Tag: sales training

Sales Enablement Tools Can Help You Train Your Team Faster

Sales enablement solutions are changing the sales operation landscape. Legacy, old-school learning systems are not user-friendly, and consumer-grade solutions don’t offer important security and access controls needed by enterprises. To create and maintain a well-trained sales team, companies need to explore ways to improve their onboarding, training, and information-sharing capabilities.

Today, a best-practice sales enablement platform should provide you with the ability to upload and intelligently organize video content, and to record training videos in a few clicks.

An enablement solution should make it easy for all team members to share content with each other, and with external partners. By design, these tools should be open, collaborative, and secure.

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement is the implementation of technology to make the onboarding and training of sales teams more efficient and productive. Using a modern platform will allow sales teams to sell with far more skill, and maintains all relevant sales collateral in an organized, shareable portal.

Discover the Benefits of Sales Enablement

From small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, sales enablement solutions help streamline the on-boarding process and speed up new-hire training. These solutions empower companies to communicate their processes and procedures and share company updates faster.

1. 24/7 Training Availability

Because sales professionals are in constant motion, it can be difficult to get the entire team together for training, updates, and reporting. By contrast, creating videos and uploading them to a central location allows team members to view training content when they can give the material their full attention.

2. Faster, Higher Quality Onboarding Of New Hires

A sales enablement platform gives you the most effective solution for efficient, high-quality training. Training new team members, one at a time, in an ad hoc manner is not efficient. Asking salespeople to read one-dimensional training documents is a low-quality learning experience when compared with videos and slide presentations that combine graphics with audio explanations.

3. Keep Company Information Current

Whether there’s a change in business operations, changes to CRM software, product updates, and pricing changes, employees should be given an overview and some training.

The most efficient way to communicate these changes is to create instructional videos that can be uploaded and shared with the entire team; that remains available 24/7, and that can be accessed through any device.

Sales Enablement Manager

The Sales Enablement Manager plays a critical role by providing dedicated support to the team’s success. This person typically has prior experience with highly-technical and complex sales in the enterprise space. They optimize the sales process, create amazing sales playbooks, manage certifications, and drive revenue campaigns. This person should be adept at working with prospects as they are with working with customers.

WHAT’S THE Difference between A Sales Enablement Manager and Sales Ops Manager?

At smaller organizations, these roles may be interchangeable. But when a company is in “growth mode”, the Sales Ops Manager carries out many of the administrative and operational tasks required to run a sales organization. By contrast, a Sales Enablement Manager may be focused on accelerating the sales team’s productivity and efficiency, implementing processes and guidelines for aligned teams.

How Can Enablement Affect Your Business?

Sales enablement is the easiest way to train your sales team and keep them up to date. Creating videos for your team to watch and reference again as needed will provide them with the best opportunity to succeed in their roles. 

Learn more about video enablement and how adding it to your sales enablement playbook will significantly improve sales team efficiency.

Using Video Role-Playing for More Effective Sales Training

This bit of military wisdom not only applies to actual war, but to business as well. In any endeavor, proper preparation and training are the keys to success. And in the cutthroat battlefield that is sales and marketing, the more prepared and trained your sales and marketing representatives are, the more money they make. And of all the myriad methods of training available today, nothing is perhaps more under-utilized or maligned than role-playing.

“The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.”

Sales training utilizing role-playing techniques – when done the right way – is one of the most effective methods of preparing your staff for any situation and any customer. Properly conducted role-playing sessions can sharpen your staff’s skills and significantly increase your sales volume. In particular, video role-playing combines the effectivity of actual role-play with the reliability, knowledge-retention appeal and reusability that is inherent in pre-recorded video learning material.

Introduction and the “Swiss Army Knife” Video

Most potential sales situations will involve customers who have at least a mild interest in availing of your products and services but need that last push of persuasion to see the value in your offerings and convince them to finally open up their wallet. In most such cases, a well-scripted “swiss army knife” role-play video that depicts the “usual customer” that will enable your staff to practice the knowledge they have learned in your onboarding resources is a good way to kick off learning using video role-playing.

