Categories: Sales Enablement Technology
Best Practices to Drive Great Outcomes
Your work environments may be shifting, but you and your team still have revenue goals to make. Nothing has changed about the need to use your time productively. Until further notice – the goal in today’s changing business world is to make the necessary transitions and stay the course.
It’s likely that your company runs some or much of the sales organization virtually. Many companies are made up of virtual sales teams with sales leaders who are adept at leading them. Things like revenue goals, customer deliveries and sales team enablement never stops, regardless of economic shifts and changes.
The key to leading sales initiatives virtually is to ensure the same level of outcomes as you would drive in face-to face-interactions.
Here are some best practices we use to drive successful virtual engagements with our clients:
Technology:
The right technology tools provide a strong level of quality and connectivity across desktop and mobile platforms. Companies that run successful virtual events focus on usability around video and audio quality, wireless content sharing and easy calendar integrations. The strongest event and training technology should include capabilities that make it easy to start, join and collaborate across any device.
Communication:
Whether you’re face-to-face or virtual, preparing the group for great outcomes takes good communication. Before your virtual event, get participants familiar with what’s on the docket by sharing an agenda and introducing key concepts. Pre-work assignments are usually important to give your audience foundational information, great context and the right mindset.
Great Facilitators:
The quality of your facilitators and how they present your content is critical to resonate with your audience and deliver results. Great facilitators know that it’s not just content, but the tone of voice, energy and conviction of the delivery that drive the greatest impact. Strong facilitators present information in clear, digestible chunks and share real life experiences, relevant examples and engagement with their audience.
Audience Engagement:
How do you drive high levels of interaction virtually? A great virtual setting will focus on delivering the right combination of information and activities to drive the best success. For multiple day events, it’s beneficial to mix it up. Use several facilitators to provide active back and forth conversations and a combination of delivery styles to break up the pace and tone.
Break Out Groups:
A great way to maximize participants’ time and increase engagement is to split the larger group into smaller breakout groups, where they can work simultaneously on learning modules, collaborate on activities and solicit group input. Breakout activities in a virtual setting require clear milestones and timing guidelines. The technology you use should provide facilitators with the ability to easily shift participants to smaller group breakout sessions. Each breakout session should be led by a facilitator and participants should be able to virtually “raise their hands” to submit questions. When it’s time to pull everyone back together, facilitators should be able to easily shift everyone back into the larger group to share report outs or continue group learning modules.
Focus on Reinforcement:
All training events, whether in-person or virtual, require reinforcement. Adoption of concepts increases when companies provide continued opportunities to put learning into practice. The best reinforcement comes from mobile-enabled platforms that provide on-demand digital content to help accelerate adoption. A mobile-enabled platform provides access to content, tools and resources in real time. The right enablement platform also provides reporting dashboards, so companies can assess how their teams are adopting, internalizing and applying critical skills following their virtual training event.
Driving Outcomes
One of biggest roadblocks to sales success is the ability for leaders to reinforce concepts, while trying to hit their revenue numbers. By starting with these best practices, making a commitment to success and keeping a a maniacal focus on results, your team can drive great outcomes from your virtual sales training event.
