Remote working, albeit a new concept at the start of 2020, has gained widespread acceptance and is slowly being normalized as a new model of working across organizations. Hence building a robust digital transformation strategy has become more important than ever for businesses globally.
While it has become imperative to differentiate from competition by digitizing and optimizing processes and workflows, it is equally important to minimize costs as most organizations are being prudent with their budgets and cash flow projections.
The sales force of any company is the engine that drives revenues. However, the front-line sales force of companies is still learning the ropes of remote sales & selling virtually. While investment in sales enablement platforms is justified to make the lives of sales reps easier, how do you ensure your organization’s latest sales strategy is also cost-effective?
Hence, companies must walk a fine line between reducing expenses and promoting efficiencies to protect current revenue and future growth.
• How Speed-To-Market Can Be Increased Via Your Sales Enablement Platform
Upskilling the field force on product knowledge is an integral part of every product launch. Additionally, salespeople need continuous reinforcement training with minimal time away from the field.
By adopting a digital-first, mobile learning approach to product training, our clients have reduced facilitator facetime by 50% and classroom / virtual training by 30%, implying an additional release of 30,000 man-hours which has played a key role in accelerating their speed to market of newly launched products.
Hence a sales enablement platform can be a cost-effective alternative to classroom training, which often involves many incidental costs and resources.
• Why Bite-Sized Learning Increases Retention And Engagement
According to Microsoft, the average adult attention span has dropped to an all-time low of 8 seconds, making the training of your workforce an uphill task. While long-form content is disengaging and adds up to the cognitive backlog of learners, microlearning helps to meet this challenge of changing learning preferences.
Delivering sales training & enablement content in a bite-sized format, can not only aid in better knowledge retention, but also make the learning experience more engaging, especially when integrated with gamification and video content.
Since microlearning can be accessed on the go and does not confine sales reps to classrooms, they can spend more time on the field engaging with prospects and buyers, which enhances sales coverage and ultimately boosts revenue.
• Drawing Data Insights To Assess The Readiness Of The Field Force
Sales enablement & sales readiness tools help to gather large data sets on the learning performance of sales reps. By analysing the learning data, sales leaders can identify the skills and competencies that sales reps are developing or struggling to improve. Further, these data-driven insights enable them to make better-informed business decisions.
Content creators and trainers can also refer to this sales effectiveness data to constantly improve and update sales training content as well as marketing messages to customers.
• Identifying Gaps In Current Processes And Addressing Them Using Skill Gap Analysis & Sales Effectiveness Data
When sales leaders analyse skills gaps in the performance data of their workforce, they get useful information about their teams’ strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, the insights also help them identify gaps in certain processes, or the need to simplify certain product features or improve product communication.
This also helps sales & marketing leaders to use their training budget strategically. Instead of spending money on generic training programs, they can create customized learning & enablement journeys based on each sales rep’s and each team’s strong and weak points.
One of our clients, after driving a new product launch & readiness program, identified that while sales reps were well-versed with product knowledge, most of them struggled with the documentation procedures required for customer onboarding. It was observed, this was also causing delays in the sales process. A refresher training focused on documentation of the new product, not only helped them make processes more efficient but also enabled them to deliver a seamless customer experience.
· Accelerating Onboarding Of New Sales Hires
According to Brainshark, new sales hires spend 10 weeks in sales training programs and are only able to ramp up productivity in 11.2 months. However, if they are unable to meet their sales quotas and struggle in terms of productivity, it not only leads to employee disengagement but also affects the company’s revenue targets. Increasing employee disengagement ultimately leads to high turnover, which further translates into higher sunk costs to the company.
Investing in the right sales enablement tools like Master-O ensures you can effectively onboard new hires faster and continuously coach your sales reps to lead differentiating and engaging sales conversations with prospects and customers, thus further fuelling the productivity of the company.
• Equipping Field Force With A Single Point Information Repository
A sales enablement platform provides a single source of information and content required by sales reps to have engaging conversations with customers. Field reps are no longer saving sales assets to their desktops or email folders. Not only is this passe, but it also hinders one of the most important elements of any sales process – a smooth customer experience. A sales enablement platform provides unified access to all the latest sales & marketing collaterals, documents, product content and videos, that sales reps can access on the spot and share with customers in real-time. This not only leads to a better quality of conversations, but it also goes a long way in gaining the trust of a customer.
Master-O is an all-encompassing sales enablement & readiness platform, which has aided several sales enablement programs for enterprise customers. The platform is a key driver of sales strategies for many market leaders across industries and empowers the field force with the right tools and information they require for having compelling sales conversations that lead to higher conversions and customer lifetime values.
To learn more about Master-O along with microlearning and enablement in the flow of work, please visit masteroapp.com or schedule a demo to discover how Master-O can redefine sales enablement for your organization.