Episode 108: Evangeline Earl on Bridging Skill Gaps Through Training and Coaching Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs.

Today, I’m excited to have Evangeline Earl from Granite Telecommunications join us. Evangeline, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role, and your organization to our audience.

Evangeline Earl: Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me to participate today, Shawnna. It’s a real pleasure to meet you and I’m looking forward to further discussions this morning. So, my name is Evangeline Earl and I am a senior corporate sales trainer for Granite Telecommunications. So, I have been with Granite for almost four and a half years now, and I actually started out in a sales role in business development, where I was bringing in new business logos for the company, before transitioning over to my sales training role, which I’m currently in.

So, Granite we have been around since 2002 and the best way to describe us is we are the largest managed services provider for wireless and wireline services in North America. So essentially, we have gained our success over the years by working with multi-location businesses, think about companies like Walmart, Starbucks or Home Depot, they’re all current Granite customers. And no matter where a brick and mortar business is located across the United States, across Canada, Granite through our wholesale partnerships with other telecom providers, we are able to provide service for phone, for internet, for any infrastructure cabling that’s needed for those brick and mortar locations.

My role here at the company is to, in addition to conducting our onboarding training every single month for our brand new sales hires, in addition to that, I also provide ongoing coaching, ongoing support for the sales reps throughout their first full year of employment at the company. And then as well, I also design different training programs, different workshops, which we conduct with the sales reps based around some of the skill gaps we’re seeing or some of the needs that are brought to our attention. And I work very closely with senior leadership, including the sales directors, as well as our senior vice president of sales. And even up to our CEO of the company.

SS: Well, I’m extremely excited to have you join us today. And as you mentioned in your intro, one of your areas of expertise is really around sales training. In your experience, what steps do you take when developing a new sales training program from scratch?

EE: Sure. No, that’s a great question. Really, we kind of work backward. So, we first want to figure out what is the ultimate goal of that training program, and then design the sessions, the material around that goal. So, if there’s a certain skill gap that we’re seeing, for example, recently we’ve been working with our sales reps on storytelling. So how do we get better at conveying stories through our messaging, with our prospects, with our existing customers?

That is one way that we really focus on designing new training programs is really just looking at what the goal is that we’re trying to achieve whether that’s a skill gap, whether that’s a business goal, maybe there’s a certain product set that we haven’t really been selling much of. And so, we want to focus on how can we improve the rep’s knowledge around that area. We also do a lot of work across the organization working with subject matter experts. For example, we have a lot of different department leaders that we like to get involved in our trainings. So, it’s not just the sales training team that is conducting these trainings, but we like to bring in those people who are extremely knowledgeable on the subjects and areas that we want to teach.

SS: That’s fantastic. And that’s great groundwork for our audi