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Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Sorry you didn't hear from me yesterday because today, sorry, not today. Yesterday turned out to be a very busy day. That was because I had some client commitments that I had to get to and I spent the first half of the day trying to record a pilot for a for a radio show. A pilot, for those of you who are not aware, is the little more or less say little tester or little thing that you have to record to present to the management team of ATV station or the radio station to show that the television idea or that the radio idea.
The idea that you have for the show. Just so that people can get a visual representation of what it is. Or an audio representation in this case, since it's a radio show that I was making the pilot for. So that people can see what it is and get a sense of whether it can work before they OK the project and give it the green light. So if that works out, then that means I should be coming to a radio station near some of you soon.
Now, since we've only gone past the pilot stage, I'm not going to make mention of the radio station, but just I'm sure you guys can figure out that it's it's going to be a business show. And of course we're going to be talking about how to improve your business from a sales and business development perspective. So if everything works out, your boys should be on the radio pretty soon. And. And yeah, so that's it. So that's what I was doing.
And recording the pilot was quite interesting, you know, because I've been podcasting for gosh, OK. I can't remember when I started anyway, but I know it was just before 2020. So should I say 2019, 2019-2020, Definitely before COVID. And we've gotten over 910 episodes over here, but I've gotten used to, you know, just freestyling, keeping it Freewheelie, you know how it is now. And then of course, you know, during live sessions, you know,
during training sessions and then during live coaching sessions and things like that. You know, I'm in command of my time and things of that nature. So it was interesting having to work with a new time format, you know, having to make scheduled stops so that you can slot in a an advertisement, you know, things like that. So it was an interesting experience. The timing, yeah, the timing was definitely off. I had to take lots of routine breaks so that we could slot adverts there because I think in a 30 minute period there's supposed to be two adverts and two adverts and then space for intro and space for outro.
So it's it's going to be quite an experience. So I'll let you guys know when I'm on the air. But it was real fun. Part of the not related to business anyway, but part of the thing that I enjoyed about the whole process was I had to work with two really young studio engineers and they were absolutely good at their job. And it turns out that, you know how over here on the podcast, I just show up and I record and then I leave.
I just do it one take. But then one of the audio engineers forgot to record the second-half of the pilot. That's after we paused for a commercial break and then moving into question and answer audience calling. So yeah, so I had to do a second take. I was kind of odd because, you know, over here, I've been doing everything, all 900 episodes, over 910 episodes. I've done everything. 1 take. So yeah, that was weird having to, you know, like, oh, we're done and you mean you didn't capture that and then starting over again.
So that was weird. Yeah. But then we also had to select music and then we're looking for music for the show. I don't do any musical intros or outros. So we had to sort that out. And the station is well, OK, well let's just say it's an NGO and. And it also has some ethical concerns. So we couldn't use music that had swear words or racy lyrics, you know, things like that. So basically Davido songs that have to do with money were pretty much out and I remembered money.
Anything by Jay-Z and JDJD is Jermaine Dupri. I don't know if he's still in music, but was an all time producer. He produced Crisscross, he produced The Brat, he did some productions for Janet Jackson and a couple of other people like that. So JD is old, Well, relatively relatively old then, put it that way. So Jay-Z and JD money, anything. So we checked it out. The lyrics are OK. So when you guys hear the pilot, because I'll definitely put it here on the podcast, you're going to hear we want to hear JD
and Jay-Z on the track. And then the other radio producer, what he came up with was from Wu Tang Clan. Cream as a cash rules everything around me, Wu Tang Clan. So yeah, that part of the conversation was real cool. Was nice to see that the the spirit of hip hop is still alive and well in excuse me in Niger. And and the reason why I think more people should listen to hip hop, particularly young men, is because all the cool stuff that we listen to nowadays, you know,
it's not bad, but I'm a piano into Afro, pop, Afro, whatever. It's basically just, you know, let's get high, let's chill, let's show you, let's party, let's do bigs. And you know, that's OK. Partying, shy, you getting high, relaxing, feeling cool, flexing, all that is good. But I think you should also expose yourself to other kinds of musical influences. And so hip hop with his emphasis on not just partying and booze and babes, but also once in a while talking about money because, you know, Jay-Z, JD,
you know, money and the thing. So we'll focus on money, entrepreneurship and sometimes social justice issues. It's just nice to broaden your musical palette. So it's nice to know that young cats nowadays are still listening to everything from Wu Tang Clan to old stuff of Jay-Z and JD. And so it's quite good. So if you're one of these young cats, you know, you're between, you know, 22 to 30 something, you know, broaden your palette.
