Categories: Adoption and Reinforcement | Company Alignment | Sales Training Initiative
A sales training initiative is a big investment - one you want to ensure provides a long-term return. The key to ensuring a return on the investment is increasing the breadth and depth of your engagement, ensuring long-term adoption and extending training to all customer-facing professionals, not just the direct sales team. Today’s top enablement teams are expanding their efforts to a wider set of roles to ensure new strategies permeate into the daily sales motion. This includes Lead Gen, Pre-Sales, Sales, Post-Sales, Channel, Marketing, and Product roles.
The impact of recruiting, training, developing and retaining skilled talent can equal two years of quota. Employing digital technologies and integrations offers higher efficiency and insight potential to improve and directly measure ROI.
Let’s dive into 3 key elements for driving adoption and acceleration of your sales training initiative: Integrated enablement, personalized incentives, and dynamic learning.
Integrated Enablement
When designing a sales training initiative, it’s crucial that you consider your revenue team’s existing rhythm and how new practices will integrate. Achieving organization-wide process change is no easy task, but account teams are much more likely to adopt new behaviors if there’s a clear path to draft them into existing workflows.
Coaches are also a critical component to driving adoption - ensure your front-line managers are equipped with a plan for guiding new behaviors, rather than just inspecting and enforcing them.
With the Opportunity Manager™ Salesforce integration, enablement tools live alongside data and real-time customer conversations to encourage the application of new methodologies. By providing a roadmap within your team’s most familiar interface, you not only provide a checklist for executing the revenue strategy; you also draw a clear attribution from the new behaviors to positive results, motivating permanent adoption.
For leaders and managers, Opportunity Manager provides a line of sight into Salesforce activities to visualize adoption rates and more easily identify coaching opportunities. Your customized Opportunity Manager dashboard shows seller activity data, methodology adoption insights, and key performance metrics to help you easily quantify the ROI of new sales behaviors. Over time, this level of insight can enable more accurate forecasting and qualification as you use the available insights to develop a blueprint for identifying the strongest deals and early predictors of risk.
Personalized Incentives
Your sales initiative takes on a new life when you have buy-in and commitment on every level, down to individual contributors. You can demonstrate your investment in their success by providing opportunities for personal professional development that extends beyond your organization. While your sales initiative is beneficial to the overall revenue strategy, it’s important to communicate how the training can benefit sellers’ personal goals and success.
Ascender™ by Force Management includes access to our Elite SellingTM Curriculum, which provides directly actionable skills and tools developed by our sales veteran leaders and facilitators. Managers can also utilize this content during opportunity reviews, tying in concepts to active opportunities for hands-on learning. Personal branding and visibility are more important to sellers than ever in today’s talent market, and certifications in key elite selling skills provide a personal incentive to take a proactive role in learning. Making an investment in the personal development of your talent boosts morale and drives team loyalty while also improving overall revenue execution.
Dynamic Learning
eLearning is a standard part of many of today’s training initiatives, but research shows that repetition is key to retaining and applying new information. Developing a plan for continuous learning and reinforcement ensures that your investment retains its value six months and a year past your initial training. That’s why we encourage leaders planning a transformation initiative to think beyond the event - start envisioning your training initiative as the launchpad to an ongoing enablement process that drives true behavior transformation.
Avoid stagnation and burnout with content that is dynamic rather than static, updating as the sales environment changes to feature multi-media offerings and topics that are applicable to the challenges your customer-facing roles encounter. On Ascender, we publish new content five times per week to ensure a steady flow of resources that keep members engaged and receiving value.
Ascender also takes personalized learning a step further by providing a community platform where members can ask specific questions, seek out mentorship and coaching, and receive peer feedback. Force Management experts and facilitators conduct live working sessions on the platform, giving perpetual access to the transformative power of your initial engagement. By extending the learning process and integrating it with professional development and networking, you create more than just an onboarding checklist - you create a process by which elite sellers are developed and empowered.
Empower Your Entire Revenue Team
Today’s most successful sales organizations don’t just focus their training investment within the sales team. It’s crucial to ensure a baseline understanding of your company’s approach to value selling, negotiation and other elite sales skills across the entire customer-facing organization to cater to the end-to-end customer journey.
We developed a guide on when, where and how to involve other customer-facing teams in your go-to-market process, as well as the leadership effort needed to generate true cross-functional operational alignment. Download Driving the Revenue Mindset now for strategies to enable next-level execution of your revenue strategy.
