How the Building Blocks & Sales Effectiveness Frameworks Align to Improve Sales Performance
Mike Kunkle
🔹Author/Advisor/Course Creator: The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement | Modern Sales Foundations | Sales Coaching Excellence
Hey, Enablers, Happy Friday. Mike Kunkle here. Welcome to this week’s edition of Sales Enablement Straight Talk!
Today, I want to share how The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement and the Teachable Elements of Sales Effectiveness work together and can be used to improve sales force performance.
INTRODUCTION
There are a few things that are difficult to get across to people who are looking for clear answers or directions.
The map is not territory: This means that representations of reality (like maps, models, or descriptions) are not the same as reality itself. While a map shows directions and routes, it doesn’t capture every detail like potholes, open car doors, children playing, or missing street grates.
All models are wrong; some are useful: Similarly, this means that no model perfectly represents reality, but some models are still valuable for understanding and predicting certain aspects. Models simplify complex systems and provide useful insights despite their imperfections.
Learning how to figure out what's right for you is ten times more valuable than being told what to do. This means that developing the ability to problem-solve, make your own decisions, understand your own needs, and develop workable solutions is far more beneficial than simply following instructions from others. When you learn to navigate your own path, you gain confidence, independence, and a deeper understanding of how to produce results.
These maxims have served me well over the years, doing sales performance improvement work. Keep them in mind as we review multiple models and frameworks today.
With those reminders freshly stated, let's dig in.
The BB of SE + Teachable Elements of Sales Effectiveness
If you're reading this newsletter, I'm guessing you're familiar with the Building Blocks framework, but you know what happens when you assume. To lay the proper foundation I will summarize the Building Blocks as well as the Teachable Elements of Sales Effectiveness. If you're deeply familiar with these frameworks, models, and systems, you can scroll through them to move forward.
Here is a summary of the Building Blocks.
The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement
The 12 Core Building Blocks
These are the performance levers to be put into place to support sales effectiveness. As Greg Alexander once said, way back in 2016 (at 34:56 in the video):
"The goal of a sales enablement program is to increase the revenue per sales rep. Anything else is noise."
That may be my all-time favorite quote about sales enablement, and it is the driving force behind the Building Blocks. The 12 core blocks are:
Buyer Acumen: Identify your buyer personas and their COIN-OP (Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Outcomes, Priorities). Understand the problems buyers are trying to solve, the outcomes they aim to achieve, and the metrics that matter to each. This includes their typical buying process and exit criteria.
Buyer Engagement Content: Align your marketing content, lead-gen campaigns, sales content/collateral, and sales messaging to identify problems, share outcomes, and address buying process exit criteria.
Sales Support Content: Develop sales support materials, job aids, checklists, playbooks, training reminders, calculators, and other tools to support your process/methodology.
Sales Hiring: Implement a proven-effective process to hire or promote people who have the best chance of succeeding in the chosen role.
Sales Training: Build sales onboarding and ongoing training that supports business objectives. Teach sales process and sales methodology. Develop ongoing training to close sales competency gaps. Train managers first, then reps. Use a sales training system: Learn, Remember, Practice, Apply, and Master.
Sales Coaching: Select a sales coaching model and implement a sales coaching framework. Remove obstacles, enable managers, and engage reps and managers in an ongoing process to identify and close sales competency gaps, increasing organizational sales mastery and performance.
Sales Process: Align your sales process to the buyer’s journey. Document tasks and exit criteria for both buyers and sellers.
Sales Methodology: Select appropriate sales methodologies for prospecting, opportunity management, and strategic account management. Develop sales competencies by role from a top-producer analysis whenever possible or proven best practices. Customize as needed.
Sales Analytics and Metrics: Benchmark your sales metrics, such as conversion ratios, deal size, cross-sell, ramp-up times for onboarding, sales velocity, content sharing, and KPIs. Track results pre- and post-training. Also track your sales onboarding and learning metrics. Analyze everything. Use available tools to analyze customers, territories, purchase patterns, and more to understand your business and improve performance.
Sales Technology and Tools: Select and implement sales technology to support your sales force, create efficiency, increase time spent selling, and support effectiveness.
Sales Compensation and Recognition: Design a sales compensation plan and incentives, rewards, and recognition that encourage the behaviors you expect and the results you want.
Sales Manager Enablement: Train managers to use your sales coaching model. Train managers on performance analysis and coaching. Foster a coaching culture and sales competency development. Determine your sales management operating system/management disciplines you want to instill. Train managers on that and hold them accountable for executing your cadence.
The Supporting Building Blocks
These blocks tie the others together and support effective execution.
Systems Thinking: Apply systems thinking to create an environment that supports high performance. Implement a Sales Hiring System, a Sales Readiness System supported by a Sales Training System, and a Sales Management System (including a Sales Coaching System) to perpetuate the above building blocks and pull everything together. The core blocks are the performance levers, and the systems are how you execute.
Communication Management - Sales Force & Cross-Functional Collaboration: Become the single point of communication for the sales force, with a regular cadence/format. Develop a sales enablement charter and establish a cadence of communication with cross-functional collaboration partners to review collaboration efforts, progress, results, and revise the plans or charter as needed.
