,

How To Get Winning Content For The Bottom Of The Funnel

In Part I, we discussed how to create winning content to promote sales marketing alignment. When you create buyer-centric content for each sales stage, your sales team will win more deals faster. But what does this look like in practice? Emailing your team every time a document is uploaded or edited is unsustainable, especially if you manage hundreds or even thousands of assets.

Thankfully, sales enablement platforms have evolved to the point where you can track content engagement and automate updates in a snap. Here in Part II, we’ll explore some of the advanced tactics involved in deploying and tracking winning content. Take these steps to foster sales marketing alignment in your organization.

 

Put Winning Content In Context

One of the primary benefits of a good sales enablement platform is its ability to put content in context. Sales reps spend almost one third of their time looking for content or creating their own, but good sales enablement platforms can reverse this disturbing trend. Make your winning content live up to its name by giving it to reps where they live: in the CRM. This way, they won’t have to spend time looking for it and they can spend more time selling.

Advanced sales enablement platforms like Veelo allow you to assign specific pieces of content like knowledge checks and video coaching modules. Scheduling practice sessions like this can be especially valuable during onboarding and sales kickoff. Never before has it been this easy to see which reps are mastering critical concepts, and which ones are struggling. See our free guide for how to set up an onboarding program that works. 

 

winning content, crm integration, sales enablement

 

Winning Content Will Be Anything But… Unless You Track It

How do you know you’ve got a piece of winning content on your hands? If your sellers can share documents and monitor prospect engagement, you’re on the right track. Once sellers can see how prospects use content, they’ll be able to gauge interest and better manage pipelines. Look for features such as view, open, and forward tracking intelligence to give your reps immediate value.

From a marketing perspective, you’ll gain visibility into what’s really happening with your content at the bottom of the funnel. Which reps use content to close more deals? What are the content pieces that prospects engage with the most? And which winning content pieces help move deals from one sales stage to the next? Now you can transition from anecdotal evidence to facts backed up by data.

 

Streamline Seller Feedback

Do your sellers have a quick and easy way to rate content and provide feedback? Your most vocal reps will always have opinions on the winning content and the duds, but how do you collect data from the rest of team? Advanced sales enablement platforms like Veelo allow your reps to score content and submit comments with just a few clicks.

Once you’ve got the infrastructure in place, review ratings monthly and look for winning content and poor-performing pieces.  If you see several reps give low ratings to a piece, invest the time and energy to improve it before adding something to take its place. In the same vein, audit your winning content and look for ways to make other pieces in the same style.

 

winning content, bottom of the funnel, sales marketing alignment

 

Winning Content: Make It Work With Sales Analytics

If you’ve come this far, you recognize the value of delivering winning content in context. This content strategy will allow your sales reps to track prospect engagement, and monitoring feedback. Now, establish ground truth by studying which pieces actually help win deals. If you’re laser-focused on the needs of prospects, then every piece of content you create has the potential to be winning content. Sales marketing alignment is within your reach when all your content helps sellers move deals to the next stage of the sales cycle.

Now, close the loop by integrating your sales enablement platform into your CRM. We touched on this briefly above, when we discussed the importance of adding winning content to your sellers’ workflow. Now let’s look at this relationship from a marketing perspective.

When you combine your sales enablement platform with your CRM, you can correlate content engagement with vital revenue metrics:

  • How each of your sellers uses content
  • Which pieces of content reps use by industry vertical
  • How content usage is related to deal size
  • Content usage related to sales stage
  • Which pieces of content do reps share most often with prospects?
  • Content that prospects open and forward to others in their organization

Now you can see how sales enablement platforms are preparing marketing professionals for the coming revolution. Marketing has never had a clear view of how reps and prospects use content at the bottom of the funnel… until now. Sales enablement platforms like Veelo can provide marketers with much richer context and a view into the lifecycle of their winning content. Now marketers can gain clarity into their content strategy and make improvements where it counts.

 

winning content, crm integration, sales enablement

 

Summary

In this article and previously in Part I, we’ve discussed the value of creating winning content that’s buyer-centric, but do you know who your most important buyers are? Your sales team! If you don’t consider their needs while you’re creating and organizing content, they won’t use it.

If you nail the basics of sales marketing alignment, then you’ll know there’s still work to be done. Buyer-centric content aligned with each sales stage is a great start, but you won’t have winning content until you take it a step further. Apply these advanced tactics to monitor prospect engagement and determine which pieces help your team close more deals faster.

