The FOUR IMPERATIVES for

SALES ENABLEMENT
in 2020 and Beyond

1 2 3 4
Customer Remote Just-in-Time Sales and
Success Selling Training Marketing Unite
 Erik Peterson
Chief Executive Officer at Corporate Visions

Sales Enablement leaders:

You have a choice to make
Buyers are now engaging with your content further down the funnel, and they’re searching for that
information on their own, without talking to a sales rep. When buyers do talk to your reps, those
conversations probably happen remotely.

Sales Enablement content can’t just be a sidekick to an in-person sales conversation—it needs to be
able to stand on its own, address your buyer’s big questions, and showcase your unique value.
You need to provide the right information, in the right context, to help your buyers and sellers have more
productive conversations on both the acquisition and expansion sides of the customer lifecycle.
This e-book is about four emerging and imperative trends that will drive Sales Enablement in 2020 and
beyond. As a Sales Enablement leader, you can choose to seize these trends and lead the charge toward
this new reality of selling. Or, you can hold back, waiting to be told to address these issues to catch up
with your competition.
Whatever choice you make, this e-book presents a glimpse into your future.

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 2

 The FOUR IMPERATIVES for
SALES ENABLEMENT

1 2
Customer Success
Emerges as a Growth
Engine
Analysts estimate that 70-80 percent
of the average company’s annual
revenue now comes from existing
customers. To adapt, Sales
organizations need to become
situationally fluent, recognizing the
difference between acquisition and
expansion, and Customer Success
needs to get better at selling value to
existing customers.
Remote Selling Replaces
Face to Face
75 percent of all sales calls are now
conducted over the phone or the web,
yet most Sales Enablement strategies
are built for face-to-face selling
scenarios. As a result, sellers are
radically under-enabled for the most
common selling scenario. Remote
selling is a different animal—one
that requires a completely different
approach to Sales Enablement.
3 4
Training Adapts to the
Speed of Business
Traditional training models just
can’t keep up with the accelerating
pace of business. When unplanned
business needs arise, you need to
launch dynamic training that equips
your team with the skills they need
to respond immediately. To deliver
training at the speed of business,
organizations need to identify needs
and roll out the appropriate solutions
in weeks, not months.
Sales and Marketing
Converge
The B2B buying process isn’t as
linear or predictable as Sales leaders
assume. In fact, it’s more convoluted
than ever, handoffs are less defined,
and buyers are struggling to make
sense of their options. The companies
that win will be the ones in which
Sales and Marketing work together to
help people make buying decisions.
Sales Enablement is the natural
bridge between these two sides.

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 3

 Customer Success Emerges
as a Growth Engine
The vast majority of B2B organizations have either moved to a
recurring revenue model or have plans to. This includes businesses
that haven’t traditionally followed that model. In fact, a Big Four
consulting firm recently released a corporate mandate to reach
30 percent recurring revenue by the end of 2020. That’s right.
A consulting business just committed to getting deep into the
recurring revenue world.
So, depending on your business, you’re either there already, or you will be
shortly. What does that mean for Sales Enablement?
In a recurring revenue model, once you acquire customers, the primary
order of business is to retain and expand business with them. Yet, the last 30
years of sales training and sales execution have been built around customer
acquisition, not expansion.
Customer Acquisition vs Customer Expansion
Over the last four years, Corporate Visions has conducted a dozen academic
studies, with thousands of participants, in partnership with professors from
Stanford University in the U.S. and Warwick University in London.
1
The research shows that if you use the same selling strategy, message, and
skills to sell to an existing customer that you use when you acquire a new logo,
you decrease the likelihood of retaining or expanding with that customer.
In other words, the dominant sales motion of the last 10 years—using insights
to sell—actually drives down retention and expansion rates.
As a Sales Enablement leader, you need to recognize the difference
between the acquisition and expansion selling motions. You need to enable
the key driver of growth and profitability for your commercial engine—
the Expansion Sale.
To do that, educate and prepare your salespeople to be situationally fluent,
bringing the right strategy, message, and skills to the right situation.
But that’s not all.
The distinction between the acquisition sales motion and the expansion sales
motion presents a second opportunity for you to have an outsized influence
on your commercial engine—one that moves beyond your traditional
Sales Enablement role. >>
The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 4
Communicating Value As you head into 2020, ask yourself two
Recurring revenue businesses often have large customer support teams—sometimes questions:
called Customer Success—whose job, in theory, is to be responsible for customer
Have you prepared your Sales team