Sales Support Services: As needed, or as possible based on budget and resources, provide sales support via SLA for services such as creating presentations, research, preparation, RFP support, deal desk support, coaching support, and more—whatever other support the sales force requires.
The Sales Effectiveness Acumens
These are the foundational pillars of sales effectiveness.
Buyer & Customer Acumen
Understanding buyer personas and their buying journey is crucial. This includes recognizing their roles, goals, and Challenges, Opportunities, Impacts, Needs, Outcomes, and Priorities (COIN-OP). It also involves:
Understanding the decision-making process, decision criteria, and buying process exit criteria by stage.
Considers both the business and personal needs of decision-makers.
Additional Information:
Sales Acumen
This encompasses a wide range of skills and practices, including:
Sales research, call planning, and sales meeting management.
Prospecting/lead generation.
Digital selling practices.
Opportunity qualification.
Consultative selling using an adaptive methodology, which includes discovery and situation assessment, solution development and co-creating solutions, developing proposals, conducting demos, presenting value and solutions, resolving concerns, and gaining commitment.
Multi-threading to message appropriately to buyers with different interests and value drivers.
Storytelling, insight selling, negotiating, influence skills, consulting skills, general dialogue and communication skills, and team selling.
Strategic account management.
These are all integral parts of Sales Acumen. You probably already noticed the interplay with the Sales Methodology and Sales Process building blocks. When I review the Sales Effectiveness Fundamentals, you'll see that this acumen fuels those as well.
Solution Acumen
This involves a deep understanding of products and services and how they solve customer problems. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills, including force field analysis, are essential. Solutions should be tied to:
Industry Acumen
Financial Acumen
Customer Acumen
Ecosystem Acumen
This acumen is the culmination of various skills used to create value for customers and differentiate the company. It also includes an understanding of competitive offerings and how to position against them, as well as against DIY solutions and the status quo. This includes the ability to position solutions to resonate with buyers who perceive value differently:
Business Value: This includes financial and operational metrics, such as cost savings, revenue growth, or efficiency improvements.
Experiential Value: This focuses on improving processes or experiences, enhancing customer or employee satisfaction.
Aspirational Value: This aligns with mission, vision, values, or initiatives such as DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) or sustainability.
Personal Value: This satisfies a personal need or professional desire, addressing individual goals or motivations.
To communicate about one solution in multiple ways requires sellers to become "multilingual"—not in the sense of different languages, but in being able to discuss solutions and outcomes in a way that aligns with how individual buyers perceive value.
Business Acumen
A strong grasp of business models, financial acumen, and operational metrics/outcomes such as key performance indicators and critical success factors is necessary. Important aspects include:
Understanding pricing
How customer organizations make money
Understanding the Why Sells What To Whom And How model
How organizations go-to-market
Building a business case and calculating ROI
Industry Acumen
Domain expertise involves understanding industry challenges, opportunities, technologies, regulations, and legislation. It also includes knowledge of:
Business practices
Current events/news
The general state of the profession
Organizational Acumen
Effective planning and organization are key. This includes:
Territory planning
Account planning
Sales call planning
Leading sales meetings
Task management
Using CRM, sales enablement tools, and other technology tools and performance support
Action planning and calendaring
Project management
Change management
Personal productivity practices
Operational Acumen
This focuses on how to get things done and make things happen in your own organization and in others. It includes understanding:
Processes
Political savvy
Culture
Collaboration
Consensus-building
Executing plans effectively
Ecosystem Acumen
This acumen may not apply in all contexts. When applicable, it involves understanding vendor and channel partners and how to build relationships and engage with them effectively. This includes:
Uncovering, managing, and winning opportunities through the co-creation of solutions for customers.
Sales Effectiveness Fundamentals
Here are the Sales Effectiveness Fundamentals.
As I mentioned previously, you'll see the overlap here between the Sales Process and Sales Methodology Building Blocks and the Sales Acumens. You'll also see overlap between Value Creation here and Solution Acumen. This is common with frameworks, models, and systems -- especially systems thinking -- and is why I mentioned earlier that the map is not the territory. When there is overlap, seek alignment and consistency, and other than that, don't fret about the overlapping elements.
Buyer Centric
Being buyer centric is an outside-in mindset that considers everything you do from the buyer’s perspective and influences your behavior to act in your buyer's best interest, achieving your success by supporting their success.
Value Creation
Value creation is your ability to understand what each buyer values and co-create and/or communicate solutions to message and deliver that value. This means to communicate the outcomes of your solution to articulate the value you deliver, which includes the four types of value, which were explained in more detail above, under Solution Acumen.
Business Value
Experiential Value
Aspirational Value
Personal Value
Prospecting
Prospecting is the act of researching, planning, and approaching decision-maker contacts in target accounts in a way that successfully generates interest in exploring how you might help them achieve their goals and setting an appointment to do so.
Discovery
Discovery is the act of understanding your buyer’s situation and what matters most to the decision-makers and key influencers—their current state and related impacts, their desired future state and related outcomes, and the size of the gap and the urgency to close it.
