Is Your Sales Enablement Sustainable?
Most sales training professionals will tell you they are working within a “new normal” these days. The products they must train reps how to sell grow increasingly complicated. Customers are savvier than ever and often do most of their research before even engaging with a rep. Procurement departments aggressively look for ways to cut costs. Marketplaces grow more competitive as new players enter the fray. And for many industries, the regulatory landscape is harder to navigate with each passing year.
The end goal of sales training should be to equip sales reps to be a trusted advocate for their customers. When sales reps partner with their customer and invest in their shared success, the buyer and seller both win. This is obviously a tall order; it demands a high level of dedication from the sales rep and requires that they truly care about their customers’ outcomes. It also demands a lot from the trainers who must prepare sales reps to sell.
With such high expectations placed on sales professionals, it’s no wonder that sales enablement has become a bigger focus for trainers. What training and resources do sales reps need to be able to become the trusted partner that customers want? How can important product information, and knowledge of the competitive landscape, be sustained and built upon long after a product launch event or national sales meeting?
Unfortunately, many of the sales enablement solutions and strategies organizations use today fall short of their intended goals. They are either unwieldy to access, focused on the wrong information or unresponsive to new regulatory changes. If trainers hope to increase knowledge retention after an initial learning event and engage sales reps with ongoing skill development opportunities, sales enablement tools must be carefully designed and implemented.
If your sales enablement tools and strategies have one or more of the following characteristics, they may not be sustainable practices going forward:
1. They are not connected to reps’ daily workflow
If your sales reps spend most of their time away from a computer, creating sales enablement tools that are only available on a desktop or even a tablet is a huge miss. Designing tools that are “mobile friendly” is no longer enough: sales enablement tools and strategies must be specifically optimized for the mobile experience.
If your sales reps work in a call center environment, the opposite may be true and they will prefer to access tools from the computer they use all day to sell. No matter where your sales reps spend most of their time, connecting sales enablement tools and resources to the CRM system is ideal.
2. They only teach basic features and benefits
Some sales enablement only focuses on the basic features and benefits of a product. However, customers increasingly need sales professionals to understand their unique pain and partner with them to find the right solution. If you only teach reps how to recite a list of product facts, you really have not prepared them to sell at all.
3. They don’t drive uniform messaging
The marketing department will, of course, tell you that uniform messaging is very important. When a product is complex and highly regulated, it is absolutely critical to ensure that sales reps are saying the same things, in the same way, around the world. This is where learning reinforcement stands out as a sales enablement strategy.
4. They don’t adapt with regulatory changes
Many of our clients work within highly regulated industries where the marketplace changes overnight. For example, the Affordable Care Act has caused health systems and hospitals to shift their focus from a volume-based model to a population management model where quality and risk reduction are king. Sales reps who are still carrying around the features and benefits of yesterday are unprepared to meet the needs of their customers, who now care less about volume and more about patient outcomes and reducing readmissions. For this reason, sales enablement content must be continuously audited and tweaked to make sure it encourages the correct behaviors and teaches the right messages.
