You’ve probably heard the term “spread the wealth,” but it takes on another meaning when it comes to “spreading” knowledge in the enterprise.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) possess a great deal of insight that is undoubtedly beneficial to their sales force. The challenge: sharing it with everyone in a timely and relevant manner. In our fast-paced business environment, where competitive pressures and market conditions are always changing, it’s difficult to find the time to produce a professional video or informational document – never mind getting sales reps to actually use it.
That’s where agile content comes in. Short, to-the-point videos, similar to a YouTube tutorial, can relay information in a quick and engaging matter – and it’s much easier to create than a Hollywood-style professional video or magazine-worthy written asset. So, how exactly can SMEs create and share agile videos the right way? Here are three tips:
1. Boost Engagement and Communication
To begin, use short-videos to engage your sales reps. These videos should be no longer than two-to-three minutes in length and should have at least one thought-provoking comment, whether it’s in the video itself or text/audio in-line with the video.
For example, talk about typical customer objections and pose open-ended questions for reps to respond to, such as “how would you handle this scenario?”. It’s important for responses and questions to be visible to all reps, so that content sparks collaboration and conversation among reps, and peers can communicate with one another and share advice and insights to solve a problem.
A note of caution here: To incorporate an effective agile content strategy, the video must be easily accessible on both mobile and desktop devices, play without requiring a heavy resource load, enable easy participation (both audio and text comments, for example), and finally, be accessible offline. All of these capabilities remove barriers that reps might otherwise have to accessing and collaborating on the content.
2. Keep it Accessible
The content SMEs provide is only as good as the ability for the sales audience to view it. That being said, it’s critical to have a platform that helps prioritize content for each individual audience. Content should be highlighted in a “recommendation feed” by topic or expert so that sales reps that count on a SME’s expertise can easily find it.
Additionally, content should be easily organized in “channels”, similar to genres in Netflix, to easily navigate through content.
Lastly, it should be easy for users with incidental needs to perform simple queries and get the results they need.
Basically, the platform should “push” content to the right viewers and enable them to “pull” it using easy-to-construct criteria.
3. Measure its Effectiveness
Now that the content is created and available to the sales force, how can you measure its impact?
First, you can simply poll your sales force. Short and sweet, ask them if the content is working for them, how often they use it, if they can attribute any wins to it or even ask the dollar value.
You can also monitor the content’s engagement statistics through a platform. Although informal, in-the-field learning–typically the domain of agile content–can be more engaging than formal classroom learning, the work is done whenever and wherever reps choose to do it; there’s no one physically looking over reps’ shoulders to see what content they’re viewing, but an effective sales learning platform will show who is or is not engaging with your SME content. If you spot a correlation between sales success and engagement with your content, you can identify not only how effective your content is overall, but also compare who looks at or ignores your content and then monitor their effectiveness.
Now it’s time to hit the ground running. You have knowledge and your reps need it quickly. Go create content for them and make it easy to view, access and measure.
A version of this article was originally posted on the Allego Allegories Blog. You can read the original post here.