Sales enablement technology has evolved due to changing buyer needs and market dynamics — like increased rep training. Just five years ago, sales training was an infrequent event but has since transitioned to daily sessions of training, coaching and collaboration, which sales enablement technology helps support.
As a sales leader, it’s only natural that you’ve implemented sales enablement software to help with onboarding and the ongoing training your team needs to confidently and successfully sell in a hybrid world. But are you unlocking your platform’s full potential?
Your team requires a platform that enhances the coaching they’ve received, reinforces the materials they’ve learned and allows seamless peer-to-peer collaboration. You need a platform to monitor your team’s progress and disperse information/feedback to them efficiently. On top of that, you and your team need to access these capabilities easily and intuitively.
Optimizing your sales enablement platform can help better train reps to take on buyer interactions and strengthen their skills.
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Here’s how to get the most out of your platform:
1. Drive Knowledge Reinforcement in Engaging Ways
There’s a lot of information to cover during sales training. The hardest part for salespeople isn’t so much learning the material as it is retaining it. Allego’s recent study found that reps don’t know the answer to 40% of the product questions customers ask. To properly equip your team to add value to every customer conversation, leverage your sales enablement platform to reinforce sales training in new ways.
Use your platform to turn mundane quizzes on new sales content into an engaging experience. For example, support your reps learning of key training facts with daily flash drills sent to their mobile devices. The sales enablement platform will track reps’ progress; if they’re struggling on a specific topic, your platform will keep serving questions to strengthen their knowledge in that area. By submitting the correct answers, reps will see that material less often. That way, they’ll never waste time reviewing topics they’ve already mastered.
Video is another way to reinforce sales training. Record yourself outlining an exercise, like asking your team to demonstrate how they would approach a call. Reps can record themselves and share their responses with you. You can then review their submissions and give point-in-time feedback of what they did well and what needs improvement. Take it one step further by sharing entries with your whole team as examples of what good looks like. Using your platform to elevate sales training will only fortify your team.
2. Create Peer-to-Peer Learning Environments
As reps undergo sales training, they require more than just formal classroom training and one-on-one coaching with their managers. Sellers thrive on informal learning garnered from collaboration with their peers. Peer-to-peer knowledge sharing lets salespeople learn directly from top-performers and subject matter experts (SMEs) in the field. Top reps and SMEs can provide win stories from successful buyer interactions, whiteboard presentations that kept clients engaged and changing market dynamics that affected their selling approach. Use your platform to capture these invaluable insights to allot to your team.
Video is one way top reps and SMEs can present their experiences to peers. Sellers can record their calls and distribute them to their teams, and teams can view them whenever convenient. Video can be a welcome and memorable approach from the usual avenues of information exchange.
3. Utilize Conversation Intelligence Capabilities
Two essential parts of sales training involve reviewing calls to gauge a rep’s strengths and weaknesses and providing constructive feedback. Although necessary, these aspects of coaching can be time-consuming, especially when coupled with your other responsibilities. Conversation Intelligence (CI), a technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scale the training process, can help ease some of the burden.
The multiple functions of CI make it a powerful tool within a sales enablement platform. With AI-powered assistance, CI can record practice and live calls, provide transcriptions, automate content recommendations based on call topics and analyze where reps are performing well and where/how they can improve. For example, suppose a rep struggled with the objection handling stage during a call. CI can surface relevant coaching exercises, content and courses that’ll help improve their performance in that area.
CI relieves you of sitting through every recorded sales call by analyzing the call for you and providing content recommendations for reps — freeing you up to coach your team in areas that require a conversation. It also streamlines the coaching process by targeting where a rep needs extra help, allowing you to step in and provide assistance.
It’s important to note that CI isn’t a substitute for traditional human coaching but a guide for more effective team training. If your salesperson isn’t asking enough questions during a call, CI can flag that and inform you, but it’s up to you to train the salesperson to adopt better call behaviors. This technology will make your training more focused and your team stronger.
Sales enablement platforms have changed the selling game. Managers can use them to better prepare their teams for buyer interactions with engaging knowledge reinforcement, peer-to-peer collaboration and CI assistance. As you explore how to optimize your platform’s capabilities or look to more modern platforms, you’ll position sales teams for more significant growth, keep them engaged and entice them to stay longer with your company because you invested in their training and development.
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