Month: September 2020

Why Your Business Needs Sales Enablement

There’s no question about it: digital is the new normal and this fact is fast impacting the buying and selling process in today’s rapidly-shifting digital marketplace. Once upon a time, only the biggest, most established companies had prominent visibility, but today’s buyer has unlimited access to the latest market trends and intelligence available in the palm of their hand (literally). And with everything moving at a rapid pace, companies are more compelled than ever to improve their sales process in order to stay relevant and competitive. 

But shifting to an agile and engaged sales process isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires organizations to equip their reps with the right tools, content, and processes in order to drive success. That’s why so many companies are turning to sales enablement to increase rep knowledge, improve prospect relationships, and grow their bottom line.

According to the 2018 “Sales Enablement Report” by CSO Insights, the percentage of salespeople achieving quota improved by 10.6%, which is an improvement of 22.7%. In these extraordinary times, companies can’t afford to miss out on a strategy that yields those kinds of results. 

But the benefits of proper sales enablement go beyond just growing your revenue. It also facilitates a multitude of business benefits across your organization, like:

Keeping Your Sales Team Informed

With a constantly shifting marketplace and selling landscape, it’s vital that your reps are armed with the latest knowledge and information about your industry and the issues affecting companies in the space. A successful program empowers your team to absorb essential information and content so they are adequately prepared to deal with a prospect and offer value. Proper sales enablement allows you to ensure all reps are getting consistent messaging about your company’s products, services, messaging, and overall positioning, so they can more effectively engage prospects across multiple channels at different stages in the sales life cycle. 

Synthsizing External Teams

Thre’s no doubt that, for a sales program to be effective, there needs to be efficient cross-collaboration between sales and marketing. In fact, a survey revealed that, on average, about a third of the assets reps need to service the customer journey come from marketing. 

But the truth is, it’s very rare they are working with marketing alone–oftentimes sales is connected with teams across the entire company. That’s why it’s so critical to include “implementing a proper sales enablement portal” on your strategy’s priority list. By setting up a hub where teams across the company can store and share trusted information, you reduce the overall chaos and disorganization that can accompany a high volume of assets coming in from multiple places, ensuring that the best information consistently flows to the sales team. This allows your reps to spend less time looking for the right content, reduces redundant communication threads, and allows marketing and sales enablement to control the accuracy, quality, and consistency of the information being shared with reps.

Getting More from New Talent

No matter what area of an organization you’re in, finding, retaining, and properly onboarding new talent can be difficult. But sales teams also have to contend with a few unique roadblocks, namely:

  • It takes and average of 10 months or more for a new sales rep to be fully productive and;
  • “The average sales turnover rate is 35%, compared to an average turnover rate for all industries of 13%. In other words, sales turnover rate is nearly triple the average employee turnover rate,” according to HubSpot.

With increasing competition and control shifting to buyers, it’s more important than ever to build a sales team that is engaged and committed to representing your company and products. A proper sales enablement platform not only gives your reps the information they need to be successful but can also play a critical role in rep success from the moment you hire them. 

65% of employees believe the quality of training and learning opportunities positively influences their engagement so it’s easy to understand why the most forward-thinking organizations are using sales enablement solutions to build full-scale onboarding and training programs that set new talent up for success. The most versatile and robust platforms allow you to easily establish training tracks, integrate them with tests and quizzes, and end up becoming a resource reps can easily refer back to later. 

Data-Driven Decision-Making

It’s a well-known truth: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. And while every leader will tout the advantages of enabling sales with the right tools, knowledge, and guidance, many organizations are still absent any properly-defined sales process or way to effectively measure it. 

In today’s data-driven world, it’s not enough to just have a strategy and infrastructure in place, you also need informative analytics that can empower you to make smarter decisions for your team and your business. A formal sales enablement structure should include a tool that not only tells stakeholders what is working (and what is not), helps quantify success in real dollars, and gives insight into key metrics like:

  • Who is accessing the content
  • What they are accessing
  • How long they engaged with it
  • How effective the content was 
  • If the content translated to a sale

Data doesn’t lie: when sales teams create and distribute content that is meaningful to their audience, they are radically more effective. Sadly, many platforms say they offer this type of in-depth reporting but, oftentimes, the capabilities come up short. You’ll want to find a solution that not only allows you to generate custom reports but also integrates effectively with existing programs in your tech stack like Salesforce so you get the most holistic picture of the impact your content is having as possible. 

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Would you like to learn more about how CircleHD’s sales enablement software can help your team deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time? We’d love to speak with you. Let’s talk.

How to Get the Most Out of Your Video Content Management Tool

As more and more businesses are driven online, the use of video for training, communication, enablement, and other organizational functions is growing. But even before this great remote work experiment began, enterprises were still having to contend with an often-confusing matrix of overlapping solutions to manage their internal (and sometimes external) content. 