If your reps see the value of your winning content, then they’ll want to use it when they talk to prospects. And once they start using it to win more deals, the sky’s the limit.

 

winning content, bottom of the funnel, sales enablement, sales content management, marketing effectiveness

,

How To Keep Your Promises On Sales Marketing Alignment

As a marketer, you care about sales marketing alignment and you want your reps to succeed. Which is why you’re certain that this new case study will be the key that helps them unlock new deals. Smiling to yourself, you hit ‘Save’ and then upload it to your content repository.

What happens next? Absolutely nothing.

Now, imagine you’re a sales rep in that same company. When a prospect asks for more information, you email them one of the documents you’ve saved to your hard drive. You have a sneaking suspicion that’s not enough. But if you dig through the content repository, then that’s wasted time you’ll never get back. 

Marketers have no way of knowing which pieces of content sellers use. Sellers use the content that’s easy to access, even though it might not be optimal or current.

Feeling frustrated? You’re not alone. HubSpot estimates that failing to achieve sales marketing alignment costs businesses a total of $1 trillion each year in decreased productivity and wasted content creation. But the good news? There’s a better way to make sure your sales team has access to the right content at the right time. Finally, you can keep your promises. 

This article is Part I, and it covers the basics of sales marketing alignment. Next week in Part II, we’ll take a look at advanced tactics that will help you accelerate sales growth and track your spend on content creation.

Address Sales Marketing Alignment at the Root

Before you write another word, get on the same page with your sales team. Ask them what they send to prospects at each stage of the sales cycle. Now go deeper, and ask what documents they study before jumping on important calls. Which documents do they use most often, and why? Finally, ask them which pieces of new content they’d like to see in the near future.

Coordinate with sales leadership to collect sellers’ responses to all these questions via email. While the results filter in, keep track of which pieces of content reps don’t mention, and prepare to be surprised. You need to establish a baseline for content usage, and involving your sales team is one of the first steps to making improvements.

 

Write Buyer-Centric Content

Once you know content sellers use (or don’t use), audit your collateral for one key characteristic. SiriusDecisions found that too much marketing content is product-centric — focused on selling product features. What sellers need is buyer-centric content that’s matched to the needs of specific customer personas. Right now, they’re not getting it. No wonder up to 80% of content goes unused. With stats like these, you might be forgiven for thinking that sales marketing alignment is a fantasy.

Buyers need sales reps to solve intractable problems or leverage opportunities – not just explain Feature A and Feature B. Content is key, but only the right content will unlock the door to more business. Once you change your focus to buyer-centric content, you can keep your promises to sales and write content that matters. Now, you’re ready for the next step in your content strategy.

 

sales marketing alignment, bottom of funnel, sales enablement

 

Get Closer to Sales Marketing Alignment: Fill the Gaps

If you’ve changed your focus from features to benefits, then you’ve made a huge step forward. Now, perform a content audit by sales stage. Which pieces of content do sellers use at each sales stage? More importantly, how well do these documents support the objectives of that stage?  

Most organizations have too much content for early sales stages, and too little content for later stages. But these latter stages are where sellers and buyers need the most help! By this point your sellers have moved past qualifying and on to closing, and your content needs to keep pace. Sales marketing alignment is within your reach. But you need to be clear about the purpose of each new piece you write. 

Keeping track of buyers’ priorities can be the difference between a deal that closes quickly and a deal that stalls. Help your sellers close more deals more quickly with content that matches buyer intent at the right time.

 

Sales Marketing Alignment Won’t Work Without You

Now you can track which pieces of content sellers actually use. Even better, you’ve made buyer-centric content your new priority. Each document is matched to a sales stage, and your content repository looks better than it has in years.

Yet great content might as well not exist if sellers don’t know where to find it.

Sometimes, sales marketing alignment seems impossible. And it is… unless you give your reps an easy way to get content they need instantly. An easy way to do this is to move your collateral to a sales content management system that integrates with your CRM. The best sales content management systems include intelligent search and recommendations for sellers. They drive the right behavior by delivering the right content directly within a sellers’ workflow.

Even with the right technology, you need to stay in touch with your team and keep your content fresh. But don’t make your original poll a one-time initiative. Remind reps that content is available, and give them tips on how it should be used. Working together, you can help keep the right content on your sales team’s radar.