Situational Videos and “Leveling Up”

Aside from the “general role-playing training”, you can also utilize video solutions for specific situations, using your staff’s innate skills, characteristics and quirks to emulate such customers or situations. Perhaps, one or two of your team members excel at being bitchy or irate? How about another team member who’s a stickler for the smallest of details? Another one may be the lawyer-type who loves using his or her opponent’s arguments against them. Still, another one may be an expert on “non-commitment”. All of these situations can be captured and stored on video for repeated training sessions. And once all these initial scenarios become “easy mode” for all your staff, you can tell them to construct more difficult scenarios to role-play and learn from. This way, everybody improves and your staff actually develops the sense of anticipating the most difficult scenarios possible in every encounter. Subsequently, everyone will be prepared to deal with even the most nightmarish of situations, quite possibly turning a losing encounter into a buzzer-beating sales victory!

Critique Role-Playing Videos

Evaluating a live sales training role-playing session right after it finishes is a good way to learn. But people are bound to miss some of the details that can sometimes make-or-break the sales pitch. One of the major advantages of video-recorded role-playing training is that they can be repeatedly evaluated by you and your staff down to the smallest of details to pick out which areas to improve. This is similar to how pro sports teams go through film sessions of past games (and even of opponents’ games) to get every possible advantage in future match-ups.

Importantly, the goal of the critique should not be punishment, shaming or calling out “bad” performances. Rather, it must be seen as a way to improve your performance by trying to improve the – as sports coaches love to call them – “little things that matter”. After all, business is a professional sport in its own right, and to become a champion you need to be the best.

Centralize, Organize and Share the Wealth

A centralized platform, like CircleHD, enables content creators, corporate executives and managers to make all their video solutions readily available and accessible in an organized manner, within a secure digital environment. This means that all of your sales training role-playing videos can be just one click away anytime and from almost anywhere.

Schedule a demo with us now and unlock your sales team’s potential with the power of video platforms.

The Power of Employee Video and Self-Broadcasting for Enterprises

At CircleHD, we believe opportunities made available by employee video can transform knowledge into company wealth. While many are moving the needle with self-broadcast in video, it often does not go past the top 10% of performers. In order to break through that barrier, a newer, faster experience is needed to replace legacy roadblocks to adoption.

There are some best practices organizations are implementing to operationalize video into learning, while encouraging peer-to-peer and knowledge sharing to encourage team skills growth. Here’s just a few:

  • Cambridge Engineering & CircleHD: I believe the epicenter for employee generated video is in Chesterfield, Missouri. Marc Braun is a primary lead in a consortium of 500 companies, hacking culture with video.

    As President of Cambridge Engineering, Marc doubled revenue and tripled operating profit in an industry with a CAGR of just 6.62%. Marc’s employees are told, “if you see a problem or waste, you have the job autonomy to fix it.” Just shoot a 1-min before / after video, and it’s played next morning at the all-hands meeting.

    “I have learned video takes courage to make. There is mastery in self-broadcast. And when video is given a purpose, the gift is people that outgrow the company.”

    This video interview was released to LinkedIn, where it got 7,600 views, and 69 likes.
  • Dell: Video lets employees bypass the organizational chart and connect with colleagues in other silos in the pursuit of better customer experiences. Dell uses Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite to connect its salespeople with subject-matter experts.

    “There are a lot of salespeople at Dell, but there are only a few ph.D.s in big data or machine learning,” said Lawrence Grafton, Solutions Product Manager at Dell. “Those ph.D.s can post an explainer video so that sales can better understand the topic. 
  • Moffitt Cancer Center uses an enterprise video platform to deliver content externally. The Moffitt Cancer Center uses its enterprise platform from vBrick to deliver video externally to patients.

    “We use it internally but also use a guest portal for external use,” said John Maass. He added that a doctor could curate or record videos to help patients understand their specific prognosis, “rather than go out to WebMD and get scared.” 
  • Video for Sales Training: ‘In fact, peer-to-peer instruction is one of the main pillars of modern learning programs and the majority of reps prefer peer knowledge sharing over corporate or manager-generated content. 

    Our survey of sales reps and their managers found the majority (65 percent) of sales representatives agree that sales pitch advice from peers is more effective than training from the corporation and that top-performing sales organizations are 76 percent more likely to utilize peer-generated video content for training than other firms. 
  • CISCO Shorty Awards: While more social in nature, the results from Cisco in 2016 for employee-generated video and content are outstanding. Get tips from this Shorty awards entry. 
  • Video in HR: “Employees want that guidance in an easy-to-access format to help them translate a complex topic in a way that will lead them to the right decision. Advanced HR teams have picked up on this, making video their medium of choice and incorporating into their open enrollment communications strategy.” 

CircleHD is the first cloud-native enterprise video platform for employees and teams of any size. For more information about how we can help your organization implement video learning, schedule a demo.