Opportunity Qualification
Opportunity qualification is analyzing various factors of the situation that typically indicate there is an opportunity (a problem you can solve that is compelling enough to spur action) and that you have a reasonable likelihood of winning the business to commit the time, energy, resources, and money to pursue it.
Opportunity Management
Opportunity management is the act of purposefully uncovering and satisfying each buyer’s decision criteria and buying process exit criteria to successfully shepherd the opportunity through the stages of the buying and sales process to a final win decision. Negotiating is included here.
Strategic Account Management (SAM)
SAM is the act of analyzing account potential, setting account objectives, considering relationships and other factors to build an account plan that will achieve the pre-set objectives, and executing that plan to achieve the objectives (usually: grow, maintain, recover).
Territory Management
Territory management is the act of analyzing the accounts and potential within your territory, however it is structured, to ensure proper account coverage and to optimize the potential of your territory.
Account Planning
Account planning is the act of setting account objectives and creating a plan to achieve them. This is part of Strategic Account Management.
Sales Call Planning
Sales call planning is the act of setting sales call objectives and then creating a plan to achieve them.
Resolving Concerns
Buyers and customers may express various concerns at any stage of the buying process or customer lifecycle. Resolving concerns is the act of following a buyer-centric process to acknowledge and clarify their issues, identifying the type of concerns they have, so you can offer relevant perspectives and recommendations to effectively address them.
The Interplay between the BB of SE and the Teachable Elements of Sales Effectiveness
Click the image below to view a larger version. Follow the color coding to see the interplay between these frameworks and models.
Buyer Acumen from the BB is an obvious tie to Buyer & Customer Acumen, which, frankly, cascades to almost everything else we do, including:
Buyer Engagement Content, Sales Support Content, Sales Training, and both Sales Process and Sales Methodology, at a minimum.
Sales Acumen ties to both Sales Process and Methodology and fees the entire framework of Sales Effectiveness Fundamentals, which is supported by Sales Support Services (when they're provided)
And, of course, Sales Manager Enablement, especially Sales Coaching, supports the entire GTM motion in the Sales Effectiveness Fundamentals.
as you see in the graphic, I point out some other interplay examples that I didn't color code, because it gets too confusing, visually:
Sales Technology & Tools with Organizational Acumen in support of the SE Fundamentals
Sales Analytics & Metrics with Business Acumen in support of the SE Fundamentals
Buyer + Industry + Business Acumen support Solution Acumen in support of the SE Fundamentals
Closing Thoughts
So, what's the point?
In the complex world of sales performance improvement, no single framework or model can fully capture the intricacy and nuances needed to maximize a sales force's performance.
Each framework, whether it's the Building Blocks of Sales Enablement or the Teachable Elements of Sales Effectiveness, provides valuable insights and structures. However, the real power lies in their synergy and how they interconnect to create a comprehensive approach.
The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement offer a robust framework by addressing essential elements like buyer acumen, sales training, and sales process - the ingredients needed to fully arm a sales force to go-to-market effectively. And then these 12 core blocks are supported by three others that tied them together, with Systems Thinking being the way to actualize the blocks and execute enablement effectively.
These core components are crucial, but even they are not enough on their own. They need to be complemented by the broader and deeper understanding and foundations encapsulated in the Sales Effectiveness Acumens. Understanding the intricacies of buyer personas, mastering consultative selling skills, and developing a deep knowledge of industry-specific challenges are all vital to truly excel.
Moreover, the Sales Effectiveness Fundamentals emphasize the importance of practical execution—what's need to go-to-market effectively: prospecting, opportunity management, and strategic account management—supported by other actions that support daily sales success. These fundamentals tie back to and are enriched by the strategic insights from the Building Blocks and the detailed acumen required from the Sales Effectiveness Acumens.
The interplay between these frameworks and models reflects the reality that sales is a multifaceted discipline. It demands a blend of strategic planning, tactical execution, and continuous learning. Each element supports and enhances the others, creating a holistic approach that can adapt to the dynamic nature of sales environments.
By understanding and leveraging the synergy between these frameworks, sales leaders can develop a more resilient and high-performing sales force. It's not about choosing one model over another but about integrating them to cover all bases—addressing buyer needs, equipping sales teams with the right skills and tools, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and adaptation.
The journey to sales excellence is an ongoing process of integrating and aligning various frameworks and models. Embrace the complexity, seek alignment and consistency, and leverage the strengths of each approach. As I often say, we need to do the complex, detailed, difficult work, so that it looks and feels easier for others to perform at their highest level. This holistic, integrated perspective is what will truly maximize your sales force's performance and drive sustained success.
Well, that's it for this week, Enablers! Did you learn something new reading/watching this newsletter? If you did, or if it just made you think (and maybe chuckle from time to time - bonus points if you snorted), share it with your favorite enablement colleague, subscribe right here on LinkedIn, and check out The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement Learning Experience. Felix Krueger and Mike Kunkle are both Building Blocks Mentors, and we hope to see you there! For other courses and content from Mike, see: https://linktr.ee/mikekunkle
Until next time, stay the course, Enablers, and #MakeAnImpact With #Enablement!