 

Summary

Sales marketing alignment is no fantasy: the best teams create content that sells and sellers that win. The content you want is buyer-centric. It’s easy to find and aligned with each sales stage. This could be the key that unlocks new business for your sales team. But beware: none of these characteristics will work on its own. Every piece of content needs to earn its place in your sales team’s repertoire.

In Part II we’ll explore some of the advanced tactics available to modern marketers and sales teams. Sales marketing alignment is a reality, and you can make it happen.

 

sales marketing alignment, sales enablement, sales content management, sales effectiveness, marketing effectiveness, content creation

 

,

How To Make Your Sales Training Program Work For You

Planning a sales training program? The data look grim: companies spend an average of $24K per sales rep to boost productivity, yet 49% of them have no way to measure their return on investment. With odds like that, a sales training program might seem like a risky bet.

Fortunately, designing a high-impact sales training program doesn’t have to be a gamble. The best sales training programs deliver actionable data that you can immediately use to boost seller effectiveness. Follow these steps to help your team win.

Establish Basic Proficiency Metrics

Most sales training programs only measure completion data, but in today’s fast-paced market that’s not enough. If you deliver a sales training program without any follow-up, by the time you notice reps are struggling it might be too late. Sales enablement platforms like Veelo can help, but even with the best technology you still need to monitor your team’s progress in real-time. As your sales training program matures, consider these metrics:  

  • Across Your Team
    • Number of Users
    • How they score on each product Quiz
    • Quiz results for sales skills proficiency
    • Results from their Final Exam
  • For Each Rep
    • All quiz scores, averages and highlights
    • What percentage of quizzes were completed?
    • Rating score of Video Coaching Submissions (if possible)
    • Participation and engagement with reinforcement training
    • Proficiency Ranking Tier – Are they Top 20%, Middle 70%, or Bottom 10%?

The big payoff of a sales training program is seeing your reps hit quota. As you design learning modules for each buyer persona, what actions can your sellers take to generate the most revenue? Be sure your reps get the coaching to master both basic and advanced sales skills, as well as enough time to practice. Research has shown that interleaved practice works best, and you can stack the deck in your favor with role-play and video coaching. For an in-depth look at building winning onboarding programs that incorporate these techniques, see our free guide here.

Match Sales Training Program Metrics with CRM Data

If you want to determine the impact of your sales training program, then you need to correlate that data with your CRM. Group CRM data into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to cut through the noise. Veelo and other sales enablement platforms help you highlight the right KPIs by revealing the links between training proficiency and sales results.

A good sales training program can help your reps win more deals now, but an excellent course can help you see into the future. Once you anchor yourself with testing data and CRM reports, it’s time to group your KPIs into leading and lagging indicators of success.   

sales training program, sales enablement platforms

Leading and Lagging Indicators of Success

If you measure leading indicators of sales success, then you’ll get an early hint of which reps will achieve quota, and which won’t. In a practical sense, you can see which reps will be the most successful by month 9 even before they finish their formal ramp period. While important, revenue metrics are lagging indicators because you won’t see their effects until long after training has been completed. Avoid focusing on lagging indicators alone, because you risk employing a rep for 9 – 12 months before you realize they won’t work out. Combine leading indicators with lagging indicators to get foresight and insight.

An optimized sales training program is what separates high-growth organizations from slowpokes, so this is a high-stakes game you can’t afford to lose.

Measure the following KPIs by rep and proficiency tier (Top 20%, Middle 70%, Bottom 10%):

Examples of Leading Indicators

  • Pipeline Velocity – How fast reps move opportunities from one stage to the next
  • Opportunity $$ driven from one sales stage to the next
  • % Lead conversion to Opportunity
  • $$ in Pipeline during ramp
  • Quota achievement velocity

Examples of Lagging indicators  

  • Total revenue / Total wins
  • Ratio of opportunities to wins
  • Average deal size
  • % Product upsell  
  • % Quota achieved

Communicate the Impact of Your Sales Training Program

Congratulations, High Roller! You’ve selected the most important KPIs and segmented them into leading and lagging indicators of success for your entire team. Get adequate investment for your sales training program by sharing the benefits with executive stakeholders. Follow these steps as you prepare your communication plan:

  • Which KPIs are the most important for your stakeholders? Use data from sales training software and your CRM to set joint priorities with sales leadership and the executive team. This will help you isolate specific improvements for each training session.
  • How often will you report these KPIs to your stakeholders? Choose a monthly or quarterly schedule and stick to it.
  • Manage stakeholders’ expectations. Report progress on leading KPIs in the early months, and include data on lagging KPIs in later months. You need a full sales cycle before you can see how your sales training program affects each stage of the sales cycle. 
  • Consider the best communication format to share the impact of sales training. You may need to pull highlights into an email, because not all executives will have access to the sales enablement platform and CRM.