There's a whole lot more out there beyond, you know, I need a bone I show you and I'm a piano and you know, and all that stuff. Anyway, I've gone taking up too much time, 6 minutes just to say I might be on the radio soon. So today I want us to look at sales enablement strategies, you know, ideas around sales enablement. And I've said in the past that sales enablement is just things that you do that help you make your sales team sell better or help you sales sell better.
And of course, sales enablement is necessary because if you have a sales team, then whatever it is you can do to make them sell better is going to be better off for you. And then if you're the one who is the main seller, then of course, whatever it is that you can do to make you sell better is going to be better off for you. So whether you're the main person selling in the business or you have four or five people that are selling for you, sales enablement definitely necessary.
So let's just quickly look through a couple of practices or tips and tricks, all sales enablement things that we can use to boost our sales. Now, of course, before we start talking about sales enablement, we have to get into this thing of the buyer. We need to understand the buyer. And I keep saying it time and time again on the podcast, and I'm going to state it again because I run into people who don't think this is necessary.
But The thing is, if we do not know who are supposed to be chasing, then how are we going to get better at doing the job? Sometimes a bunch of businesses that I start consulting for, the problem is obvious that you guys are trying to chase everybody. But The thing is there is no business, there is no whatever that is for everybody. I pointed out how even those people who sell water are not trying to sell to everybody.
The pure water seller is not trying to sell to everybody. That's why she is not in the high brown neighbourhoods. That's the reason why she's at the motor park, because even though it's water and in theory everybody needs water, not everybody is our customer. Then the person who sells what's it called, you know, those big jog ones like Seaway and stuff like that, There's a reason why they're in the shopping mall, but they are not in Wuse Market or in the general market or in Oingo Market or whatever.
There's a reason why they are not there because in theory everybody needs water but not everybody is a customer for Seaway and all those jugs of water that now sell for about 1000 to 1003 a pop. So yes, it's water but not everybody is your customer. And then for these people that May May Rua in Abuja and in Lagos, May Rua, these are young men who go around pushing these small trucks that have gallons of water inside 2525 litre.
You know, So like in my own part of Abuja, you don't see Mirua here because water flows fairly constant. And if they take water, the water board takes water. It's maybe like once every three months or, or or something. So Marua is not in this part of town. So even Marua, they're selling water but to everybody, but they're only patrolling certain kinds of neighbourhoods in Abuja or certain kinds of neighbourhoods in Lagos because even though water is for everybody, not everybody needs the Marua kind of water.
So you can't say my stuff is for everybody, except if you're the Agusi seller in the market, you really can't say my stuff is for everybody. So you're better off trying to figure out who are we supposed to be chasing. We need to understand that first. This is the beginning of us beginning to sell well because if I know where the people are, like the pure water seller, for instance, the pure water seller, she already knows her market.
That's the reason why she goes and she sits directly in front of the gate as the bosses come and drop some people. The person that has been thirsty all through in traffic will say how much? Give me two. Another person that has been shattering traffic all day can come and say is it cold? Give me one, you know. So she knows who her target audience is. Then she goes there. The same thing with merua. Merua knows who his audience is and then he goes there.
So it's the same thing for us. If we know who are supposed to be chasing, we will go there, whether it's physically or whether it's online. So how to know The Who your main buyer is different ways, but I just talk about checking your trading history. There's all lots of exercises that you can check out online about developing a buyer persona and stuff like that. And by all means, yes, take advantage of those. But those things are usually very aspirational, you know,
like who do you want to chase? Who do you want to chase? Who do you want to chase Now, Aspirational is good, no Ala do that, but then check your trading history because it will tell you who you've actually sold to. So check your WhatsApp, check your DMS, check the invoices that you've sent, what else? Check your emails, check all those things. You will now get a sense of who it is that you've been dealing with. Now when you look at your trading history, you're going to be able to get some commonalities.
You'll now be able to see that. Oh, OK. I've been doing 80% of my business with women who are between the ages of social and soul and who live between Abuja and Nasawa or who live in Lagos, between Lagos and Ilori. So that gives you a sense of when you now want to start doing your advertising online or things like that. You now know all the things you need to slot into what are they called again, the targeting criteria or whatever it's called.
You now know the targeting criteria to put in your Google and put in your Instagram because you have looked at your trading history. Now, in the old days before there was AI, doing this exercise was rough because you can't imagine writing out all these things and then trying to use your own eye to gauge like, OK, what's the commonality? But with AI now, it helps. All you have to do is just write out. You don't have to put the customer's name, but you know,
number one, female, 25, living in Alausa, you know, blah, blah, blah. You just drop it, drop, drop like that. Then you copy and paste everything into GBT and then you put a small preamble saying that these are a list of the customers that I've dealt with in the last in the last 24 months. Please go through it and give me commonalities on demographics and possible psychographics and then hit enter. And then 20 seconds later is going to give you something usable to say that OK, it looks like your ideal client is male or female within the age range of this and this, living in this part of town, interested in this and doing this and that kind of job.