1
retention. And yet, the performance of those teams tends to be sub-optimal.
to be situationally fluent, so they
Customer Success teams often see their role as “delighting” customers. And while bring the right strategy, message,
making sure a customer is happy is important, that’s not why that team exists.
and skills to both an expansion
Customer Success exists because your senior leadership wants to ensure that no
customer leaves. A lost customer is extremely expensive, because the only way opportunity and an acquisition
to replace them is to go through the costly process of acquiring new customers. opportunity?
Have you enabled your Customer

2
What senior management really wants from Customer Success is to communicate
value to your customers consistently across the customer lifecycle. Success organization to articulate
value in every interaction with your
The problem is, most Customer Success Managers were never trained on how to
communicate value. They know how to onboard a customer, push adoption, run existing customers?
analytics, and fix broken things. But they don’t know how to articulate value.

??
Value articulation is a skill that you, a Sales Enablement professional, should be
bringing to those Customer Success teams. In fact, if you can help reduce churn by
just a few points, you’ll have a bigger impact on company profitability than if you come
up with a program that increases customer acquisition by double digits.

Tailor Your Messages for Customer Success

Research conducted with an academic research partner found that:
• A messaging approach that reinforces an existing customer’s natural Status
Quo Bias increased intention to renew by 13 percent relative to the provocative
messages in the test.
• The provocative messages increased the likelihood of a customer switching by
10 percent relative to the status quo reinforcement message.

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 5

 Remote Selling
Replaces
Face to Face

2
Sales Enablement, as a specific function in B2B enterprises, has That’s not to say that no progress has been made toward remote selling.
only been around for about 10 years. During that time, the role has But it’s usually treated as a necessary evil. That means sellers are trained to
mostly focused on enabling face-to-face sales. Remote selling—a execute a pale imitation of a face-to-face call—or, worse, left to figure out on
their own how to translate face-to-face skills to the remote selling world.
sales conversation that happens over the phone or the web—is
usually an afterthought. Every salesperson you ask will tell you that they think remote conversations are
much more challenging than in-person conversations. So, what you have is a
But that needs to change. situation where the most common sales conversation is the most difficult and
the least enabled. >>
Remote selling is now the dominant way sales conversations occur. According
to research by InsideSales.com, almost 50 percent of B2B sales are conducted
by an Inside Sales team. And that only captures part of the remote selling story.
Field salespeople say that over half of their conversations happen remotely, Inside Sales Outside Sales
over the phone or over the web. If you combine the percentage of B2B 100% remote 50% remote 50% F2F
sales driven by Inside Sales with the percentage of field sales conversations
that happen remotely, you see that over 75 percent of ALL sales calls are
conducted over the phone or the web.
Yet, Sales Enablement has spent the last 10 years optimizing strategy,
messages, and skills for a face-to-face conversation.
75% of selling is remote

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 6

Finding the Friction In 2020, ask yourself two questions:
When it comes to remote selling, reps tend to take the path of least resistance. Are you creating dynamic,
According to a survey of over 300 B2B salespeople, 42 percent of sellers try to
“reduce friction” by keeping the conversation verbal only. They don’t use web links,
apps, or other visual aids for fear of reducing their prospect’s willingness to participate.
1 impactful messages and
assets that support the remote
Meanwhile, 46 percent of sellers add only minimal friction, asking prospects to use a conversation?
web link to virtually walk through a sales deck. Have you trained your reps to

42% Only 12%

use interactive visual
2 embrace friction during their
remote calls by adding interactive
keep the storytelling technques. visuals?
conversation
verbal only.