If you can’t connect the dots for your executive team, then they might decide the sales training program doesn’t matter. Don’t leave it to chance. Track the most important leading and lagging KPIs, and make it easy to understand. Then, share your results with stakeholders on a regular basis, so they can see the ROI for themselves. That’s how you keep your winning streak going.

Summary

The very thought of a sales training program used to be painful for reps and opaque for executives, but those days are over. Stop gambling with your team’s future, and start winning. First establish proficiency metrics, and then correlate those numbers with your CRM. Select the right leading and lagging KPIs, and make sure to communicate your findings to your executive stakeholders. Sales enablement platforms like Veelo can help you make sense of the data by integrating your sales training program with your CRM, but that’s only the beginning. The real magic happens when you feed the results from one sales training program into your plans for the next one. That’s what it takes to win.

 

sales training program, sales enablement platforms, Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, Leading Indicators, Lagging Indicators

Crowdsource Your Way To The Best Video Sales Playbooks

Crowdsourcing is having an incredible impact on the world around us, and nowhere is the potential greater than with video sales playbooks. 

Let’s face it: most sales playbooks remain mired in the past. Many are lengthy and dense, artifacts of  textbook teachings that contradict the findings of brain science. Effective sales playbooks are dynamic and modular, delivering information in short bites that engage sellers and improve retention of key concepts. Video can help engage reps like never before, but only recently has technology advanced far enough that you can profit from these findings.

By now it’s no secret: the next generation of playbooks calls for crowdsourcing. One of the primary goals of sales enablement is to give reps what they need, in a format they can use. Crowdsourcing is the way, and video sales playbooks can help deliver high-quality results.

Design the Project and Divide the Labor

The best video sales playbooks deliver focused information in short, bite-sized chunks. Make sure your goals are clear and aligned with SMART deliverables: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Realistic, all with a clear Timeline. Here’s a simple project plan that taps into the expertise of your team:

Goal:  Create a 5-stage playbook covering common sales dialog snippets. Include tactics that reps need at each stage of the buying process.

Format:

  • Video recordings from your reps, 1 – 5 minutes each
  • Approximately 20-25 modules total; 2-10 modules per stage
  • Validation/Proof – must receive minimum 4 out of 5 star rating from management
  • Delivery/Access Point – Veelo inside the CRM  

Video Playbook Grid

Discovery Validation Business Justification Purchase Decision Negotiate & Close
About Company Win Story 2 How to Quantify Value References & Case Studies Managing Discounts
Value proposition BANT Conversation Battle Card 2 Setting Up a Close Plan Obtaining Signatures
5 Common Objections Battle Card 1 Battle card 3
Win Story 1 Engage Buyer Persona 1 Win Story 3
Qualification Questions Engage Buyer Persona 2

Timeline – Approximately 1 month

  • 20 days: Record and review videos.
  • 10 days: Approve videos and build playbook.

Select a Sales Enablement Platform to Build Video Sales Playbooks

When it comes to technology, keep it simple. Make sure it’s easy to export the videos to the delivery platform, or better yet, select a sales enablement platform that integrates with your CRM. Every time reps have to stop what they’re doing and search for content, it absolutely kills sales momentum. Keep your sellers on task by delivering video sales playbooks directly within their workflow. If they can’t find it, they won’t use it.

video sales playbooks, sales enablement platform, video coaching, video playbooks, sales onboarding, sales coaching, sales training

Good Communication is SMART

Great video sales playbooks don’t just happen. Everyone on your team will play a different role in making this project a success. Here’s how to engage your entire organization in building new video sales playbooks:

Executive Team and Sales Management

  • Engage executive sponsorship early. Ask for their help in reviewing video submissions. 
  • Conduct short demos and a few practice runs, so sales management can see how easy it is.

