Rocket Your Sales -Tools & Practices for your Global Sales Teams!

Organisations constantly strive to better their sales teams by hiring the best sales people they can find. This sales talent comes with years of experience selling to the toughest customers. Most of the knowledge they have comes from their experience. What if we could complement their accumulated knowledge with some tools that would make them even more efficient? 

Here is an attempt to identify and explain some such tools and practices that can be effectively deployed in your organisation to drastically improve the output of your sales teams:

Big Data would be the game changer

Traditional L&D departments are not just rollups to Human Resources any more. The are now working closely with the CIOs and are some of the biggest purchasers of technology. This means that sales enablement teams will now keep on to of the growth of data and all the information that they are going to be flooded with. This will help them determine learning paths for sales teams and determine predictive analytics around the sales team’s success of sales teams.

Importance of SMEs

Sales reps in an organisation have an almost real time access to learning through live webinars and conference calls where they can ask almost anything to their SMEs and even the CEO. Having such a mechanism to giving the sales teams regular access to SMEs, is the most important and cost-effective tool that can be implemented. Many organisations also host Lunch and Learns, where they bring in experts to enable employees to have continuous learning.

Unified System of learning

We may not like it, but more often than not, a lot of sales professionals and reps are turning to the internet search engines (Google) for their research! What does that mean? It means they need access to a system with great indexing and search capabilities. As a result, enterprise organisations are making a big shift. They’re now storing all of their learning in one central place. This doesn’t mean the end of learning management systems, but it does mean that all learning will be housed in one place.

Real-Time learning

Also, when sales reps access information out of the portal, the meta tagging needs to be dynamic. They also need to be able to find courseware or tips within courses immediately or through social media channels such as LinkedIn or Twitter. Making these tips and course modules searchable will save sales reps time and allow them to find the information they’re looking for quickly.

Sales professionals need information immediately and in real time. This means that information has to come to them via email or into their salesforce.com

LMSs sometimes are too mundane!

The user interfaces of most LMSs are not well tough of. People want the Amazon experience. But their user experience with typical LMSs aren’t matching those expectations. Search capability needs to be stellar, and sales reps need to be able to get tips easily and on demand. Online learning is also becoming mobile. Tablets are replacing PCs and people want to be able to access their learning with their smartphones.

Gamification

Gamification allows organisations to analyse performance among sales reps, and the department’s implications. It also allows outside vendors to compare one organization to another. What it means it that sales professionals want to follow people who are providing valuable tips, tricks, and tactics. Companies are also beginning to create review and rating systems for their curriculum. 

Bite-sized learning

The current generation needs their learning in bite-sized chunks. This means no more than two to 10 minutes of learning at a time. The new generation wants to be able to access a video, which gives them all the information they need in three minutes. The learning also needs to be spaced out. After an instructor-led session or after learning a concept, you need to drip campaign the learner to reinforce the learning.

As a sales professional and consultant to the Trainings and Recruitment industry, I’ve effectively used these processes to help improve sales efficiencies and conversions. However, the views expressed above are not the only tools that you can use! I’m sure other experienced sales professionals have more to add to this list from their varied experience! I’d welcome other experts to pitch in with their opinions in the feedback and comments.