Learn Which Pieces are Most Influential to the Sales Process

Many CMOs are still in the dark when it comes to understanding the ROI of content created in support of the sales organization, or which pieces of content influence the bottom line most.

Yet, knowing which marketing content pieces do best after the handoff of Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) is a necessity. Without this data, marketers don’t have the data to make sure that they aren’t wasting time, money, and effort on pieces that don’t get used or, when they are used, aren’t effective.

There are two aspects to putting a system in place that will give marketers the information they need to make smart decisions about this type of content:

  1. Visibility into content use
  2. Tracking when and how content is used

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Though these two might seem fairly related, implementing a system for each is usually separate. What’s most important is having an integrated CRM, marketing automation, and guided selling tool to give a view to marketing and sales leadership across both. To view which pieces of content are being used by sales, having an effect on prospects, and resulting in a customer, marketers need to have a continuous integration of tools between Marketing and Sales. Once this visibility has been attained, tracking tools can easily report on how Sales is utilizing marketing content. Reports can inform marketers, for example, which pieces of content are instrumental at which stage of the sales process, or how many closed deals are associated with a particular marketing asset.

The ancient turf war between Marketing and Sales is beginning to come to a close with a peace treaty in the form of integrations. As Marketing becomes a more and more technologically reliant field, it’s easier to have the two departments work together for a better understanding of how Marketing affects Sales. This knowledge lets marketers focus on content that is actually contributing to revenue so that they can give Sales the assets they need.

We recently had an article featured in Sales and Marketing Management magazine on this topic. You can preview it here.

Why Sales Training Should Take a Page out of Marketing’s Book

The marketing word of the year (maybe even the next decade) is personalization. Companies of every nature and stripe strive toward the tantalizingly just out of reach 1:1 marketing ideal, and an overwhelming number of surveys and studies conducted over the past year indicate that personalization is the name of the game. Yet, as marketing moves toward a hyper individualized form of targeting, other areas of business continue to use blanket, mass approaches to communicating.

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Sales training is one such area. Instead of personalizing training and making it relevant to the individual’s life, onboarding and continued training (when it exists) often consist of inundating reps with huge amounts of information about the entire sales process—rather than the information that is contextually relevant to where each sales rep is. Teaching like this is the equivalent to sending out a mass email to every single prospect and customer, regardless of their relationship to the brand.

Personalization, though it has been taken up largely by Marketing, is actually part of a larger societal move towards individualized experiences and forms of expression. Internet culture has spawned a generation that expects specific things quickly and easily. And now that this generation has entered the workforce, it’s time to start training them in the way that they’ve grown accustomed.

For Sales this means giving:

  • Contextually relevant training assets, e.g. aids that are pushed out at specific points in the sales cycle and are relevant to the type of prospect the rep is interacting with.
  • Short, modular pieces of content that are easy to digest
  • Interactive training and practice aids
  • Device agnostic support, especially ones that are accessible on mobile and tablet.
  • Marketing and sales assets that are automatically recommended so that the rep doesn’t have to search through hundreds of docs (or across portals and management systems) for what they need, including marketing aids for prospects so sellers do not spend an inordinate amount of time searching for them.

Experian Research recently published a Millennials’ “Omni-channel Consumer Bill of Rights,” that is very closely  aligned with the ways in which we recommend Sales training imitate Marketing best practices. The tenets of this Millennial bill of rights are: recognize me, treat me as an individual, make it easy for me, anticipate my needs, and give me a voice. And while these tenets may sounds obnoxiously self-centered, they’re actually incredibly applicable to the ways in which people learn best.

Sales reps are more likely to recall information over a long period of time if they are assisted in the ways we describe. Just as people hate to search for the information they need, reps are more likely to be effective, knowledgeable sellers if they’re given real-time support including training and references aides as well as marketing collateral to share with prospects, all of which allow sales to engage and have better selling conversations with their prospects. Don’t just personalize the marketing brand experience for consumers; personalize for your company, too. For additional resources on how to do just this, check out our brief on Sales Onboarding.

Tips for Improving Your Sales Onboarding Process

Onboarding has become an increasingly crucial process to get right as job turnover rates climb; the quit rate in 2013 was higher than it has been in four years–a sign of both a recovering economy and a generational shift. According to a 2012 Allied Workforce Mobility Survey, companies lose 25% of all new employees within a year (that’s across all professional fields – where we know turnover is typically lower than sales roles) and the average cost to fill one position is about $11,000.  The number one reason: onboarding. And, it’s no wonder as 35% of companies spend $0 on onboarding.

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Although most companies agree that onboarding is a priority, The Aberdeen Group found that 14% of companies define their onboarding program as lasting one day. Obviously, a single day is not enough to get a new hire up to speed on company goals, strategies, and day-to-day doings, and it’s no wonder a high percentage of new hires quit within the first year.