Sales Representatives

  • Share the benefit and time-frame for the project – keep it SMART
  • Give sellers clear instructions on how to record and upload videos
  • Influence and champion the right people for the right videos. A few examples:
    • Sales veterans to demonstrate closing tactics
    • Subject matter experts to highlight product benefits
    • Creatives who find innovative ways to revive stalled deals

Reps need a supportive network in which they can easily share videos and receive feedback. Do more than just assign them a task and hope for the best. You need to engage team members across your entire organization for this project to be a success. Once you start receiving videos, you’re ready for the next step.

Get Feedback on Early Versions of Your Video Sales Playbooks

The beauty of video sales playbooks is that they encourage reps to practice until it’s perfect. As each seller records multiple takes, they’ll sharpen their sales skills across the board. With every repetition, reps will get ideas for other sales challenges that need to be addressed. Sales enablement platforms like Veelo will give them a way to send comments quickly, without leaving the recording session.

Be open to feedback. As your reps produce more and more videos, they’ll suggest ways to improve the program as well as ideas for future video assignments. Once they become familiar with the platform, they might even start to send videos voluntarily. This is the promise and potential of crowdsourcing, and video sales playbooks can make it a reality.

Assemble the Work of the Crowd and Build the Best Sales Playbook

While recording and watching videos engages your sellers much more than text alone, relying exclusively on video goes too far in the opposite direction. Maximize knowledge retention by delivering content in a variety of ways, in a random order. Include knowledge checks to test reps on the skills they’ll learn from watching their co-workers’ videos. Interleaved practice maximizes learning outcomes, and in this case that means better sales conversations with prospects.

Selecting the right sales enablement platform will go a long way towards helping this project succeed. Tools like Veelo not only give you an easy way to manage your growing library of video modules, but they also provide intelligent search as well as predictive coaching aligned with your sales stages.

video sales playbooks, sales enablement platform, video coaching, video playbooks, sales onboarding, sales coaching, sales training

Summary

Sales reps are always looking ahead to a brighter future. “How can I make this deal close faster?” “What does my pipeline look like for the rest of this month? This quarter?” Yet while sellers set their sights on the horizon, they’re often handcuffed by playbooks rooted in the past. Relieve this tension with crowdsourced video sales playbooks. Once you decide to crowdsource videos to build more effective playbooks, you’ll be helping your reps meet the challenges they face everyday.

Now, your reps can have the tools they need to make their future plans a reality.

When’s The Best Time To Invest In Sales Enablement?

As the end of the month draws near, faster sales growth remains an elusive goal for reps all over the world. New leads from marketing aren’t always a good fit, and admin work usually seems to get in the way of cold calling. Some reps even spend their precious selling time writing sales collateral. “After all,” they figure, “When was the last time I found what I needed without spending an hour searching our content library?”

If comments like these make you cringe, you’re not alone. The good news? You can take concrete steps towards success by focusing on sales enablement. Hope isn’t a strategy, but a targeted investment in sales enablement will fuel sales growth for years to come.

When’s the best time to invest in sales enablement?

Now.

Here are the top 5 cues your organization is ready:

#1 More spending on marketing doesn’t equal faster sales growth.

Marketing creates sales content, but after that? It’s estimated more than 60% of content never gets used. Even then, how can marketers measure ROI on the remaining 40%, the bottom of funnel content that’s supposed to help reps win deals?  Fortunately, sales enablement technologies allow you to bridge the gap between marketing and sales. Finally, marketing can see how reps and prospects use content, and sellers can send feedback to marketing in real-time. A sales enablement platform like Veelo makes it all possible.

Also, keep in mind that more leads don’t automatically translate into faster sales growth; it’s lead quality that matters. With greater insight into content that resonates with prospects, marketers and sales enablement professionals can make the appropriate improvements to sales playbooks and onboarding materials. Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment can see a 20% boost in sales growth. Clearly, this is a step worth taking. 

#2 Your reps aren’t spending enough time selling.

Time is our most precious resource, and this is doubly true for sales professionals. High-growth companies make it a priority to maximize their reps’ efficiency, but even with these initiatives it’s estimated reps only spend a third of their time selling. Faster sales growth won’t happen until reps improve their efficiency and effectiveness. This is where sales enablement shines. New technologies allow you to make dynamic playbooks available to reps directly within the CRM. This way, once reps get on the phone they’ll spend less time searching for content and more time sharing the right value proposition.

Companies that optimize for sales enablement measure all non-selling tasks to see which ones can be eliminated, delegated, or automated. Don’t be stuck on the outside looking in. Maximize your team’s time by connecting them to the right sales content, right when they need it.

