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9 Tips for Sales Coaching

As we all know, training and coaching salespeople is crucial in the overall success of a sales team. Even naturally gifted sellers need great resources and management support to rely on to be happy and productive. This is often a management challenge with just 24 hours each day and numerous salespeople and teams in different locations. The emphasis on great coaching is worth it and will pay dividends now and in the future. According to CSO Insights, 20% more sales reps achieve quota at companies with effective coaching compared with companies that have poor coaching. Also impressive is a 43% decrease in sales force turnover.

Not surprising, we find that the best training and effective coaching is in the field and in the moment, and now, with technology, this is easier than ever to do. Technology can become a seller’s sales assistant and truly act as a mentor whispering in your salesperson’s ear with selling tips, content suggestions and memory boosters.Sales coaching

Tips for Coaching with the help of Sales Enablement Technology

1. Design Seamless training – Design your overall training program with the long term in mind. Focus on initial product information that the salesperson needs right away, sales techniques to create great customer relationships, and then closing language, which emphasizes value and creates urgency.

2. Identify areas of challenge early – What do your salespeople need help with? Typical early challenges involve positioning and messaging, or asking the right discovery questions.

3. Keep information and modules short – Build trust with the salesperson that they can invest five minutes and come out with a solid piece to immediately help them.

4. Make information easy to get to, searchable and fast – Make the information and training part of the daily workflow. Even better if they can get to it in two or three clicks.

5. Have your prompts include a mix of short training bursts, job aids and sales content – Your sales people need all three in the moment to be most effective.

6. Create interactive activities to increase memory – Rather than just telling salespeople something, have them think through examples and participate in providing an answer. Memory games and exercises can be entertaining and, more importantly, they work in improving recall.

7. Add learning modules and prompts to the CRM – Especially effective for inside sales reps, prompts help immensely as salespeople call on accounts and progress a prospect through the buying process.

8. Align training modules and virtual coaching with the sales managers – Weekly push reports can provide a snapshot of training used by sales people with their progression and competency. If managers can zero in on gaps and provide added examples and reinforcement, the faster the salespeople can get up to speed.

9. Monitor and track for continuous improvement – Correlate usage of the training modules and virtual coaching to time-to-first-opportunity, the time-to-sale and more. If you can learn what sales people are using and what is leading to more sales, you will soon know what they need more of.

Today’s sales effectiveness platforms and applications are making real time coaching a reality and best of all? It works!

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Veelo Adds Intelligent Search

Veelo™ Adds Intelligent Search to Its Award Winning Sales Enablement Platform

February 17, 2016 – Portland, Ore. – Veelo, an award-winning sales and marketing effectiveness technology leader, advanced the functionality of its flagship platform with an intelligent search capability, making it easier and faster to find sales and marketing content.

Chanin Ballance, Veelo CEO, says, “Our focus is always to deliver features and functionality that help salespeople perform better.  Intelligent search allows salespeople to find content quickly.  It anticipates what you are searching for and predictively recommends content, linking the salesperson directly to what they need.”

Intelligent search was designed with a sales person centric view.  In addition to anticipating what the salesperson is searching for, intelligent search also groups results making it easier and faster to find the specific piece of content the salesperson is searching for.  Some of the key features include:

Grouped results:  Search results appear in 3 groupings.  The first provides the total results for the search.  The second group provides categorized results.  The third section suggests content with direct links to the content in just one click.

Results count:  Not only do users see the total number of results from their search, but each category has a corresponding count for greater visibility into the type of content and where it resides.

Categorized results: Based on category and tags, results are organized so it’s easier to find exactly what the salesperson needs without searching through a long list.

One-click suggested content: At the bottom of the search window, Veelo recommends content.  With just one click, the user is taken directly to the content.

Auto-populate:  As the user types the search phrase, intelligent search anticipates the phrase and finishes it for the user, requiring less time to type in the query.

Spell check:  Veelo checks the spelling for users, eliminating time wasted misspelling and then retyping queries.