So take advantage of AI to make these things easy for you. Doesn't make a difference. Yes, definitely it does. Because there's one business that I've been working with and I've seen this thing in the field. I've worked with them and the business thought that their customer base was 5050 as in 50% men, 50% women. And so I have no, no Alan, no problem. But as well going forward, reviewing all these things and fed into charge GBT, it looked like their customer base actually was 80% almost 90%
male. I suspected just coming in anyway, but for some reason the marketing people insisted no 50505050. It's not as if they changed their marketing anyway. But The thing is if the way you market 5050, the way you market the product trying to appeal to 50 percent, 50% women is not the same as if you know for a fact that it's 90% men who buy, you know so that should reflect your marketing. That's what I'm saying, even though they didn't change it,
but in theory it should. So it helps if you know, you now know how you're going to change your marketing. What kind of colours do you use? What kind of words do you use and things like that. Then when doing sales enablement, it's nice to do things data-driven. The reason why I say data-driven is because no how, no how. We can't remove hunch or instincts when it comes to growing the business. But The thing is, your hunch is in your heart or it's in your head.
So your business partner doesn't have access to your head or your heart. You know, only your wife does, only your husband does. And your sales team doesn't have access to your hunches. So you trying to make decisions based on your hunch, people are left in the dark. But then if you're gathering small, small information, putting it out into the open and you guys are deciding together, it's a different thing. Data just means information doesn't have to be anything fancy.
So even if all you have is a record of who the sales people spoke to last week, what the sales team said when they went out, how many people bought, how many people did not buy? Even if it's just this small, small information you have like that, that is a very good basis for, for starting off your sales enablement conversations because it gives you a fair idea of who are the people listening to you, who are the people buying from you, What are the things we need to work on?
Then you can start doing sales enablement based on that. Then let's see whether you have formal sales enablements for your business or not. You need you and your crew. You guys need to key into one thing that you know, continuous learning, continuous development. So you don't have to be a podcast junkie like me. Find your thing. Some people do blogs, some people do Facebook groups, there's stuff on YouTube, but you have to find something so that you'll be learning every single day.
There are some professions that need continual. What's it called? Professional, professional continual education or something like that, I can't remember, but it's something that lawyers and doctors have to do. So I know about it because my first degree was in in law. So as a lawyer, you can say that you graduated in 1968 and because of that you haven't learned anything since then because things are changing. Their new laws, policy changes every day, things like that.
So even for somebody who graduated in 1958, first class in law, once in a while you're still supposed to be doing some small, small things, attend MBA, attend conferences, learn some things, go and do one small postgraduate something here, you know, be learning. So it's the same thing with sales as well. We're also supposed to be learning on the job. You can't say that you've been selling for 20 years and then because of that you're done.
You know, you need to know what's up because things are changing. AI is out. Does that affect the way we sell? Social media came in. Does that affect the way that we sell? Has culture changed? Are we supposed to be talking to women differently than how we used to talk to women 15 years before? Let's see what else. You know, these are the small, small issues that you run into on the job that you need to know what's up.
OK. Like people say Gen. Z now is becoming the largest target, largest customer base because they're now getting old enough. They'll be getting jobs soon, you know, things like that. So these are the people that we need to take without paying attention to. So we need to know those things. Are we supposed to be selling to Gen. Z different from the way we used to sell to our generation or Pop C's generation? So continual learning, we need to be knowing what's up because things are changing.
Then what else? OK, collaboration, sales and marketing. You guys need to be collaborating. You can't just leave your sales people to be doing their own thing. Marketing people to be doing their own thing. Routinely get everybody around the table marketing, what are your plans, sales, which part of the plan do you think makes sense? Marketing, if you achieve what it is that you want to achieve and 1,000,000 people see the post, how are we going to make sure out of those 1,000,000 at least some percentage will call the sales people or whatever.
We need to sit down and start having these collaborations then. OK. So the whole point of sales enablement is part of it is going to involve streamlining our sales funnel. That's all the online stuff for those of you who do lots of things online and then training people on the sales script or the sales flow or the framework or the process or whatever it is you want to call it. So part of sales enablement is going to involve that.
Then sales enablement also has implications for the kind of content that you put out there. So you guys have to be able to develop content that will engage people, that will get people engaged. I put it well, let's just say content marketing strategy. Let's just say content marketing is the content marketing strategy is your your strategy. What is the the scope that you guys are trying to work on that is going to use how you guys use video, how you're going to use text, how you're going to use audio, how you're going to use pictures to make potential customers engage more with your business.
