me with challenges, with the reps wanting coaching for them. So yeah, so I kind of have my pulse on what's going on. But as companies grow and skill, it's really hard to do that. If you have like my last company, the management team was close to 100. It's really hard to have one on one with every manager, every director every month. So yeah, there need to be solutions where you can kind of measure and see are they having those conversations? Are they doing pipeline reviews? And then at my last company, for example, we had these manager coaching roundtables that we did every month and they came the managers came, it was a trusted community of all the sales leaders. They came together. They shared some of the best practices they were doing with their teams. They learned from each other. So we had a learning community for them. That was very interactive too.

Jessica Ly: Excellent, well, this has been a great learning conversation. Thanks for being on the show Shadi.

Shadi Bucklin: Thank you, It's been a pleasure.