 

sales growth, sales enablement, coaching in context, sales playbooks

 

#3 New reps aren’t contributing to sales growth.

Without an effective onboarding program, it takes companies much longer to achieve ROI on each new sales rep. Contrary to popular belief, though, the best onboarding programs are not one-and-done bootcamps. Research has shown that interleaved practice and ongoing reinforcement actually produce the best learning outcomes.

Good sales enablement managers create a consistent training experience designed to maximize retention of key concepts. The best onboarding programs also deliver learning sessions in a variety of different ways, from knowledge checks and video coaching to real-life practice in the form of role play. Adopt sales enablement best practices, and you can help new sellers ramp up faster and spot the ones who aren’t a good fit well in advance.

#4 Your sales team is selling more on price than on value.

Is your average contract value declining or stagnant? Clinging to price as a key differentiator is one of the most pernicious beliefs in all of sales, but you can reverse this trend with coaching in context. By using the the right sales enablement platform, you can deliver improved messaging to sellers in easy-to-digest learning modules. This way, they can absorb your company’s unique value proposition in advance of every new selling conversation. 

Hope isn’t a strategy, and neither is discounting. Help your team focus on sales growth by looking beyond price to real solutions and value.

#5 When your organization has aggressive goals for sales growth.

The good news? Your team is already crushing its quota.

The bad news? You’re doing so well that management wants to raise your target by 45% next year.

Faced with the challenges of fueling rapid sales growth, many companies would hire more reps, increase quota for each rep, or try to do both at the same time. However, taking any of these paths without a plan for sales enablement will burn capital and produce disappointing results. If you aim higher with more aggressive goals for sales growth, think of sales enablement first. From improving your reps’ negotiation skills to increasing pipeline velocity, there are always ways to optimize the sales process. Sales enablement gives your team the resources they need so you can achieve your ambitious goals.  

Summary

Every success sets the stage for your next big win. However, what got you here may not be enough in the future. As your sales team expands, you’ll need to efficiently onboard new reps and support your existing team. Investing in sales enablement will help new reps get to first dollar quickly, and it will give them more time to focus on selling. Finally, an optimized sales enablement program will help sellers hit your aggressive goals for growth.

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Begin your sales enablement journey now to kickstart the best future for your team.

How to Improve Sales Readiness in 5 Easy Steps

Can your reps move deals forward every time they speak with a prospect? If not, how can you help them improve? These two questions capture the essence of sales readiness. However, while it’s easy to ask questions, the answers may surprise you. SiriusDecisions found that 38% of companies lack a formalized sales onboarding program. As many as 67% of sales reps fail to reach quota, and nearly 90% of sales conversations fail to meet the expectations of executive buyers. 

That’s a huge gap in sales readiness. Fortunately, we can make a U-turn before we lose sight of where we’re headed. Here we share our top five tips for improving sales readiness in your organization.

Good Playbooks are Vital for Sales Readiness

Many sales playbooks are 50-page binders crammed with product details. Do dense, text-heavy playbooks really improve sales readiness? Based on the statistics above, we’re going to venture a ‘No.’ Effective playbooks are direct and modular. Effective playbooks engage your reps, because this helps boost retention of key concepts.Finally, the best playbooks help reps move deals forward at every sales stage. 

For example, at the Discovery stage your reps are still learning about their prospects. The Discovery section of your playbook will need to cover the following points:

Rep Activities

  • Discovery
  • Qualify the Opportunity
  • Identify key Stakeholders
  • Define status quo and beginning metrics

Tools & Training

  • Discovery Deck
  • Qualifying Questions
  • Video of an Experienced Rep Pitching the Value Proposition
  • Micro-training: How to Handle Objections
  • Short Deck on Win Stories related to this Opportunity
  • Script for Video Presentation to Demonstrate the Product

Creating an effective playbook is one of the best ways to drive sales readiness. For more information on building great playbooks that deliver concrete results, check out our free guide here.

Create a Catalogue of Past Wins

Get sales readiness in the driver’s seat. At that point, playbooks become the course map, and past wins help your prospects see around the next turn. When reps draw from success stories, it’s a huge boost of confidence. Top performers leverage their confidence to drive opportunities to the next sales stage faster.  

