The availability of engaging and valuable sales training content has long been a priority for most companies. However, over the past few years, sales enablement has emerged as a hot new trend in B2B sales training, and sales managers are recognizing that getting the right content into the hands of their sales team is only half the battle.
While there is no standard blueprint for creating a successful sales team, research shows that the yearly sales kickoff – even when supplemented with intermittent classroom training – is no longer producing the desired results. In fact, according to the National Association of Sales Professionals, 84 percent of training content is likely to be forgotten within 30 days unless there is ongoing follow-up and reinforcement. Enter sales enablement, which is pivotal to helping the modern sales force to both develop and retain the skills needed to close more deals.
What Is Sales Enablement?
Before we delve into strategies for successful sales enablement, let’s take a closer look at how sales enablement is defined.
Put simply, sales enablement is a function that helps sales teams to become more effective. While the role is still relatively new and definitions vary, the consensus is that the sales enablement professional is a hybrid of sales and marketing that better relates to the experiences of the salespeople, thereby providing them with relevant, engaging content for each stage of the sales process. Whereas sales training takes place on certain designated days or at certain times of the year, sales enablement is an ongoing and continuously evolving process. While organizations may approach this role differently, the goal of sales enablement is to provide individualized and ongoing guidance to salespeople to increase their close rate.
To evaluate the effectiveness of a sales enablement strategy, companies should look at how content from training materials is implemented and used during the sale, not just what content is being read. This means that sales enablement must not only create strategies and content, but also monitor their effectiveness by tracking the sales team’s success.
Mobile-Video for Effective Sales Enablement
While there is no standard method for implementing a sales enablement strategy, many companies have found that on-the-go access to high-impact content is essential and additionally, that collaboration, feedback, and coaching are equally important to the process as product training and classroom learning.
Due to the nature of the job, salespeople are often in the field and therefore, tablets and smartphones can be the ideal platform to make training accessible. The unique, high-pressure and deadline-sensitive role of a sales rep requires easy access to knowledge, content and best practices—as well as learning reinforcement through ongoing practice, coaching and feedback. Sales professionals are far more likely to learn and internalize information when they are most motivated to learn – typically at deal time. This type of just-in-time learning increases knowledge absorption and retention more effectively than traditional classroom learning because it enables professionals to access content at the times that they choose—when they are in the best environment and mindset to learn.
Far more than the traditional, static sales meeting, mobile-video enables real-time collaboration across sales teams, promotes peer-to-peer sharing of best practices, and allows team members to develop product training, build new sales assets and provide guidelines for using them.
Video is also the most efficient and impactful platform for providing coaching and feedback, including pitch rehearsals and role-play assignments, along with interactive tools to enhance productivity. Virtually any topic or exercise that can be covered during an in-person sales meeting can be shared via video, without the typical meeting tangents, distractions and expenses.
Launching a Mobile-Video Strategy
The key for implementing a mobile-video strategy at the enterprise level is to provide sales professionals with the tools needed to create and share compelling videos on their mobile devices that positively impact both sales training and sales enablement efforts. Capturing best practices, insights and objection handling in short videos and sharing them across the team can be hugely successful. Not only can sales professionals see first-hand the pitches of top performing peers, but they can also develop a clearer idea of what ‘good’ looks like when it comes to corporate messaging and product sales presentations. They can also reference those videos on demand for their own development anytime, anywhere, and can apply the videos for their own benefit in client situations that have similar challenges.
Video can be further leveraged to support the transfer of learning from training to the sales environment and to reinforce content delivered to new hires during the onboarding process. Access to this information in the field, as well as to continuous coaching and feedback, can also help reps fine tune their sales skills with deliberate practice of the sales messaging.
As an example, a global technology-enabled staffing and recruiting service is using the Allego platform to share best practices and collaborate more effectively across a geographically distributed team. Each week, salespeople share their insights by creating and sharing one- to two-minute videos with titles like “What worked for me this week” and “Top challenges this week.” The sales reps watch videos of top performers on their team delivering key sales messages and demonstrating a solid pitch, which can be applied to their own development in client situations with similar challenges. Best of all, they can do so anytime, anywhere.
Critical to the success of any sales learning platform implementation is ongoing participation by the head of sales enablement. In the customer example above, the VP of sales enablement creates assignments and each sales manager records and distributes weekly videos to his or her team, communicating the top three priorities each rep must focus on for the week. While many users were initially camera-shy, the benefit of being able to collaborate globally, obtain immediate access to best practices and key objection handling, and also review success stories or challenges, has resulted in higher team engagement.
As more companies turn to comprehensive sales enablement processes to train employees, mobile- video will further emerge as a pivotal tool to deliver both sales content and training. As the modern sales team becomes even more distributed, these tools will help to simplify the collection, curation and sharing of valuable content from the field with reps located across the globe.
