Balancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales team is a delicate act. Although closely intertwined, each plays a critical role in your sellers’ success – and the success of your business. 

In the age of the customer, success ultimately does not come down to how many dials a seller makes, but to the impact and quality of the customer conversation. Sellers often get one shot to deliver value to buyers who have already completed much of their journey alone. A rep’s confidence and readiness in these critical moments can mean the difference between a win or loss.

Many leaders live and breathe the philosophy: “Keep the reps dialing – we can’t waste time on non-selling activities.” But what if the time spent off the floor is directly correlated to making reps more effective in closing deals? Used wisely, this time can create consistency and predictability in your reps producing desired results. 

When done well, pulling reps off the floor to make them more effective can have a massive impact on performance. Efficiency may save time and effort – but effectiveness closes deals.

THE KEY TO IMPROVING SELLER EFFECTIVENESS

You’ve made the decision to invest time in enabling your salespeople – now what? The most successful companies ensure that their enablement activities are aligned to business initiatives and focused on increasing sales effectiveness. 

To prepare your teams to have the most effective customer conversations, your sellers need the perfect combination of role- and regional-specific content and training plus guidance on when and how to use it – all at the moment of action.

Within Highspot’s sales enablement platform, training and guidance come to life in the form of industry-first SmartPage technology. Enablement leaders can build out dynamic sales plays that help salespeople what they need to know, say, show and do in every unique customer conversation. With context on how to use the content, combined with experiential training, sellers are equipped to make the most of critical customer moments. 

When preparing to pull your reps off the floor for an enablement session, follow these do’s and don’ts to ensure your training is relevant, actionable and measurable.  

What to Avoid	What to Do
Generic presentations for all customer-facing teams	Role-specific content aligned to the buyer’s journey and sales process
Global training programs that lack specific regional intelligence	Role- and region-specific training programs that are interactive, engaging and ongoing
Long-form static playbook used primarily in onboarding	Plays that provide guidance for specific scenarios at the moment of action
Massive dump of competitive information	Dynamic, curated competitive intelligence with customer stories to prove differentiation delivered in consumable microlearning formats
Enablement updates sent via email	Engaging homepages with the latest content, training and best practices to win with customers
Communication of business initiatives solely at the annual sales kickoff	Consistent consumable communications and a feedback loop on business initiatives, as well as guidance for customer-facing teams on how to execute
No clear way to measure the adoption and effectiveness of your business initiatives	Scorecards and analytics to measure the effectiveness of enablement programs and understand the sellers demonstrable capabilities with the ability to segment by initiative, role, region and more

 

MASTERING THE BALANCING ACT

Efficiency alone is not enough. Your reps might be holding one hundred conversations a day, but if they’re not the right ones, then they will not be successful in driving your desired business outcomes. 

To help your salespeople be more effective in producing results, you have to build, land, and optimize your training and guidance. Take action with Highspot’s Guidance Framework eBook that outlines how you can enable your revenue teams to provide value in every customer conversation.