There are three different ways to share past wins with your sales reps:

  • Customer matrix – which clients excel with our value proposition
  • Case studies – multiple benefits we delivered for a specific client
  • Proof Points – list of stats showing quantifiable improvements for a certain customer

As you compile a list of past wins, you’ll start to see a pattern. Very few – if any – hinged upon product knowledge alone. Past wins plus modular playbooks equal sales readiness, but this is only the beginning. It’s time to hit the gas.

Video Coaching: Big Step Forward Towards Sales Readiness

Creating a focused playbook filled with past wins is a vital part of sales readiness, but it’s not enough. Reps need to practice their pitch to get it right. Here’s how to encourage formal practice sessions that prepare them for real-life selling situations:

  • Script and record demo tracks for key selling conversations at each opportunity stage.   
  • Assign these video tracks to your team, so they can watch and practice before recording their own.
  • For more dynamic conversations on objection handling, augment video coaching with role play.   

When reps say it aloud they’ll learn it faster, and they’re more likely to remember it when it counts. Regular practice with critical feedback from sales management is one of the most critical steps to ensure sales readiness. Video coaching allows you to automate this process and helps your reps reach quota faster.  

 

video coaching in sales playbooks promotes sales readiness

Provide Ongoing Reinforcement

Great playbooks are the plot, and past wins give prospects a glimpse of the happy ending. Practice with video coaching helps reps stay focused, but unless we provide ongoing reinforcement, their confidence will erode over time. Research has shown that we forget more than half of what we’ve learned within 3 weeks, and after 3 months we only remember 16% of it.

Address this quirk of human nature by integrating playbooks into your sellers’ workflow. Better yet, add advanced search capabilities so your reps can always find what they need, right away. When you give sellers instant access to the content that helps them win, watch their confidence take flight. Here are three ways to provide easy reinforcement to your sellers:

  • Create straightforward case studies and product data sheets
  • Micro-trainings that focus on deal strategy. These shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes, tops.
  • Include both fundamental & advanced topics in sales training sessions. All reps have gaps to fill.   

Topics for effective micro-trainings include negotiation skills, listening, time management, financial acumen, and active listening. Now it’s time to go full-throttle.

Technology Can Accelerate Sales Readiness

Learn to leverage your sales tech stack, and you’ll prepare your team for anything they might face on race day. Here are the four types of technology you need to achieve sales readiness:

  1. CRM – MS Dynamics, Hubspot, or Salesforce.com
  2. Prospecting/Engagement such LinkedIn Navigator, SalesLoft, Outreach.io
  3. Content & Training Enablement – Veelo
  4. Quote and Proposal automation – Quosal, Octiv

Companies spend an average of $400 on sales technology for each of their reps every month. What’s most surprising is how small this is compared to the cost of sales rep turnover. It can cost your company at least $100,000 every time one of your reps leaves. Invest in sales technology to boost sales readiness.

Summary

In conclusion, if you can embrace sales readiness you’ll be able to lap the competition. Many organizations take their reps through the equivalent of Driver’s Ed before they start dialing prospects, when what they really need to learn is the art of keeping cool at high speeds. Yet giving your reps the keys to drive revenue doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Focus on these five practical ways to improve sales readiness so your reps have the confidence to succeed.

How To Use Sales Science To Win More Deals

The right sales training can impact your team for years to come. Studies show that companies spend $20 billion annually on sales training, but how much of this training takes root? Sales science reveals that ongoing reinforcement and continuous coaching are the best ways to make this training stick. These two factors help fortify what sellers learn and make each stage of their learning more effective.

Now that we know what works, it’ll be smooth sailing from this point forward, right?

If only it were that simple. 

Pitfall #1: “One and Done” Training Sessions

Sales kickoffs and bootcamps may give reps a big boost of momentum in the beginning, but the inertia of old habits can quickly bring their progress to a screeching halt. Here’s the good news: we can consciously change our behavior over time. You need to give your team the resources they need to rock their sales calls, and this takes structure, long-term commitment, and knowledge of how the mind works. Mix all these together and we’re on our way to mastering sales science.

Pitfall #2: Fluency Illusion: The Enemy You Don’t Know

What Is It?

  • The false impression that you know more than you do.

What Causes It?

  • We convince ourselves that what we remember now, we will always remember later. Falling victim to the fluency illusion means we forget what we’ve forgotten, which can make learning frustrating and slow.

Now we know what to avoid. So, how do we use sales science to build better training programs for our reps while steering clear of the dangers?