So that's just the scope. That's just the 411 on content marketing. So how are we going to take these things video, take picture, whatever it is and get people to engage. Then of course, as you're doing all that content marketing stuff, you have to measure and keep track of stuff, you know, KPIs as our as our quantitatively minded people like to say. So KPRS or OK R, IB OK R is objective key results or something? So, OK, Rs, KPI, same thing,
pick whatever, whichever acronym that you prefer. But from the sales angle though, what we should be looking at are things like deal size, how much are people buying, sales cycle length, how long did it take for them to buy, win rate? If I spoke to 10 people, how many people buy bought? Was it 2 out of 10? Was it 8 out of 10? Let's see what else then repurchase, yes. So if I get in one customer, how often do they buy again?
Do they buy every single month or do they buy twice a year or whatever? All the information that we have the better then OK, well, 20 minutes. Problem is there's plenty to say when it comes to sales enablement, to be honest, there's, there's plenty. OK, well, let me just say one last thing. Mobile optimization, we need to make sure that sales materials, all the things that we're putting up, whether on the website or on the blog or the everywhere, we need to make sure that it is accessible on mobile devices and not just on laptops.
And this is something that I still see happening live. This one is not theory. In fact, I saw it last week or maybe two weeks. Client was done with something, put it up. The marketing person that handled it was like, no, everything is good, everything is good, there's no problem. But me, I do all my work from my phone. So because me, I'm looking at it on the phone, I can see like, bro, there's problem, there's this white space here.
I don't know what it is, but we need to resolve this thing. So anyway, we got it resolved. But I'm just saying that for you people who are making websites and handling all kinds of stuff, I know that you professionals, you IT people, you marketing people, you coding people. Yeah, I know it's most convenient to do your work from your laptop, especially if you have the, you know, best gear in the world. You know, you have your latest MacBook Pro, Something,
something, something or your great, your new Samsung workstation, This, that, that, that, that. I know your fancy gear. But by the time you're done, one of you needs to send it to your phone and they open the thing and you'll be surprised that the thing looks beautiful on the computer, but when you open it on your phone, The thing is looking wonky and it's looking wonky. So mobile optimization guys, need to check that out.
So sales, sorry, no sales optimization, sales enablement, very wide field, talking about all kinds of things. These are some of the strategies, tips, tricks that you're going to have to employ in your business once we start looking at the sales enablement. But the overriding concern or the overriding question behind sales enablement is how do we get people to sell better? And I'm sure that with all the things you've spoken about so far, you can see that all these things have implications for how individual sales people are going to sell better or how the business is going to sell better as a whole.
So sales enablement really, really vast. Although typically when I have been talking about sales enablement on the podcast, I've usually limited myself to things like the phone and the CRM because this is one thing that cuts across for most of us, no matter what it is that we do. You know, our people need to have usable phones and our people need to have some sort of CRM. The CRM is just that tool that says this is who I'm talking to currently.
This is who I need to talk to next. For the people that I'm talking to currently, these are the issues that we have outstanding. These are the meetings that I need to have. Who else? It's just keeping track of all the multiple relationships. This is who I'm talking to. This is what they're supposed to do for me. This is what I'm supposed to do for them. This is the next step to move the deal forward, and this is how soon we're going to collect our money.
So you need some tool for that, whether it's Excel sheets, whether it's using calendar, the calendars and the notes and things like that on your phone or whether it's using project management software like Asana or OK, no, Asana is Asana project management. I'm not sure if Asana is project management. It's not something I've used. Well, I've used Evernote, I've used Trello. So you know, there are plenty. But all these project management software, So whether it is you use the phone or use that project management software or use the free stuff like Odo, or you use all the stuff that are now denominated in Naira like Zoho, by the way, you have to use something.
So typically on the podcast, I pay attention to those ones because for those of us who go out and talk to people on the streets or who call people every day, you know, this is the easiest, the should I say the easiest, well, the most direct way that we can use to boost our sales productivity, to handle sales enablement. So let me just stop there, I'll keep you guys posted if I ever get on the radio airwaves. Hopefully if I get on the radio,
it should be something that should be able to be syndicated. I'll see if it's possible to do that. Even though the radio station is an NGO, I'll see the open to syndication to see how we can be available in more more states of the federation beyond Abuja. So that's it. Thank you very much for your time and attention. As usual, connect with me on WhatsApp, phone number 08064 662140 Country code is +234. Then connect with me on LinkedIn.
My name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm the host of the show. You can confirm the spelling of my name, so you can search for the right Tavishima. You can confirm the spelling of my name using the link. While you're listening to this episode, my e-mail address is also there, so I'll catch you guys at the next episode.