According to the State of Sales Enablement Report 2024, 20% of organizations see sales process as a key strategic priority. So how can you streamline your sales process and equip reps to win more and win faster?

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Win Win podcast. I am your host, Shawnna Sumaoang. Join us as we dive into changing trends in the workplace and how to navigate them successfully.

Here to discuss this topic is Scott McNabb, the chief sales officer at Verisk Marketing Solutions. Thank you for joining us, Scott. I'd love for you to tell us about yourself, your background, and your role.

Scott McNabb: Yeah, I'm thrilled to death to be here. Thank you so much. As mentioned, I'm the Chief Sales Officer for Verisk Marketing Solutions.

I have been in and around the world, solving problems for major brands, major carriers, major tech companies, et cetera, for the better part of the last 20 years, so since I was nine years old, that's a joke, and have been leading sales teams, both in the data world and also in the SaaS software world over the course of my career.

SS: Amazing. Well, Scott, we are honored to have you here. Given your extensive experience as a sales leader, you have seen the landscape evolve. I'm sure throughout that journey, but especially in recent years. What are some of the top challenges that you would say sales teams face today?

SM: You know, I would say as relates to my use of different tools in the sales cycle, what I continue to evolve and learn from is the notion that sellers may not understand analytically where a Buyer stands in their buyer's journey.

And it's evidenced by the fact that, again, going back to the conversational topic, they don't know the right material to provide to the right buyer at the right time that might resonate with them at the proper deal stage, more importantly, at the proper. Sort of category of ICP, right? The ideal customer profile.

So sending the wrong material to the wrong buyer at the wrong time in the stage, and before you know it, you get lost in the deal cycle. And it is the number one challenge that sellers face, both in my current role and in previous companies that I've worked with is understanding where they are from a situational awareness perspective in the deal sort of cycle. I've got a military aviation background, and one of the things that we teach in fighter pilot school is helping the aviator understand where they are in the fight at any given moment, right? Where's the nearest, you know, fuel stop? Where's the enemy line versus the friendly line? You know, where do you stand three-dimensionally in relation to the buyer?

In this particular example, but in relation to the enemy, you know, am I positioned properly to either fight and win or escape and save myself for another day? So to use the vernacular, that situational awareness is something that we teach in, you know, in our aviation community. And it's a construct situational awareness is a construct that we try.

To guide, teach, coach, and sort of replicate for the sellers so that when they're in the deal cycle, that they understand where they are in relation to the challenge that the buyer faces. Does that make sense?

SS: Absolutely. And I have to say, Scott, also very cool that you are in the aviation space. That is amazing.

SM: It's 15 years of my life, lots and lots of time doing it, and it's amazing the corollaries between that situational awareness, the thing that you have to teach, and oftentimes young up-and-coming aviators, they get that they're flying the plane, and they get that it's moving in a forward direction, and they get what they have to do to get from here to there, do the thing you have to do, and return safely. But, you know, sort of advanced instruction is understanding three dimensionally where you fit in the fight.

SS: I can see how that is a great analogy to sales. Now, from your perspective, how can enablement help sales teams overcome some of these challenges to achieve more success?

SM: Well, let's be clear. So there's training and there's enablement.

I think we get these two things confused. Training is what you do when you're trying to show somebody how to lift in the gym, right? Enablement is when they're thinking from a, again, three-dimensional perspective when we're guiding them to have critical thinking skills and understand if I'm here, then my next move is there, and we call it in our world, next best action.

We built our entire sales enablement model around MBAs and the most often reasons why sales reps won't put deals and commit is because of the fear that if I asked you to commit, or if you're willing to stick your neck out and commit to a deal, Then somebody is going to ask you to have a plan for how you're going to execute on the mission.

Right? And so it is the number one challenge. They say that I learned this from an amazing sales leader. Light is the world's best disinfectant, right? So enablement is about bringing deals into the light and via example, leading from the front, guiding, coaching. Enablement is not something that lives exclusively in an enablement department.

It is something that is truly something that is to be led by the leaders. They have to exhibit and exemplify these skill sets so that the seller will feel as though we're all in the same set of airplanes after the same mission. And so enablement. Is that guidance tool, but again, it's not the enablement department exclusively.

It is the seller, the sales leaders function. This is what, uh, I've got a sales leadership summit next week in Chicago with all my leaders and a big part of what I'm coaching on is how do you coach and enable your sellers? You can't just depend upon the enablement department to solve for the challenge.

SS: I love that. You've essentially made enablement a cultural priority across your organization. And I know that you're passionate about developing high performance cultures. What are some of your best practices for building that culture within a sales team?

SM: They say that culture eats strategy for breakfast. It's an old school book that's been around for 30 years and it's still never more true. And so culturally we have to guide the sellers from a culture perspective. Around the notion of franchise ownership, right? They have to own, understand the mission, be clear on the goals, be clear on the steps, and then accountability comes with culture.

So again, a big part of what we're teaching next week is really just sort of an agreement between the sales leader and the sales rep on what is accountability and what does that mean, and then finally, Culture, whereby our one on ones are designed around four key concepts. Revenue first, right?

Where you stand in the revenue picture, people, right? What people are you struggling with process? What processes are kicking your butt? And then finally innovation, right? Where we make it the responsibility of everybody culturally in the sales team to constantly be looking for ways to improve and innovate our process, right?

So it's just not do it because I say that you do it. They have to be bought into that concept. And more importantly, they have to be challengers who look at the process and go, all right, well, look, that's kicking my butt. That's stupid. Why are we doing it that way? I got an idea. Why don't we do it this way, because we can shave three days off of the opposing cycle, or we can accelerate our deals because finally, culturally, it's all about velocity of deals.

Culture has to be sort of digging in on the notion of increasing the velocity at which we move deals through the cycle. Because, you know, they say an army travels on its stomach, a sales team travels on velocity.

SS: I could not agree more. So we talked in the intro and you mentioned it just now about the importance of a solid sales process.

How can the sales process influence a high-performance culture? And what have you done to streamline the sales process to help kind of boost sales performance?