Tackling Sales Training with Football-Inspired Video Playbooks

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Having a great playbook, filled with the collective wisdom of your all-star reps, can be the difference between winning and losing in today’s highly competitive markets – as long as you can get your team to properly leverage it.

This has been the case in the world of professional sports for decades as well. Celebrated NFL coach Al Saunders achieved staggering results throughout his career by doing anything and everything he could to get his teams to study, internalize and fall back on the playbook. There were even famous stories of him going around and secretly leaving $100 bills in the middle of each player’s copy so he could later check which ones were missing the money to know who was studying it!

Thankfully, in the world of enterprise sales, there is already the built-in mechanism of performance-based compensation to get sales reps to want to study and practice, but the challenge lies in consistently generating and delivering relevant content to them in a format that will allow them to.

YouTube Meets TED Talks

Best-in-class sales organizations are already finding the key to being able to consistently generate and deliver the most relevant content in a timely and cost-effective way is to leverage the one technology that allows you to meet face-to-face with someone even if they’re a thousand miles away: video.

This has been true in the world of professional sports teams for decades as well. In fact, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady watches 17 hours of video each week – reviewing plays, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and coming up with strategies for improvement for the next big game. This process of study and review, of watching and critiquing our own performance – and that of our peers – is crucial for all of us to understand, whether we are professional athletes or salespeople.

Who wouldn’t want a best practice library of up-to-date, highly relevant and peer-generated content? Using short, bite-sized videos created by an organization’s own reps has allowed best-in-class sales teams to flourish in a way that has never been possible before. Reps record a video on their phone or tablet of their best pitch for a specific product and upload it so their managers can review. Then, managers go through and highlight the “top gun” videos that the entire team will be tasked with emulating. And, today’s technology makes this simple, easy, secure, and amazingly fast!

This has the effect of creating a sort of “corporate YouTube” of best practices and procedures for all the most common challenges specific to the sales teams of each individual company – essentially, a self-updating, YouTube-style sales playbook filled with the kind of distilled, high-relevance content you would get with a TED Talk.

Video is the New Document

Jim Lundy, Founder and CEO of Aragon Research, has said “video is the new document.” His research centers around cases similar to the one described above, as well as the overall rise of video in all facets of sales which has led to the hypothesis that video content growth will overtake regular content by midyear 2018.

Sales teams are not only accelerating top-line growth by using video content platforms to better train and coach, but they are using those very same tools to massively save time and T&E (travel and entertainment) expense associated with onboarding new reps and certifying reps for new product rollouts. All of this, in combination with the fact that mobile devices have made video creation easier than ever before, is contributing to widespread adoption of video technologies across sales organizations in all industries.

Mark Magnacca
Mark Magnacca is the President and co-founder of Allego, and has spent the last 15 years helping sales leaders shorten the sales cycle and distribute their best ideas faster. Prior to co-founding Allego, Mark founded Insight Development Group, Inc., a leading Sales and Presentation training firm specializing in the Financial Services industry. As a former financial advisor, Mark brings a unique perspective to the world of consultative selling. Mark is a graduate of Babson College and resides in the Boston area.

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