 

About Veelo

Veelo helps companies improve selling effectiveness and marketing ROI with tools for developing and delivering sales content and support.  Based on an exclusive brain science approach, Veelo is the only system that helps organizations create and deliver content based on the way sellers learn, retain and apply information. The Veelo Guided Selling™ product uses a proprietary machine-learning algorithm that automatically suggests dynamic content and support based on the sales stage, prospect type and preferences of sellers and managers, resulting in exceptional customer experiences.

 

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How To Increase Your Marketing ROI

We are all tasked with increasing sales each year, and to do that, we need every marketing effort to be effective.  With large portions of marketing budgets being allocated specifically to content marketing, how do you know what is working?  And how do you increase your marketing ROI?

Marketing’s Objectives

First, let’s start with where you are now and what is on marketers’ radar. According to a B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks and Trends

  • Lead generation (85%) and sales (84%) will be the most important goals for B2B content marketers over the next 12 months.
  • Over the last six years, B2B marketers have consistently cited website traffic as their most often used metric. This year, however, they were also asked to rate metrics by importance. The most important metrics are sales lead quality (87%), sales (84%), and higher conversion rates (82%).
  • On average, B2B marketers allocate 28% of their total marketing budget to content marketing—the same percentage as last year. The most effective companies allocate 42%, and those identified as the most sophisticated/mature content marketers allocate 46%.

No matter what you spend, you’ll need to determine if your marketing content is pulling its ROI weight.  Technology and tools are providing ways to directly measure the marketing ROI of pieces of content that salespeople are using, and, more importantly, which pieces are most often linked to a closing a deal.

Increasing Marketing ROI

marketing ROI

So how do your increase your marketing ROI?  Here are 4 important tips for increasing ROI of marketing content.

  1. Connect your marketing and sales teams. Communication between teams is so essential! Have sales share with marketing which pieces of content they’re actually using. Armed with that information, marketing can then focus on creating exactly what sales needs for their specific prospects.   
  2. Make the Content Easy to Find. Once you have the content created, make it as easy as possible for sales to locate it.  It sounds obvious, but research has found sales reps waste 31% of their time searching for content.  Using technology to make content easy to find and for the content to even find the seller can pay huge dividends.
  3. Know where the prospect is on the journey and meet them there. Prospects have different needs at different points in the decision making cycle. An overview may be needed in the initial awareness stage, whereas a case study or data sheet may be more appropriate later.  Sophisticated sales enablement platforms can suggest stage-specific content in addition to industry specific items. 
  4. Help the Salesperson use the content appropriately. Too many companies hold training sessions and then expect their reps to remember what they learned months later.  Studies show up to 90% of the training is forgotten just 30 days later.  Sales training bursts (less than 5 minutes long) can be highly effective on increasing usage and having better presentations with prospects. 

There is no perfect, magic formula to marketing ROI, but without a doubt, taking the actions above will get you a step in the right direction.  Best of luck!

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Doorways to Forgetting

Doorways to forgettingHas this ever happened to you? You get up from your desk to do something and by the time you get to the next room, you’ve completely forgotten what you meant to do. Frustrating, right?

Don’t worry.  You aren’t losing your mind.  This recent Scientific American describes the phenomenon and it is perfectly normal.

We all know the usual causes of memory lapses and why we forget things.  It’s usually because we didn’t pay enough attention initially, too much time passed, or we didn’t think it was important. But this article says there may be more to forgetting.  A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame have developed a theory about our memory called a “doorway effect ” and the title of their paper  “Walking through doorways causes forgetting” couldn’t be more clear about their findings!

Oversimplifying, but basically the researches ran various tests that had participants moving objects between rooms and sometimes within the same room but kept the distance the same.  It appeared that the act of passing through a doorway affected memory, and caused people to be more likely to forget things.

The researchers theorized that information and memory appears to be tied to the activity you were doing.  If you pass through a doorway, it may signal your brain to “clear the decks” (aka forget) since what you were doing in the original room may no longer be relevant to the new situation.

