New Focus on Sales Training and Development
As sales leaders continue to cope with the myriad of changes after the pandemic, one issue is beginning to emerge as a critical challenge to overall sales success. Due to the proliferation of working remotely and virtual selling, many sales teams have experienced a lack of sales training, product knowledge, and staff collaboration.
According to new research, many sales reps don't know the answer to 40% of customer product questions. This deficit in collaboration, coaching, and training is detrimental to overall sales outcomes.
The Role of Technology in Sales Enablement
Recently Forbes addressed this issue by predicting that critical sales enablement trends will play a significant role in improving sales training in the coming year. These trends include the following recommendations:
- Hybrid workplaces are here to stay. Hybrid workplaces offer salespeople flexibility plus face-to-face interactions. Companies must ensure their platform provides mobile access, video capabilities, and asynchronous learning.
- Sales tech will converge with sales enablement. Sales tech, such as conversation intelligence (CI), can help streamline sales enablement training. With the help of artificial intelligence, CI can record practice and live customer calls, provide call transcriptions, recommend content based on call topics and analyze improvement areas for sales reps.
- Evaluating sales enablement ROI will be critical to its success. One way to calculate sales enablement’s impact is by assessing reduced risks. By increasing the number of reps who comprehend the material and demonstrate unified messaging through sales enablement training, the risk of negatively affected revenues is minimized.
- Sales enablement will accelerate institutional knowledge preservation. The great resignation has caused the loss of longtime key contributors, subject matter experts, and customer relationships. With the help of sales enablement platforms, companies can preserve employee insights through video and CI recordings. That way, if a top rep leaves, a new hire can quickly learn the ropes from top performers, even those who are no longer with the organization.
- Employee experience will be intrinsic to seller retention. Supporting salespeople starts by taking stock of their needs. Creating an environment where employees are empowered to train, quickly locate and study just-in-time content, and exchange knowledge with their peers is how organizations can start prioritizing the employee experience.
- Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) will grow in popularity and change how buyers and sellers collaborate. DSRs provide a centralized location where all pertinent collateral, case studies, videos, call recordings, and pricing information can be easily found and accessed by buyers. DSRs will grow in popularity to facilitate seller and buyer collaboration, delivering a seamless experience for both groups.
The Need for a Robust Incentive Technology Platform
Just as high tech plays a critical role in sales enablement, your sales incentive program needs the best-in-class technology platform. We can transform your sales culture into one that can win in today’s hybrid sales environment. Give us a call today.
