Sales Support: Just Enough, Just in Time
Double-Bind
Two different aspects of the sales workforce are creating interesting challenges for sales enablement and sales training today:
- Most businesses support five different generations of people on their sales team, from recent college graduates who can’t remember a world without Internet, to workers in their 50s and 60s who grew up in vastly different technological landscapes.
- The sales enablement landscape is evolving very rapidly. Tools and technologies that were difficult to conceive a couple years ago, such as predictive enablement, are rapidly becoming a reality—or have arrived already.
Supporting these generations of workers—with their differing baselines in tech savviness, expectations and learning styles—can be a challenge. How do we help such disparate groups level up their skills so they can hold better conversations of value in the face of such rapid change?
By blending some smart new technology with tried and true learning methods to provide just the right support, just in time. Try these three tips:
- Provide bite-sized content.
Attention spans are getting shorter. (Thanks, Internet!) In fact, one study has shown that our attention spans have shrunk to about eight seconds. Eight.
And that’s only part of the battle. Once we get someone’s attention, we need to make it easy to store in their memory centers, and equally important, easy to retrieve from that memory.
Bite-sized support content and training bursts are ideal for this purpose. Not only do they cater to abbreviated attention spans, they’re easier to look up in the moment sellers need them, and don’t overwhelm working memory with irrelevant content. All this amounts to support that sellers can really use, right when they need it.
Have an 80-page sales playbook or training PDF? Distill it down to the most important points, then modularize it into bite-sized chunks by topic. Your sellers will thank you.
- Make support part of the workflow.
Gartner has estimated in the past that enterprises average six content repositories. Combine that with goldfish-level attention spans, and you have reps hopping from repository to repository, trying to look for what they need before giving up and using outdated material—or worse, winging it.
The solution: make your content accessible right within your CRM, where your sellers spend most of their time. Instead of pulling them out of the prospect or account record, technologies like Guided Selling™ can serve predictive content and support to sellers based on transaction attributes such as sales stage and prospect data.
Providing this information right within the sales context—so it’s available before, during and after sales calls—not only helps sellers right when they need it, it increases their ability to recall that information the next time.
- Serve up information as stories, analogies and examples.
Humans are storytelling creatures. In fact, stories are so hardwired in us that they’re memorable in a way that a jumble of data or a string of procedures aren’t.
Need to get across some nuances about selling technique? Try creating a video that provides sellers with a scenario they can model. Have some tricky points of competitive differentiation you’d like your sellers to learn? Give them some examples that illustrate those differences concretely.
New technology can help you spread more information faster, but what use is it if people don’t or can’t use it? Use the thousands upon thousands of years of evolution that have predisposed people to storytelling to your advantage.
Getting to truly effective sales enablement
In an era where buyers have become more sophisticated and savvy to the buying process, your sellers need a solid information strategy so they can be better equipped to succeed no matter what stage they encounter the buyer, what generation they belong to or what role they play. Providing information in smaller bursts based on how your sellers learn, retain and use information could be just what you need to keep your business in the lead.
