Helping Sales Teams ‘Get Their Stories Straight’
Consistent messaging is a must for optimizing sales.
However, it’s also one of those goals that’s easy to set, but not so easy to achieve. Over the years, I’ve seen lots of sales teams struggle to speak the same language when it comes to their products—to get their stories straight and keep them straight.
Here’s where sales learning and coaching platforms help.
Easy-to-find Sales Learning Content
When you’re onboarding new reps, one of the biggest challenges is getting them the product information they need when they need it—i.e., yesterday.
These platforms make it easy to organize sales training and onboarding content, so your reps locate it quickly and access it instantly. If you want to build confidence and competence across the sales force, knowing the product backwards and forwards is critical.
Within our own Allego system, for example, there are lots of channels that give Allego salespeople different examples of how other reps sell the platform. There are also examples of Customer Success or Product Marketing professionals talking about the platform for Allego reps to watch.
But some of the most valuable content we give our salespeople are powerful customer testimonial videos.
When I was onboarded as a Customer Success Manager at Allego, this was some of the most valuable learning content for me. While it’s always key to absorb how my peers were talking about and demonstrating our product, seeing what our customers had to say was invaluable.
Which features were most important for them? How were they getting value from our Flash Drills or Courses modules? Watching videos of customer testimonials added color to the tried-and-true messages I learned from the organization for honing my own talk tracks.
Reinforcing the Sales Narrative
Once everyone on your sales team is speaking the same language, it’s important to reinforce the messaging to ensure it isn’t forgotten or diluted over time. To accomplish this, sales learning and coaching platforms let you set up quizzes, knowledge checks and other reinforcement mechanisms. Everyone stays on the same page by repeating key information at regular intervals.
To practice their talk tracks, my clients’ salespeople use these tools to create videos they can review and reshoot — over and over — until they get the messages down pat. Just as important, they use the video to collaborate with other team members, as well as coaches and managers, so they aren’t practicing in a vacuum. Getting feedback and pointers from their supervisors and peers is key.
For me, this last feature was critical for learning and refining my Allego messages, and then practicing them to perfection.
Ultimately, what sales learning and coaching technology does is build more consistent messaging through a comprehensive approach to modern learning.
First, you assemble and deliver curriculum learning by organizing and pulling together the right content for your reps. Next, you’re able to reinforce that learning with quizzes and practice sessions. Finally, whenever new products or features are introduced, team members can quickly access the video library to develop and fine-tune their new messaging.
Ultimately, this can spell the difference between a team that delivers uniformly successful messaging and one that’s all over the map.
