Spinning your wheels trying to make sense of sales enablement?
Up to 75% of training programs fail to contribute to the success of business. 1
Not knowing how to measure sales performance tied to sales enablement training will stop you dead in your tracks every time. You need to gain insight and momentum when it comes to designing a program that will really improve the way you deliver sales onboarding and increase consumption of training content, which ultimately boost your team toward greater sales.
1. The Push Off: Align Business Objectives
An effective sales enablement program starts with identifying your core business challenges, objectives, and initiatives. What’s even more important is assessing your ability to enable your organization to overcome those challenges. So you first need to create your business case, outlining performance goals and what the sales team is trying to do. This step includes revenue objectives, cost reductions, centralization, and stakeholder buy-in.
2. Find Your Balance: Skill Assessment
Always remember who your audience is, and what they need as you design enablement initiatives. Put surveys and interviews to use, reaching out directly to sales in order to understand their competencies and gain input, while assessing new opportunities. Keep in mind all that is needed during the entire sales process when going through this step.
3. Get Moving: Review Existing Assets
Investing upfront time to evaluate what hasn’t worked in the past can point you in the right direction in executing on a new strategy. Identify your gaps and map out an action plan to overcome underutilized or inefficient content. Analyze strengths, and consider available resources and market relevance. You can then better analyze your content strategy related to sales enablement, and create a new plan to ensure the right message is delivered at the right time to the right audience.
4. Pick Up the Pace: Create Your Courses
Now that you better understand where both your team and assets stand, you can begin to then define a fresh curriculum for a training program that will better resonate with sales. This encompasses identifying the modules/topics that will need to be created, and developing the actual content, which should include multi-media aspects and sales scripting as well. The more interactive it is, the better retention will be.
5. Beyond the Rink: It’s Time for Rollout
Sales enablement should become a part of your organization’s culture. Promote the new program in advance to generate anticipation, clearly communicating its importance and how participation and feedback are encouraged. Grant permissions to the sales team – who should take part in which course, and consider this initial rollout a beta process where each element is tested and fine-tuned.
6. Full Speed Ahead: The Value of Assessment
Track and evaluate adoption and progress, using built-in reporting to facilitate this process. Also create a survey to share with sales so that they can easily provide feedback on the courses – what may really be working for them, what isn’t, and what else they’d like to see.
7. Smooth Gliding: Leverage the Right Support
The ideal platform will fully support your efforts in delivering a successful training program. Remember, analyzing and assessing impact is an on-going part of the process so that you can always remediate problem areas, create new modules as needed, and continue to build upon success.
With the right approach, your sales enablement efforts will get up-to-speed, bridging the sales productivity gap and empowering reps with the necessary focus for their highest potential sales. Keep the discussed tips in mind, and you’ll be off and running in no time. If you need a further expert push, contact our Exact Market team for additional guidance on a sales enablement program that can accelerate your path to performance.
1 bigtincan.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/bigtincan-Infographic-State-of-Sales-Training-4-15
