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Increased onboarding NPS
More effective sales enablement
Stronger collaboration between teams
Ankorstore is a marketplace for B2B companies, connecting independent brands and retailers across Europe. In just two years, they’ve built a presence in over 23 countries, with local offices in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Thomas Monvoisin is the head of sales performance and enablement for the company. Part of his role is ensuring that the sales team is talking to the right prospects, has the right data and is using the right tools to hit their targets. The sales enablement department makes this possible by supporting the sales team with onboarding, training and anything else they need to perform at their very best.
However, while they had a basic knowledge of what was involved, they lacked the necessary expertise to build a strong sales enablement team and capability. Effectively communicating their global enablement vision and getting the buy-in from other teams within the organisation was also challenging, with a lack of clarity on what sales enablement really meant and its role in driving positive change.
Having identified sales enablement as a key part of any growth, Thomas realised that they would need external help. Following a recommendation, he decided to bring in the Flow State team to build out their sales enablement strategy.
After Thomas explained the current state of the sales enablement team, Flow State set out to create a training roadmap and curriculum, covering the key areas that would drive the biggest results for the company.
From the beginning, Thomas’s biggest priority was to ramp up the enablement team and provide them with the necessary knowledge and tools to interact with the sales team. By carefully analysing the business and its customers, Aaron and Raff came up with additional ideas to improve the enablement team’s plan and performance.
This started with a sales management competency self-assessment, where everyone ranked themselves across 30+ different skills. This enabled Flow State to create a comprehensive report, identifying the strengths and weaknesses at both the team and individual levels.
Using an iterative process, they then worked with Thomas to create an agenda for a series of tailored workshops that met Ankorstore’s unique needs.
Topics included:
These workshops were designed to give the participants specific outcomes and deliverables that significantly impacted performance. For example, one of the workshops covered the 12 Pillars of Sales Excellence, a framework that Thomas and his team now use daily. Other workshops dived deeper into the structure of the sales enablement team, how to measure the success of the enablement team and what metrics to track.
All of the workshops were carried out on-site over three days at the company’s offices in Paris. More than just a series of PowerPoint presentations, these were interactive workshops that involved the whole team. Rather than just telling the team what they should be doing, Raff and Aaron gave them exercises and frameworks that forced them to explore different methods and come up with their own solutions. As a result, participants learnt how to collaborate and solve problems together.
“We deliberately wanted to stretch them mentally,” explains Raff. “We gave them frameworks which made them have to come together and problem solve in ways they didn’t do before, which gave them a tangible solution at the end of each workshop which they could then go on to implement within the organisation”
Thomas found these workshops extremely useful for helping the team ramp up. While onboarding has been a struggle in the past, the workshop provided Thomas and his team with the tools they needed to improve the process, resulting in a strong increase in onboarding NPS.
By the end of the workshops, the team felt ready to use what they had learnt from Flow State and move forward. In an emotional conclusion, the participants shared how they now felt more invigorated, with a clearly defined plan and the confidence to execute it. They also felt more comfortable in their role and how to articulate their purpose to others within the company.
“Raff and Aaron come with strong sales management and leadership expertise” says Thomas. “Rather than just inspiring the team with a good speech, they made it extremely easy for us to understand how we could take what we’d learnt and apply it to our internal customers in the real world.”
There has also been a strong improvement in how enablement works with the sales team. “Previously the enablement team had a top-down approach, just pushing stuff out to the sales team. Now it’s much more collaborative – salespeople know what we can do for them and come to us with their training needs.”
Once the workshops had been completed, Flow State created a dedicated Slack channel for everyone involved in the workshops. For three months, participants had unlimited on-demand access to Flow State, which could be used to ask any questions, request additional calls and get practical advice on implementing what they’d learnt.
For example, if they had an upcoming presentation with key stakeholders or they wanted to help other regions improve their performance, Aaron and Raff were on hand to help them refine their messaging and guide them through the execution.
Flow State also set up a 30-minute weekly review session with Thomas. This allowed them to regularly discuss the team’s progress and address any obstacles or challenges they were facing.
Aaron and Raff also helped with the hiring process and ensuring the right people were in the right roles. When it was time for Ankorstore to hire a Head of Sales Enablement, Flow State shared the details with their network and sales enablement communities. They then recommended ideal candidates, sat in on the interviews and gave structured feedback on the candidate’s performance.
For companies who are either yet to put an enablement function in place or need help taking their existing team to the next level, Thomas wholeheartedly recommends Flow State. Looking forward, he plans to build on this foundation and further strengthen the relationship between enablement and sales. “Flow State definitely helped us with their expertise in this industry to shape a strong and efficient team for the future.”
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