Categories: Sales Transformation | Sales Enablement Technology
This blog contains content from Chapter 3 of our eBook - Taking Command: How On-Demand Technology Drives Adoption of Sales Methodologies. Start from the beginning here.
Choosing the right platform to support a new sales initiative can’t be an afterthought. You’ll need to provide your team with on-demand access to the content that helps them successfully drive buyer-focused sales conversations. How you provide access is critical to serving up the information that sellers can successfully comprehend and adopt. You’ll need a platform that meets sellers where they are - in their career and on their learning curve.
Here’s what sellers need from a content management system:
- Customized content to help each seller move the needle on their individual and team performance goals
- A personalized engagement plan, that helps individual sellers and their sales managers practice and perfect the skills they need to be successful
- A consistent messaging framework, so everyone in the sales organization stays on the same page throughout the process
- Less focus on compliance, like your LMS, and more focus on coaching and comprehension
Sales transformation is a long-term commitment. As part of your initiative, your company may be working with a partner to drive new methodologies. Launching new methodologies means introducing your entire sales organization to new mindsets, processes, tools, and content.
These new concepts will need to be constantly reinforced through engagement, coaching and application to drive long-term adoption and produce measurable results.
A sales-focused Engagement Management System has engagement built into its’ DNA. It should provide more than one-way communication, because you’ll need to test for both understanding and application. The right on-demand content and tools engage your sales organization during, after and between your sales kickoff and in-person trainings.
How Salespeople Learn
It’s important to understand how salespeople learn.
The best way to engage your sales team is to deliver relevant on-demand content in a combination of formats - all focused on leveraging the foundation set in a traditional classroom setting. Research shows that combining coaching with classroom learning will improve your content retention by 58%. If your platform combines e-learning with training and coaching, you’ll decrease the “forgetting curve” or loss of knowledge by 79%. That’s why it’s important that your platform accommodates both traditional learning content as well as industry leading content delivery methods.
It’s also important that your platform leverages multiple point-solutions. It should be customized to include not only your engagement related digital content but also tools to deliver related services - like pre-work courses, training reinforcement, learning assessments, peer reviews and micro learning.
Is Your Content Set to Deliver Optimal Results?
Here’s a quick checklist to make sure your Engagement Management platform is ready to deliver optimal results:
- Your system is set up more like a coaching tool and less like a compliance task list
- Your system is helping sellers improve their skills all the time, rather than getting up to speed only when in-person training is available
- Your system gives sellers the option to choose the learning modality that best aligns with how they absorb and apply information
- Your system gives your sales managers insight into the specific areas where their team or individual sellers excel, as well as where improvement is needed
Up Next? How to Make Your Digital Content Digestible so Your Sellers Can Consume It >
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