Technology So You Don’t Forget

It is interesting that our brains are constantly keeping our short-term memory deck clear and ready for new information.  I started thinking about how many “doorways” I pass through in a normal work day.  (Note to self: now I have an excuse when I forget to do something).  This phenomenon also explains why I need to make so many notes and to-do lists.  Provided my computer doesn’t crash, those lists don’t get cleared.  As amazing as human memory is, it still has limitation.  Which also explains why applying learning science in technology makes a lot of sense.  Having tools that overcome our propensity to forget and help us “remember” can be huge productivity boosters.  But using technology just for storage does not solve the problem.  In fact, learning science shows that the memory capacity in our brains is massive.  Being able to retrieve that information can be difficult, especially as our brains are constantly wiping our short term memory banks clean.  So, it comes as no surprise that learning science has found that for best retention and retrieval, learning is best done in short, digestible bursts at the relevant moment … before you walk through a doorway and forget.  Technology has come a long way to addressing this challenge but has room for improvement.  Until technology is available so I never forget anything, I guess I’ll just have to walk through fewer doorways.

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Veelo™ Unveils SMS Text Notifications for Seller Updates

February 3, 2016 – Portland, Ore. – Veelo, an award-winning sales and marketing effectiveness technology leader, advanced the functionality of its flagship platform with enhanced notifications via SMS text. The new notification feature allows sellers to be notified of new content updates and training deadline alerts, wherever they are.

Veelo sends sellers SMS notifications of deadlines and content updates.

Chanin Ballance, Veelo CEO, says, “As a salesperson, you want the latest information, yet your first priority is to spend time with potential customers. Having to log into an application to check for the latest content wastes time. Now, with SMS text notifications, Veelo alerts the sellers of important updates.”

Built on learning science principles, Veelo provides predictive recommendations of content and knowledge for the sales opportunity at hand. It allows sellers to have better sales conversations and ultimately increases the ability to close deals. This latest  SMS text notification feature follows the company’s design philosophy of fitting into the salesperson’s daily workflow and not requiring interruptions to use the Veelo platform.

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Designing Sales Technology for Humans

I was recently reading a knowledge brief by Aberdeen Group’s Peter Ostrow titled “Building Toward a Sales Enablement Win: Where Should I Start?” The data in the brief paints a very compelling reason for sales enablement investments. The brief cites Aberdeen research showing companies that implemented “fully sales-enabled sellers” had double the yearly revenue growth of those that did not.

What really caught my eye though was a stat on “What Great Sales Enablement Looks Like.” The disparity on “coaching and developing our people” was huge between the fully sales-enabled respondents and all others: 47% of the fully sales-enabled sellers rated coaching at 4/5 stars vs. 21% of those who weren’t.

Sales technology needs to enable, not confuse

Humanizing Sales Technology

An important insight lies behind that data. With all the excitement of what technology can do: machine learning, predictive this or that, automated everything… we tend to lose sight of the reality that on the other side of that sales technology is a human being. And that human sells to yet another human being.

Now don’t get me wrong. I love sales technology, but technology should be there to serve the human, not the other way around.  So what are the characteristics of a sales technology solution that serves humans? Here are a few of my thoughts:

  • Fits into the seller’s daily workflow – When implementing any kind of sales technology, human behavior is often the single hardest challenge to overcome. I don’t care how good your artificial intelligence, machine learning, predictive widget is.  If it requires a dramatic change in how a seller works day-to-day, it probably will fail.
  • Easy and intuitive – I shudder to think how many hours, days, weeks of my life have been wasted learning tools that would “revolutionize the way I work.” Some did.  They required 2x the time of the old way, but boy, were those charts that nobody used pretty.  Successful technology implementation should be almost user manual free for the end user.
  • Does what the seller does faster/more accurately – Machine learning and predictive recommendations have real value. Talk to any seller and I guarantee they will complain about wasting time searching for content or not even finding the right content.  Using sales technology as a virtual assistant who can find that content fast has tremendous value.
  • Helps sellers grow & improve – Let’s circle back to that second stat I mentioned above. Saving a seller time helps a lot, but they won’t improve and grow without things like coaching.  Coaching delivered via sales technology can be very powerful because it can be delivered real-time and in the moment, and unlike a sales manager, it can be in more than one place at a time.

As the sales technology landscape continues to evolve, we likely will see some great products and some flops. The winners will be the ones that don’t lose sight of the human seller in the solution.

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