Nandakumar Chari
JANUARY 5, 2022
In our last webinar, we asked our participants a simple question. When you’re building a sales enablement framework, what do you consider the stepping stones to set up your sales teams for success? 70% of people voted that regular knowledge checks, and creating microlearning modules, make learning immersive and effective. Likewise, there was significant interest in adding gamified contests and incentives to further improve sales readiness.
With this in mind, let’s discuss the training enablers that are essential for implementing the Always-On Sales Enablement and Readiness Framework. If you don’t know what this 4-step framework is, you can read about it here.
Read Here: The 4 Step Always-On Sales Enablement Framework
The Key Enablers of Always-On Sales Readiness Framework
“Sales readiness is a continuous process that aims to equip sales teams with the right information, on the go. We need to continuously assess, measure and reinforce knowledge to create high performing sales teams that offer differentiated value to customers in every conversation.”
– NK Chari, CMO, Streamz
The Always-On framework allows you to scale sales readiness beyond a handful of your overachievers. That is to say, it allows you to provide all salespeople with the right knowledge, best practices, tools, and resources required to consistently deliver results. Following are the enablers with some of our tried and tested tips to help you improve or get started!
Driving Sales Readiness with Automated Knowledge Checks
The first step to building a sales enablement framework is to benchmark current sales readiness levels. It is a continuous process that helps build upon and improve the current sales enablement strategy.
In other words, Knowledge Checks are a tool at your disposal to assess the competencies of your sales cohorts. They are a set of questions that are triggered automatically to determine the precise know-how of your sales teams.
In fact, you can think of Knowledge Checks as personal sales coaches that help reps remember what they learnt and discover where they need improvement. Here are some tips:
- In your current sales enablement strategy, make sure you conduct Knowledge Checks periodically. After every training, at the time of onboarding or leading up to a product launch, conducting knowledge checks will help you objectively gauge the sales readiness of your teams.
- Keep your question bank interesting! For instance, move away from the cliched MCQs and bring in a mix of visual questions. Use question templates that help you assess item associations, symbol associations, and scenarios and responses.
- Provide explanations and feedback after every question and assessment respectively to further reinforce knowledge and improve sales readiness.
Learn More: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting Knowledge Checks
Always-On Learning with Sales Optimized Content
Good, easy, understandable content is the pillar of sales training. For this reason, the next step in building a sales enablement framework is creating content. However, only 31.8% of organizations have a dedicated sales enablement content strategy.
A sales enablement content plan isn’t limited to creating product PPTs and datasheets. Sales enablement managers need to spend time creating content that will drive sales readiness. The best way to do this is to slice existing content into interactive, digestible knowledge nuggets. Actively understand the forgetting curve of your teams, how your teams learn, and what kind of content is retained well.
A point often overlooked by most learning management platforms is how readily you can re-access the content. It is imperative that you provide all information on the go and make it easily searchable.
Here are some Streamz Tips to help you successfully optimize your content:
- Add titles, images, videos, flowcharts, and other visual elements to your content.
- Send weekly content refreshers on key brand information, product USPs, objection handling, critical facts, competition updates, and sales playbooks.
- Continuously analyze how your content is performing. Get feedback from your salespeople on what content they liked and what they found difficult regularly. This will not only help you improve your content, but also align it with your sales readiness goals.
Level Up Your Sales Enablement Strategy Gamified Sales Training
While the above two are the very fundamental block of sales readiness, gamification is an additional layer that plays on human psychology. It’s a common fact that salespeople are target-oriented and driven by competition. They’re not phased by challenges and will try new and innovative ways to achieve their goals. Gamification is the next act of sales enablement strategy that brings this competitiveness into training and makes it more fun! In fact, mobile apps like Duolingo and Babbel have been implementing this for years to help their users learn languages faster.
Sales gamification is an ensemble of points, leaderboards, badges, rewards, and perks that help drive the right sales behaviors. It lends itself to sales enablement managers to help create a community of always-ready sellers. Here are a few tips you should consider:
- As mentioned above, gamified contests are a play on human emotions. Your rewards, therefore, don’t necessarily need to be monetary. It’s important to make sure your contests reward the right behaviors- whether by letting reps share their progress or the badges they’ve earned.
- You can’t run a contest in isolation and announce the results after months. Your participants must be able to visualize success. Therefore, you must provide continuous visibility into the program’s rules, peer progress, and leaderboards. This will drive sales reps to complete tasks and participate fiercely.
- You should set up multiple winnable milestones that tie into the whole competition. Rewarded reps instantly either with points or badges for achieving these milestones.
- Send personalized notifications and nudges to ensure maximum participation.
Building a Sales Enablement Framework: Quick Recap
In this two-part blog, we discussed the conceptual architecture of the Always-on Sales Readiness and Enablement framework and how to successfully deploy it with the key enablers. Most of our customers who have invested in this maturity model have seen a significant increase in the productivity of their sales teams. That’s not all, this simple framework is easily sustainable with an automated digital solution.
Reach out to us for any questions on implementing this framework. Additionally, to get the latest news on the sales enablement industry and learn more about improving sales readiness, subscribe to our blog now!