46%
direct prospects
to a weblink.
88%
??
But, a Corporate Visions study found that the more friction you add, the more fruitful
the conversation. In fact, leaning into the friction by using an interactive visual in
remote sales conversations produced marked increases in message effectiveness, seller
credibility, and information recall. And, in a live simulation conducted in partnership
with a Corporate Visions client, using interactive visuals increased sales by 24 percent
month over month and year over year.
Incorporating tailored, visual storytelling techniques for remote selling demands some
behavior changes from Sales. Our survey found that 87 percent of sellers rarely or
never engage prospects with visuals. In other words, the majority of reps aren’t using
the engagement techniques that research proves to be most impactful for getting
meetings and moving your deals forward.
In 2020, you need to do better. You need to enable the remote selling conversation first.
And only after you’ve done that should you enable the in-person conversation. Sales
Enablement must support the most important and difficult activities and behaviors that
make for a successful salesperson, not the easiest.

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 7

 Training Adapts to the
Speed of Business
Sales leaders’ biggest frustration is that Sales
Enablement isn’t dynamic enough. Over the
years, Sales Enablement has generally been
effective when looking at the company’s
revenue budget for the coming year, building
a twelve-month program against that budget,
and executing that plan.
Unfortunately, twelve-month plans are rarely
relevant past month three. Businesses are so
dynamic and new challenges come up so quickly
that the old model of Sales Enablement can’t
keep up.
To stay relevant, Sales Enablement must become
problem-centric, not program-centric.
3
The key to moving from a program-centric
approach to a problem-centric approach is to Some of the problems Sales Enablement should
abandon the thinking that all initiatives require a be ready to attack with speed include:
one or two-day, in-person training to accomplish
• Too little pipeline
behavior change.
• Too many stalled deals
A problem-centric approach demands a bias
• Failure to get executive-level engagement
for speed. If it takes you six months to roll out a
• Response to competitor product/service
program to address an unplanned need for your
advances
business, you’re moving too slowly.
• Excessive discounting
So, why hasn’t every Sales Enablement leader
• Too much churn
moved to a model that delivers this kind of
execution speed? It’s typically because they • Failure to expand into whitespace
don’t believe other behavior change models can
produce the same results as an in-person training
experience. Research from Corporate Visions has
proven them wrong, however. >>
The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 8
From Program-Centric to Problem-Centric Training In 2020, ask yourself two questions:
An asynchronous, inline training model produces results on par with a one or two-day, Are your training programs flexible
in-person training session. This new model gives you unprecedented capacity to
execute with speed, which means you can now take a problem-centric approach to
Sales Enablement. You can address problems as they arise. You can do it in weeks
1 enough to address new challenges
and opportunities as they arise?
instead of months. And you can do it without sacrificing the quality of the outcomes Are you providing your reps with
you’re trying to drive.
Are there situations when a one-day or two-day in-person class will be best? Of course. 2 an ongoing learning experience
designed to foster situational
fluency?
You’ll always have some reason to bring your team together, such as a company
kickoff, where you want to encourage everyone to get to know each other. A two-day

??
training is an ideal way to take advantage of that travel investment.
There are many valid reasons for holding an in-person event. But if your goal is to
improve individual execution at speed, inline training is your best answer.

Inline Learning
Multi-touch, spaced online training and enablement

Training
Needs Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4 Step 5

Key Skill
Training
Q1 eLearning + Activities
Video Tutorials +
Knowledge Checks
Practice + Recorded
Challenges
Coaching Assessment
+ Feedback
Remediation Videos
+ Re-submit

Product
Launch
Q2 eLearning + Activities
Video Tutorials +
Knowledge Checks
Practice + Recorded
Challenges
Coaching Assessment
+ Feedback
Remediation Videos
+ Re-submit

Price
Increase
Q3 eLearning + Activities
Video Tutorials +
Knowledge Checks
Practice + Recorded
Challenges
Coaching Assessment
+ Feedback
Remediation Videos
+ Re-submit