Instead of parsing together different tools to manage a wide range of assets, companies are increasingly turning to video content management platforms to securely create, host, and share information with their employees. But these solutions are only as useful as you make them. To set your team up for success, follow these best practices. 

It’s All About the Set-Up

Whether you already have a video content management system in place or are looking to implement one, it’s always a good idea to go back to basics and get a holistic view of what assets you have. Too often, content is created and then forgotten about, which can lead to employees referring to outdated information. 

While it might seem overwhelming to clean up, it doesn’t have to be. Like anything, this process becomes much more manageable if you break it down into bite-sized pieces. Create a spreadsheet of all existing assets, noting the name of the item, what type of file it is, a short description of its use, and a link to where it’s currently being stored. This will help you assess where updates are needed, give you valuable insights into what files you may want to toss, and help you address any areas where more content may be needed. 

Categorize With Effectiveness

It’s no secret that more content brings more problems, particularly when it comes to effectively storing it. After all, your assets are only as good as how discoverable they are. Employees have reported spending 43 hours every month searching for information (that’s over 500 hours a year), which contributes to lost productivity and a suffering bottom line. 

But there’s also a silent issue that many leaders don’t talk about or address: information overload. Even when there’s not a pandemic going on, workers are often constantly barraged by an onslaught of email and Slack messages, which results in key information getting lost in a black hole. 

Couple these issues together and you have a recipe for disaster, which is why categorizing your content is arguably the most critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring the adoption of a corporate video portal across your enterprise. 

Increase to usefulness and discoverability of your content by:

  • Separating assets into channels based on goals, subject matter, or function, similar to Netflix. The best part about setting your files up this way versus a “catch-all” folder is that you’re able to quickly add a piece of content into a track with a simple click whereas it’s more difficult to add new folders to a large store of existing content while retaining their discoverability. 
  • Ensuring everything uploaded has relevant tags. Hot tip: a good way to keep tagging structures consistent is to create a document everyone on your team can refer to that outlines what type of content should be paired with certain keywords. If you’re like us and prefer things to be more uniform, putting a naming convention for all files in place can also help keep things organized. 
  • Adding contextual information. After all, information is only as good as the background you can provide on it. You wouldn’t just jump into the middle of a movie you’ve never seen without understanding the plot that led up to that point, would you? The good news is that providing this information doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds; it is easily achieved by adding a thumbnail that provides a clue as to what the file is about, or a short description to accompany the name. 
  • Annotating your assets and leaving important insights about content for others to refer back to. This could be in the form of notes about changes, new information, or when a certain tactic or skill should be used. This provides an easy way for thoughts and advice to be captured for posterity and is a great way for teams to collaborate and share what they have learned–a very useful feature for preserving training or sales intelligence. 

Secure Your Content

Having great assets and storing them effectively is a great start, but you also need to have a solid security strategy to prevent information from falling into the wrong hands (and, in turn, your company falling into a potential PR disaster). But sometimes, the reasons to secure your content aren’t always so clandestine: you may want to restrict content to certain teams or levels of seniority, for example. Whatever your use case, you should be using a platform that utilizes the latest enterprise-grade security protocols such as end-to-end encryption, SSO, and custom access controls. 

Another good best practice to follow includes critically assessing what levels and permissions you want to grant for each uploaded piece of content in order to keep your most sensitive information as secure as possible. 

Cast a Wider Net

Giving employees the ability to access content on their own terms is incredibly powerful for any enterprise. Whether your company is still working in-house, or you’re distributed, there’s still a great need to access information as conveniently as possible. This is where a dedicated mobile application is especially helpful. Even if people are working from home, they are still driving places in their car, going for a run, or doing things that don’t require them to be at a desk. In fact, 60% of employees use apps for work-related activity.

But there’s a prevailing idea that creating such a tool would require a ton of money or resources but that’s actually not the case. A video content management system like CircleHD comes with a native app that you’re able to custom brand so it becomes a natural extension of your organization. By having an iOS or Android application in place, you enable company information or training to be accessed 24/7 from anywhere in the world regardless of time zone or internet connectivity (and without the hurdles of trying to use a clunky VPN or a Learning Management System that isn’t optimized for mobile). 

Measure the Impact

Content is only as good as the impact it’s having and the truth is you cannot measure its usefulness or impact without proper analytics. But the truth is most systems only give you superficial insights that don’t really help you make data-driven decisions that impact ROI. 

When it comes to determining what content is working best for your teams and new hires, you’ll want to look at metrics like:

  • Who is watching videos
  • When they are watching videos
  • How long they are engaging with the content
  • Where they may have dropped off or had trouble

By understanding these data points, you can make informed decisions about what type of content to create and what may not be as helpful. 

No matter where your teams are working from, it’s important to empower them with the tools and information they need to stay in the loop and do their job effectively. By putting the proper tools and processes in place and being intentional about communications, you’ll create a winning strategy and get the most mileage possible out of your corporate video portal.

Do you want to learn more about how you can effectively implement a video content management tool at your enterprise? Let’s talk.