Topics for skill development

- [Instructor] As you get started with your sales enablement program, how do you really know that your seller is going to use what you produce? In fact, do you know why you're even creating the topics and content you're creating? Well, you won't unless you can directly link your program topics to the skills the seller needs to be successful. And that takes designing your topics with measurable outcomes and the real needs of the sellers in mind. Why do you create the things you create? Do you know how they are used and what they produce? Have you ever asked about the impact that your work has on the people it's made to support? Do you know your audience and their daily job, what it's like to be a seller? When engaging sellers, I find the conversations shift when they're asked questions about their needs or if certain assets are helpful. Here are some asks that you might come across. We need negotiation training. We need product training. We need sales process training. These are a lot of things we hear from our clients, and on the surface, the request seems really reasonable. A lot of sellers need to be able to be good at all of those things within their job. There are two things that you need to follow up on to figure out what's going on and why the requester has decided that these are the answer. What's happening in the sales process with a customer that you're thinking this training is needed? Is this issue happening across many sellers or just a few? How do we know that this is the issue? As you start to uncover what's really going on and what the stakeholder sees as the issue, it helps you to start formulating if the request is really the answer, and if it's a strong answer, how you're going to know if it's successful. Ultimately, what you're digging into as a current state or baseline of where your sellers are today with, say, closing deals that are profitable, selling a new product, or addressing all of the steps needed for a strong deal during the sales process. So when you're given a topic and asked for something to be created, remember to follow up the request with your discovery questions so that you can make sure it's something that's going to make a material difference for the business.