Memory Storage vs Memory Retrieval, and What This Means for Sales Science

The storage capacity of the human brain is vast, yet our ability to recall the right information at the right time is limited by two crucial factors:

Working memory limits: Whether you’re a sales rockstar or you just made your first call, your working memory limit is about the same: about 20 minutes’ worth of new information at a time. Yet most playbooks and bootcamps cover an overwhelming amount of information all at once. Long and dense, these types of training actually work against optimal learning methods.

Memory retrieval limits: Once information has been stored, it sits in long-term memory storage forever. However, accessing the right piece of information at just the right time takes practice and skill. This ties in with the fluency illusion we discussed earlier: we’re overconfident about our ability to retrieve the right information because we misjudge how hard it is to recall it when we need it.  Everyday, sellers need to juggle an endless stream of details. Follow the guidelines of sales science in your training sessions by considering the natural limits of memory, and provide ways for reps to find the right information when they need it.sales science, sales enablement

Working with Memory Storage Limits: The Power of Small

Don’t overload your sellers with a huge binder and then wonder why they can’t remember the case study on page 89 three weeks later. Take your cue from sales science, and use brief learning modules to instruct your team:

  • Short micro-trainings hold attention better than long lectures or pages of text.
  • Brief learning modules make key details more accessible when sellers need a quick refresher.
  • These short bursts won’t overload sellers’ working memory. This way, they can transfer the maximum amount of information into long-term memory.

Sales Science is Clear: Make Time for Practice

Great sellers get that way by practicing and perfecting their skills over time. You can help everyone on your team by adding frequent practice sessions into their training.

Experts quibble on the ideal intervals between refreshers, but a popular sequence is to serve up quizzes or knowledge checks on the second, seventh and thirtieth days after a learning session. Some software, like Veelo KnowledgeBoost™, allows you to automatically schedule and assign retrieval practice from quiz banks and existing materials.

Curiosity is Your Ally 

We learn better when we’re excited to learn. Sounds obvious, but curiosity also helps us in more subtle ways. Research has shown that curiosity not only helps us pick up our main interests more quickly, but it also helps us recall unrelated information that we learned at the same time.  

Here’s the key: Sellers are more curiosity-driven than the rest of us. Salespeople also tend to have fairly short attention spans, and many are action-driven. These traits will assert themselves in several areas:

  • Sellers learn best when they absolutely need the information, such as right before a meeting.
  • They won’t tolerate complex systems that require dozens of clicks to navigate.
  • Good sellers stay focused, and they’ll skip what they deem unnecessary.

With all this in mind, how do we optimize our training sessions for curious, opportunistic sellers using the principles of sales science?

Content in Context

Integrate with your team’s workflow; don’t interrupt it. Incorporate sales training sessions into the tools your reps already use, which will also support the benefits of short, modular training sessions. Here are some practical suggestions to implement this in your organization:

  • Your training needs to be accessible on desktop and mobile devices, so salespeople can refer to it whenever they need it.
  • Use a guided selling tool to deliver the right content based on factors unique to each opportunity.
  • Put the content where they spend most of their time, such as the CRM.

Apply Sales Science to Learning Modules with a Variety of Content

Pop quiz! Which of the following works best?

  1. Practicing new skills one at a time for a block of time
  2. Practicing new skills in a predefined sequence
  3. Practicing new skills in a random order

If you guessed option 3, you’re right on target. Researchers have found over, and over, and over again that interleaved practice is the best for improving learning outcomes. We can use these findings to maximize long-term results for our team:

  • Mix it up! Spread your practice sessions across different formats like flashcards, quizzes, and dynamic elements like audio clips.
  • Role plays can be up to 30 percent more effective than merely reviewing information. Explaining to other people what you know, even when your knowledge is imperfect, is one of the best ways to learn.
  • Video coaching takes the benefits of role-playing a step further. Ask your sales reps to record a two-minute video of themselves overcoming objections, and what do you think will happen? They’ll record themselves over and over until they get it right. This type of practice will reap huge dividends when they’re in a real-life selling situation.

Conclusion

The goal of any kind of training is to achieve lasting behavioral changes that result in concrete improvements. Our sales training sessions need to be focused, relevant, and above all, memorable. Yet traditional forms of sales training can actually harm your team in the long run. Keep sales science in mind to help your reps change their habits for good. Once you combine all these principles and integrate training into your sellers’ workflow, watch their confidence and productivity soar.

Now your sales team is on the right track, because you’ve got science on your side.