Nandakumar Chari
MARCH 26, 2021
In today’s digital world, the need of buyers is evolving. In a recent webinar held by Streamz about scaling Sales Readiness, Mary Shea from Forrester talked about how buyers want to connect more authentically with the product.
So, what makes up a perfect salesperson in today’s times? It’s not merely the talent to sell anymore. The perfect salesperson needs to be supplemented with the right behaviour, skills, and framework to engage buyers in meaningful “high-value” conversations. This requires thinking beyond traditional sales training; it requires sales readiness.
While sales training will give your sellers the knowledge essential to be competitive, sales readiness will drive the confidence needed to cut through the noise and amp up sales numbers. With the right sales readiness initiatives in place, your sellers can have
- Higher Win Rates;
- Higher Levels of Job Satisfaction; and
- Accelerated Ramp-Up Time.
Before we delve into the importance of scaling Sales Readiness, let’s get a deeper understanding of what it is.
What is Sales Readiness?
Sales Readiness is an objective-oriented approach to improving your sales teams. It means empowering your customer-facing teams to have meaningful conversations with your buyers and providing a world-class product experience.
In a previous blog, our CMO describes Sales Readiness as
“Ability of the enterprise to ensure continuously that each salesperson- direct or indirect, becomes a real advisor and advocate, enabling valued and meaningful conversations with the new age ‘up on things’ customers….”
Today the most common problems faced by sales leaders include:
- Onboarding new salespeople;
- Addressing a salesperson’s need for training or addressing a skill deficiency;
- Bringing underperforming salespeople up to an acceptable performance level; and
- Supporting a change in sales messaging.
Sales readiness includes a wider range of activities such as training, hiring, onboarding and much more. At the grassroots level though, it is measuring and identifying the gaps in your reps’ knowledge and skills, setting personalised goals for them and employing a strategy to reach those goals. The strategy behind sales readiness is to continuously measure, correct, and prepare team members for buyer interactions through role-specific microlearning tasks, assessments, and gamified activities until they can engage buyers with conviction.
The Importance of Scaling Sales Readiness
1. Increase in Revenue
The first measurable impact of rolling out Sales Initiatives is the growth of the bottom line. Companies that prioritize effective onboarding and ongoing communication, coaching, and training, are heavily investing in sales readiness tools. They are investing in their most valuable asset- the sales force.
With mobile sales readiness solutions especially, sellers are spending more time learning on the job and sharpening their skills. When done well, sales readiness has hallowed effect on revenue growth, as it:
Reduces Ramp Time
Improves Productivity
Increases Closing Rates
Enables reps to identify and pursue selling opportunities
Ensures optimal onboarding
2. Equip Leaders with the Right Metrics
Modern Mobile Sales Readiness Solutions help you assess and visualize the effectiveness of your readiness programs.
They give you an in-depth analysis of how your reps are spending their time learning, the content they are engaging with, and the continuous change in their skill levels. All this data is available on a single platform so an admin, manager, or enablement leader doesn’t need to pull up numerous sheets.
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3. Improved Communication with Prospects
Let’s consider a scenario of pre-sales readiness. Your rep goes and speaks to your prospect and tries to engage them. Your prospect asks a question and while your rep realizes what is required, he can’t back up his answer with the right material and key offerings.
Sales readiness encourages you to align your pathway with the marketing team to produce the best content- and train your sales team on how to use it most effectively. It coaches them to analyze what they need at each buying stage and how to use those collaterals to nurture and close deals.
A sales readiness program enables your reps to access collaterals in real time and highlight key selling points, and other relevant information to have more informed conversations with prospects. Besides, continuous learning and assessment help enforce key behaviors, information, and skills.
4. Increased Engagement and Sense of Community with Gamification
Gamification is the introduction of game mechanics into non-game situations, like work or training. It is currently being used to combat disengagement at work through points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards.
Most people in today’s sales force and Gen X and Y and it is estimated that by 2025, as much as 75% of the global workforce will be millennials. This is a generation that has spent the better part of their lives with technology in hand. Getting them involved in learning where gamification is employed makes the sales leader’s task somewhat easier.
A gamified learning experience implements fun and exciting way for teams to learn important sales techniques and behaviours. It provides instant feedback and facilitates a better learning curve and content engagement. Presented as a game instead of a chore, sales training becomes more appealing.
5. Personalised Learning and Improved Skills
The emergence of new technologies is making some current skills redundant. There is a demand to rapidly upskill and reskill sales reps. The wheels of the new age selling have to be greased by engaging content delivered in the context of the learner’s role, personality, and learning style. Learn more here: Competitive Advantages of Microlearning
The personalization of training should be used to stimulate employees and provide a highly customized and relevant learning experience. It will enable sales leaders to align the learners with business goals and quickly upskill or reskill them effectively. Personalized training will put learning into the reps’ hands and offer:
Custom approaches that match their readiness levels, strengths, and current proficiency level and attend to their future needs.
Ownership of their learning curve will result in higher engagement and make them proactive.
See Sales Readiness in Action
Now that you understand the importance of scaling sales readiness, the next step is to choose the right platform to get you started. You need to assess the trends in the market and understand your business’ pain points.
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