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 9


Sales and Marketing
Converge
4
Sales and Marketing are coming together in unprecedented ways.
Gone are the days when Marketing’s only contribution was to
organize events, send mailers, and then hand off a “lead” to Sales.
Today, Sales and Marketing are deeply integrated through initiatives like
ABM (Account-based Marketing), which requires significantly more focused
back-and-forth communication between the two departments.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Customers are now engaging with marketing-created material much further
down the buying funnel. Research by Gartner shows that customers struggle
to make the buying decisions they set out to make.
?#?$
77% of buyers say their
most recent purchase was
either very complex or difficult
$
In response to this complexity, buyers are doing their own research,
trying to find answers that help them progress towards a decision.
And they’re often doing all of this research without talking to a sales rep.
One way to make the buying decision easier for your customers is to provide
tools that help them take the next step in their buying journey. These tools
should be simple, relevant, and credible. They should be built to enable
consensus, since most buying groups are now made up of six to 10 people.
And the best way to build those tools is to understand how customers
make decisions.
In fact, if you understand not just the buying journey, but the Deciding Journey,
your organization can create customer-facing tools that simplify the buying
process and reward your team with bigger deals. >>
The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 10
The Customer Deciding Journey

Deciding
The Customer Buying Journey

CREATE ELEVATE CAPTURE EXPAND

Why Why Why Why Why Why Why Why

Change? You? Invest? Now? Pay? Sign? Stay? Evolve?
Status Buy Re-Buy
Quo
”
“Disru
pt” ntiate y” tize” “Protect” “Guid
e”
“Rene
w” “Expa
nd”
“Diffe
re “Justif “Priori

Customer Acquisition Customer Expansion

Once both Sales and Marketing understand the Deciding Journey, you
can give Marketing clearer direction around the tools your buyers and
salespeople need to move more quickly and painlessly throughout the
buying process.
This won’t happen without someone taking ownership of the problem.
You can hope Marketing will recognize it on its own. But often, Marketing
is just a bit too far removed from customer interactions to know what
needs to be done. This is where you can shine as a Sales Enablement
leader and drive the deeper integration between Sales and Marketing to
enable both sides of the commercial engine.

?? In 2020, ask yourself two questions:

Are you providing contextual Are your Marketing and Sales teams working

1 information that simplifies the

buying process for your customers? 2 together to create messages and content
tailored to your buyers’ key decisions?

The FOUR IMPERATIVES for SALES ENABLEMENT in 2020 and Beyond 11

Conclusion About Corporate Visions
The four imperatives for Sales Enablement represent an opportunity for Corporate Visions is a leading marketing and sales messaging,
you. It’s your chance to show your organization that you’ve surveyed the content, and skills training company. Global B2B companies come
changes to your business and have a plan to address those new needs to us when they want to:
before your competition. It provides an opportunity to shine.
These imperatives will be with us beyond 2020. But the people who • Create Value™: B
 reak the status quo and differentiate your
attack them now will have the advantage. As you think about how you’ll solutions from competitors
choose to respond, please feel free to reach out with thoughts, ideas,
• Elevate Value™: B
 uild a more effective business case to
or questions. We’d love to hear from you.
justify executive decisions

• Capture Value™: Maximize the profitability of each deal

• Expand Value™: Renew and expand existing customer revenue

About the Author
Only with Corporate Visions will you learn tested and proven
customer conversation approaches for enabling buyers to choose
you at every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Erik Peterson
Contact Us to Learn More

Erik Peterson, Chief Executive Officer at Corporate Visions, helps

companies and salespeople around the world win at the three-foot
level when they’re sitting across the table from their most important
prospects. Peterson is a recognized author, keynote speaker, and
has trained thousands of sales teams in some of the most prestigious
companies around the world. He is co-author of three books, including
Conversations That Win the Complex Sale, The Three Value Conversations,
and the upcoming book, The Expansion Sale.
© Corporate Visions, Inc. | 1.800.360.SELL | corporatevisions.com