Why Ineffective Onboarding Can Be Costly for Each New Hire

Training Industry recently featured “Why Ineffective Onboarding Can Be Costly for Each New Hire” by Veelo CEO Chanin Ballance.

Traditional onboarding and classroom style training is expensive and as a result, organizations continually pressure trainers and managers for shorter training schedules.

It’s no surprise that this often results in less effective learning and frustration leading to a cycle of constant turnover. However, there are new creative technology solutions to bridge the gap in abbreviated training such as virtual coaches and predictive training modules.

Curious to see what new technology solutions are, and how they can improve your onboarding effectiveness? Read the full article on the Training Industry website.

Hungry for more insights on how to maximize knowledge retention, skill mastery, and onboarding effectiveness in general? Check out our newest brief, “Onboard Smarter, Not Harder“:

Onboard Smarter, Not Harder: A Quick Sales Onboarding How-To | Veelo

/by

Why Your B2B Sales Content Isn’t Working

A Tragedy in Two Acts

Why Your B2B Sales Content Sucks | VeeloSales: I can’t find what I need. Where is that case study? Marketing doesn’t understand what we need. (Or what they say when marketing isn’t around: “This content sucks!”)

Marketing: Sales doesn’t use my content. Why do they keep bugging me? I posted it up on the sales portal! (Or when sales isn’t around: “Our sales reps don’t get it.”)

Sound familiar? Many companies experience this problem in some fashion. In fact, SiriusDecisions estimates 60-70% of B2B content goes unused.

How Not to Fix the B2B Sales Content Problem

Many companies attack this problem through a content lens. They hypothesize that they aren’t producing the right sales enablement content, have too much, etc. Then they embark on a content audit, conduct surveys, and perform countless interviews.

Unfortunately, the result from all of this work is often a short-term band-aid fix that loses sight of the forest by focusing on the trees.

What if content wasn’t actually the real problem at all? The ultimate, end goal is sales. In order to make the sale, sales reps need to sell value. How does your product or service help your client achieve greater revenue or reduce costs?

Most sales organizations have adopted a sales methodology, have sales playbooks and have core messaging decks articulating their value proposition. The hope of every VP of Sales is that their sales force can repeatedly and consistently articulate that value, and use a proven, repeatable sales methodology to close the sale quickly.

Go back to the B2B content problem. Even if you could identify and eliminate the 70% of content that sales doesn’t use, will your sales force be ready to sell value, stay on message and do it quickly and consistently? Probably not. In the best case, you will save them time from looking for content and they will be able to find the right content.

Content doesn’t sell. People do.

The focus of any B2B sales content initiative should be delivering the right content and coaching at the right moment. With content only, there is no guarantee that your sales rep and even your prospect will ever read that piece of content, or if the right message will be delivered.

With coaching, on the other hand, the content becomes an aid. The real value lies in the correct, consistent messaging and value articulation, and that comes from the salesperson.

So before embarking on a large content audit, disrupting your sales force with interviews, and getting excited about how much wasted content you are going to eliminate, ask yourself how your initiative will make your sellers smarter and better sellers.

 

Download Sales Playbooks of the 21st Century

/by

Content Doesn’t Sell, People Do

A Look Into the Bad Old Days

Content doesn't sell, people do | VeeloA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—OK, fine, what we really mean is about three years ago, right here on Earth, one of the biggest problems in sales enablement was content proliferation and management. 66% of enterprises had more than six content repositories. Salespeople wasted 9.5 hours a week searching searching for information, and another 8.3 hours gathering information, plus another 3 hours recreating content that already existed.

Some amount of information gathering and research is inevitable, but having salespeople waste half a work week on it was a big problem. Productivity (how much can you do?) is different from effectiveness (how well can you do it?), but a big hit in productivity necessarily means effectiveness suffers, too.

Solving Findability Doesn’t Solve Everything

Every sales enablement platform worked furiously to solve this problem, because it’s a necessary first step. Repository consolidation. Cloud content sync. Smart search. Context-aware recommendations within the CRM. Machine learning algorithms that learn over time to serve up smarter, faster, better recommendations.

And if you look at the state of content search today, things look better. Software has managed to whittle away at the number of hours salespeople waste on content search. But content recommendations alone aren’t enough.

Surfacing content for sales reps saves them valuable time. Some solutions even work like Amazon’s recommendation engine, but instead of recommending products, they recommend sales content to share based on the context. And it’s vital that the sales rep has the right content—but now what? Did the rep read that 25 page whitepaper? Probably not. Can they correctly position it, articulate the key points, sell your value while tying it back to the collateral?

The ultimate goal of sales enablement software is to improve sales performance. Delivering relevant content is a great first step, but what delivers real business impact is helping salespeople have better selling conversations by matching coaching with the content.

What You Need is a Virtual Coach

Content doesn't sell, people do | VeeloA sales enablement platform that gives you virtual coaching alongside content do two important things:

1. It makes it easy for you to give salespeople the messaging, positioning, and all the other skills that help them sell value—and help them do it consistently.
2. It recommends the coaching content in conjunction with your sales collateral at the right time. A study from Corporate Visions indicates that this one-two combo raises sales deal value an average of 75%. Talk about an impact!

Conclusion: You Need to Care about How, Not Just What

Without a doubt, content is necessary, but content isn’t what sells your products. People do. And people need guidance on how to use that content effectively. Keep that in mind when choosing your sales enablement platform. Make sure that what you’re getting isn’t just a powerful search engine stapled to your content repository. Make sure you’re getting a system that helps your salespeople up their game right when they need it most.

 

Download The Science of Sales Training

/by

“Top 5 Sales Enablement Mistakes” Published in Salesforce Blog

Top 5 Sales Enablement Mistakes To AvoidThe Salesforce Blog recently featured “The Top 5 Sales Enablement Mistakes To Avoid (But You Are Probably Aren’t),” written by Veelo VP of Marketing Brian Fravel.

There is no doubt that sales enablement technologies are a huge trend for forward thinking leaders looking to increase sales and find a better way of doing things. Unfortunately, as organizations implement and adopt these new technologies, we are seeing some common practices that can actually backfire and work against improving sales performance.

You can read the full piece on the Salesforce Blog.

 

Watch the Blockbuster Webinar that Inspired this Article

Sales Enablement Mistakes You Should Avoid | Veelo

/by