"It's actually okay not to be perfect...." - Melissa Madian- Founder of TMM Enablement
7. What is the challenge you face in your job as a sales enabler?
You can create the best enablement package, and the best sales process; but it fails if the sales manager and the senior executives aren’t on board. They must inspect and manage their people on the process. As a rep, if I think it isn’t important to my manager, then I won’t bother to do it. And then it just falls by the wayside.
I’ve seen when the managers support the process, things are very successful. When the managers don’t support it, all the work goes completely to waste.
8. You discussed about finding the right sales person. But how do you find the right person?
You can get consultancy groups to help you create the ideal seller profile. You can do things like having candidates go through a competency module. The easiest way, is to find out what you are looking for in the organisation:
Learn how sales people are successful
How people do the things they do, so you can know if the person will fit into this idea sales person model or not.
If they will fit into the corporate culture, and fit into the processes. If they don’t fit into the processes you have the organisation, they probably won’t succeed.
Then you can create a series of questions to ask them to know if they are the right fit or not.
9. Should a sales rep over sale?
I never recommend over selling. Because you will hurt the customer somewhere down the line. You can sell more later, if you sell them right. Because the customer will want to buy more from you, and that customer will want to refer you to other people. If you make sure your team doesn’t oversell it sets the customer up for a great experience; which solves their exact problem and they are more likely to recommend your product to all their peers.
10. As a successful person, there are certain traits that you must have. So what kind of traits you have that you think is important to be successful?
Competitiveness. I want to get to that next level. I want to succeed, and get all the shiny ribbons. So I consider myself to be very competitive!
I work hard. I put a lot of effort in everything I do. Part of it is because of my engineering background. You can’t succeed in engineering if you aren’t hard-working. There’s also a level of consistency and ownership in your work that you have as an engineer. Traditionally, as an engineer, if you design something and the item is flawed, then a bridge will fall or a plane will crash – you must be very diligent! Even if I don’t manage something as dangerous as that, I still take ownership of that quality, and I reapply it throughout my work.
11. In your discussion, you discussed how to empower your people. I think this is something that many organization lack. What is the key to empowerment to bring people to the next level?
Think of Batman and his utility belt, and the martial arts and combat training he has. Alfred is the man that helps him with his utility belt, and provides him guidance. If you imagine for a moment, Batman is the sales team and Alfred is the enablement team! Alfred provides Batman with all the training and tools he needs, and helps tunes up the Batmobile, just as the Sales Enablement team provides the process, tools and training to the Sales organization.
12. What is your recommendation for the young next generation when it comes to work ethics?
There’s an expectation of speed to success, and there’s no fast way to get to success. Quite often, you need to have a ridiculous amount of patience and diligence. And sometimes, you just may not succeed.
There are a lot of books out there that talk about “embracing your failures” and there’s a certain amount of truth to that as well. Unless you screw up, you can’t learn what not to do. So you shouldn’t expect to be perfect all of the time. I am certainly not perfect most of the time. And I have done stupid mistakes too, and you learn not to do them again!
Can you tell us what are the last 3 books you have read?
I would recommend:
Switch, by the Heath brothers. It talks about how you can connect with people emotionally.
Good to great, by Jim Collins. It talks about how to change the little things in the organisation, and change them from good to great. Just by changing 2%, can switch between second place and first place.
Any book by Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett
Reach Melissa Madian at:
Twitter: @MelissaMadian