Get your whole sales team all on the same messaging. Or, risk falling short of quota.
“We needed to quickly get everyone a shared messaging approach to meet our annual sales goal,” explains Karen Hundley, VP of Legal Partnerships and sales leader at CeriFi.
Growth through acquisition is a common way to boost revenue, but integrating and streamlining sales messaging and processes across teams can be fraught with challenges.
CeriFi is an industry leader in professional certification training for the financial services, Series 6, Series 7, and Certified Financial Planner (CFP) licensure offerings.
Quick and effective integration of two recently acquired brands into their existing sales framework is exactly the challenge CeriFi faced at the beginning of 2023.
Vice President of Legal Partnerships, Karen Hundley, spearheaded the work on creating a common sales language as well as a repeatable sales strategy and processes across the new and existing teams.
These efforts not only led to considerable incremental sales revenue in 2023, it also was critical in preserving millions of dollars of at-risk renewal revenue, allowing CeriFi to surpass set targets and establish a foundation for ongoing success.
We recently had the chance to talk to Karen about her strategic approach and commitment to training and empowering her salesforce to drive revenue growth at CeriFi.
Cultivating a Culture of Continuous Learning
Karen and her team worked with sales leadership across 5 sales teams and 40 individual producers to build a plan for integration into a shared, repeatable selling system.
A lot of sales training is delivered in stand-alone training workshops or sessions, which have no lasting performance impact. By contrast, skills development delivered in weekly doses of coaching and peer learning raises individual performance by an average of 17%-19%.
Karen emphasizes the importance of regular one-on-one meetings, stating, “Employees who have regular one-on-one meetings with their managers are three times more likely to be engaged at work.” It ensures that team members receive the guidance and support needed to excel in their roles.
Those one-on-one meetings are then connected to weekly team learning sessions to promote sharing of best practices within sales teams. By providing a platform for discussing wins, losses, and best practices, leaders cultivate a culture where every team member’s contribution is valued. “It’s really important to look back at where you went wrong and what you could have done better,” Karen explains.
Building Shared Playbooks through Field Learning
Karen championed comprehensive training initiatives, such as monthly Playbook and Field Learner Workshops, to equip her team with the skills and knowledge needed to excel in their roles. Her proactive approach to integrating training into CeriFi’s sales operations has yielded tangible results, driving sales performance and revenue generation.
Karen says: “Everyone is able to evolve and consistently get better with shared playbooks and field learning… If others set up their follow-up training the same way, I guarantee that their reps would get something out of it … You’re giving them the opportunity on a regular basis to practice and share and be vulnerable with each other and not be afraid to listen, learn, and contribute.”
The monthly Playbook and Field Learning Workshops, where team members actively contribute and share valuable insights, have been extremely successful. To quote one of her team members: “Together, we’re a better team.”
Aligning Sales to the Buyer Journey for Revenue Maximization
Karen also focused on strategic alignment of sales to an overall positioning strategy that connects the buyer journey across marketing, demand generation and sales. Implementing a shared positioning framework means that when buyer conversations transition from marketing engagement to sales conversations, there is no disruption.
The shared positioning framework makes it possible for marketing to begin the buyer journey on the website and through content consumption in a consistent way with sales conversations. Through meticulous training and coaching, Hundley ensures that every sales team member is equipped with the tools and knowledge to effectively articulate personalized buyer value in each sales conversation.
Karen has not only transformed individual sales performance but has also positioned CeriFi for long-term success in a competitive marketplace. Karen’s success with CeriFi can serve as a blueprint for sales leaders seeking to optimize their sales performance and drive sustainable revenue growth.