How to Effectively Equip and Educate Your Sales Team for Success
Of course, you know that your sales force wants to sell. They’re driven by hitting and exceeding their goals and delivering the results your company expects. It’s what they love to do — and for these highly competitive professionals, there’s nothing worse than missing the mark or botching a sales call.
Therefore, if your organization isn’t seeing the sales revenue you’re relying on, it’s entirely possible, maybe even likely that it’s not a motivation problem. Perhaps it’s an information problem. A knowledge gap in understanding?
To be effective, your sales team needs to thoroughly understand your processes, products, and services so they can position them against the competition. They need tools and know-how in order to compete. They need to stay up to speed on product changes in real time. Furthermore, they’ve got to have access to quick, on-the-go resources and memory refreshers that enable them to sharpen their pitch and close the deal.
It’s simple. If you want to boost your numbers, start by providing the relevant, useful, accessible information your representatives require. Here’s exactly what your sales force needs from you in order to improve their performance and deliver the goods.
Seriously Easy to Use, Mobile-First Technology
Let’s be honest. Your sales force may not be the most tech-savvy group in your company — after all… their job is to sell, not develop and implement new technologies or keep up with the latest innovations in training and apps. This also means they’re likely to groan with dread any time you try to introduce a new technological tool. However, these same people are usually quite comfortable using their cell phones. This is how they connect with their customers, the home base and possibly even your customer relationship manager (CRM) platform. They happily tune in to a podcast on the way to a sales call, rely on turn-by-turn navigation systems to find their way in unfamiliar territory, and power up their phone’s browser to search for their favorite coffee shop en route.
Accessing professional learning should be as easy for your sales team as finding their favorite show on their Netflix app. That’s why you need a Learning Experience Platform (LXP) that is intuitive and easy-to-adopt — just like the leading consumer-driven apps and interfaces on the market.
From the experience we gained at our parent company, Float, we’ve been talking about how mobile technology supports sales teams for years. A decade ago, our tips to deliver mobile support for sales teams were considered forward-thinking, aspirational advice. But now? Offering learning on a mobile device is table stakes — and mere access doesn’t go far enough.
Today our clarion call is this: Don’t just take the learning resources within your LMS and make them available on a phone or tablet. You need to redesign learning with the mobile sales professional in mind.
This involves making wise use of microlearning, distilling complex manuals and tutorials down into quickly consumable resources like tip sheets and short videos, and offering content in a variety of formats to support a range of learning preferences. Increase relevance and density of the information and make the learning available everywhere.
Just-in-Time Support in the Moment of Need
You’ve always been concerned with providing your sales team with helpful resources, materials, and leave-behinds. However, most often these resources live on a shared server like SharePoint or within your clunky LMS. That makes them difficult to access away from a desktop computer. What’s more, it can be hard for your employees to tell which versions are new and which are outdated. And searchability? Forget about it.
It’s time to stop relying on these outdated methods. The best thing about using mobile technology to support professional learning is that it enables your workforce to carry a limitless amount of real-time information wherever they go. Futurist Ray Kurzweil put it forth very aptly, “Mobile phones are misnamed. They should be called gateways to human knowledge.” Providing just-in-time learning support in their 5 moments of need is key to helping them level up their performance. This requires robust search functionality that is frictionless and fast.
For example, your sales team might need to:
Quickly find the materials they’re looking for — ideally in about 10 seconds or 2 clicks — so they can brush up on product specifications and knowledge before a sales call
Access FAQs or review tips for overcoming common objections
Receive notifications about product updates in real time so they don’t present out-of-date information
Find specific presentations, demos, and supporting documentation so they can share those resources directly with prospects
Pull up collateral that can be shared with prospects based on their buying signals (rather than carrying an entire portfolio of leave-behinds everywhere they go)
No one can remember everything they learned in training. That’s especially true of sales people who may be asked to speak intelligently about a host of ever-changing complex products and services. To ensure they present truthful, accurate information every time, just-in-time learning support is key.
Adaptive Content and Smart
Bookmarking Capability
Most enterprise-level sales teams are composed of individuals with vastly different learning and talent development needs. For example, an employee assigned to representing your company at trade shows will need training on how to position and present a product quickly to prospects who are browsing through many options. A sales engineer may require training on how to best access your demonstration products and toolkits. A team member who is following up on qualified leads, however, may need coaching on how to nurture and develop interpersonal relationships.
You may also have different sales divisions for different parts of your company and for each portion of your product portfolio. That means a one-size-fits all training approach will fall short in giving your sales force the in-depth learning they need to master the ins and outs of each product’s technical specifications.
Adaptive learning, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, allows you to offer up the content that is most salient to each individual’s role and responsibilities. For example, SparkLearn’s recommendation engine learns what types of things each user is accessing to elevate the resources that align with their needs. The system gets smarter with time and as the user engages with it, building a positive feedback loop.
Employees can also tag, bookmark, annotate on, and save resources they find useful so they can access them quickly later on. This allows them to create a personalized library of content that is uniquely suited to helping them reach their sales goals and objectives.
Furthermore, you can use push notifications and other reminders to send role-specific guidelines to help your sales team document their activities correctly in your CRM. In this way, you can keep your sales pipeline updated with the most current information.
Sharp, Streamlined Learning Requires a Nimble, Modern LXP
Your sales team is constantly on the go. They’re shooting for the next target so they can surpass their benchmarks and goals. That means they don’t have time to wade through an 18-page PDF or a 60 slide PowerPoint Presentation to find the one piece of information that’s pertinent to their next sales call. A two hour training session? A full day workshop? You can forget about those, too.
If you don’t take proactive steps to distill important information into quick takeaways and useful summaries, they’ll crowdsource an answer by texting a colleague or googling the issue themselves. Therefore, be proactive. Give them quick, scannable resources outlining the key selling points of a product. Create a quick video recapping what you outlined in longer training sessions. Provide mobile-first, just-in-time support to meet them in their moments of need. Use adaptive learning and AI to tailor their learning experience to them. And watch their sales performance soar as a result.
Ready to learn more about how SparkLearn can enable your sales team to do their best work? Just reach out. We’d love to show you what’s possible.
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