To prepare companies for the influx of Gen Y and high job turnover, we’ve put together a few tips for establishing a long-lasting, effective, onboarding process for new sales reps:

  1. Map your buying process: A map of the customer journey is one of the most essential things for new sales reps to know, and often companies assume that they’re somehow aware of it, or will pick it up on their own. There should be a visual reference for the buying process that is easily accessible, in addition to the training in which reps are introduced to the company’s buying process.
  2. Map of required knowledge and skills: Assess what skills and knowledge sales reps will need at critical milestones of the customer journey. Ensure that the onboarding process outlines for reps what they should know and how they can access sales support content at each of these milestones. Better yet, pare this knowledge into bite-size, easily digestible bits of knowledge that are taught on an ongoing basis for maximum retention, increasing a rep’s ability to recall and apply that knowledge in a real sales situation.
  3. Augment structured training with just-in-time support: Guided selling tools push sales aids and supporting content at specific stages in the buying cycle so that reps are equipped with knowledge and assets right when they need them. Just-in-time support acts as a refresher course for different stages and scenarios.

Greater turnover does not have to be a reality. As Millennials look for greater success and fulfilment from their positions, helping them achieve productivity faster and showing that they make a meaningful impact on the business is not only powerful in creating a bond between the employee and the company but serves to further corporate goals. Rather than cutting onboarding resources, this translates into processes and training that increases the effectiveness of onboarding programs, helping sales reps reach maximum performance faster than ever before.

Additional Sales Onboarding resources can be found in our Brief on the topic.

 

MobilePaks CEO featured on Salesforce Blog

Salesforce

“Four Ways to Boost Sales Productivity with Guided Selling”, an article written by MobilePaks CEO, Chanin Balance, was recently featured on the Salesforce blog. In it she writes, “Buyers are more sophisticated than ever and sales reps must adapt. With many resources at their fingertips, buyers are no longer reliant on sales to educate them on products. Yet, buyers are more challenged by complex business issues than ever. The solution, as Forrester’s Mark Lindwall clearly articulates is to, ‘revamp your selling system to hire, train, equip, develop, and support salespeople who guide your buyers [to] solve their complex problems.” Guided Selling does just this, helping decrease rep time to productivity while boosting their sales velocity.’”

You can read the full piece here and if you are interested in additional Guided Selling resources, we have several for you here.

Melding The Human And the Technological For Improved Selling

As a culture, we’ve set up a dichotomy between what is human and what is machine. Technology can be used to augment real-life; after all, its purpose is to improve the human living situation. Guided Selling tools are a perfect example of this: they can’t do the actual selling for reps, but they can coach and give sellers real-time support to aid them in actual selling situations.

Jonathan Sacks said, “thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.” Guided Selling technology actually does help us know what to say. It follows sellers through the buying cycle suggesting best next steps and content assets, and providing short training bursts so that sellers are always equipped for the next step. As suggestions are built using data on best practices, the technology is the next best thing to having a live selling coach by the rep’s side when they need it most.

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When Sacks said that technology doesn’t help us know what to say, he was referencing things like email, texting, skyping, etc., but he didn’t take into account tools that enable people to communicate via these channels in a more effective manner. Guided selling tools provide just-in-time support; this can consist of short, two minute videos that sellers can watch before interfacing with a prospect, a reference job aid on competitive positioning statements, or a quick podcast they can listen to while driving. The point of just-in-time training is to maximize flexibility by having it available on any device at any time.

There’s usually a right thing to say at a specific time. Whether it’s telling a loved one “sorry,” telling an insecure friend that he looks great, or positioning a company’s value when the prospect is most likely to be receptive, it’s important to know the right questions to ask , and what to say at any given time. Just-in-time or on-demand knowledge offers a reminder to the sales rep of what to ask, what to say, how to say it, and when the right time would be to say it. These refreshers are based on the prospect profile, their position in the buying cycle, sales feedback and best practices from top sellers. Essentially, a guided selling tool will take into account who the prospect is and where they are in the buying cycle and then give the seller a prompt towards the most effective messaging, questions to ask and sales process.

 Sacks was right that at the end of the day it’s the person doing the communicating, not the technology. Yet, when a well-trained sales rep is combined with the support of a great guided selling technology, the best of both worlds—human and technological—marry to create great sales outcomes. For more information on how to merge these worlds in your organization, check out our recent brief on Guided Selling.

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Chanin Ballance featured in Business2Community

B2C

“2015: The Year Marketing Personalization Comes to Sales,” by Chanin Ballance, was recently published by Business2Community. In it, she shares how sales reps are overwhelmed with content. Portals are teeming with content, and reps are overloaded with the number of data repositories in which to search for it. With so much content and numerous ‘haystacks’ in which to look, no one should be shocked when sales is not able to find what they need when they need it. And yet, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of marketers plan to grow their content output next year. How, with this flood of content, can marketers provide a systematic way to organize and deliver content to the sales team in a way that helps impact sales effectiveness?

The answer, readable at Business2Commity, is to extend to the sales team the same marketing principles we apply to reaching and converting prospects: By extending the target marketing framework to sellers.