When it comes to growing, scaling, and developing an excellent sales team, there’s truly a fine art to it that can’t be learned overnight. In a re-airing of this episode of Ready, Set, Sell, Hannah and Tony sit down with Stephanie Valenti, who was Chief Revenue Officer at SmartBug Media at the time of the original interview.
In her role, Stephanie led sales, marketing, and all client services and delivery departments at the company. She’s also spent more than 15 years learning the best strategies for fostering sustainable growth, leading a team, and helping B2B sales organizations scale up, so she has plenty of wisdom to share about leadership and the customer journey overall.
During the episode, Stephanie shares lots of insightful advice and plenty of actionable tips that you can benefit from, no matter your current role within your organization.
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Ready, Set, Sell focuses on sales performance, productivity, and continuous training to create entire teams of high performers. Check out our full episode archive below.
It’s now a given that more sales meetings will be virtual for the foreseeable future. But keeping people engaged and focused while virtual is a challenge. Too many people turn off their camera and multitask. While people may commit to attending a meeting but they don’t necessarily attend with purpose or feel energized when attending.
There’s an opportunity for salespeople to flip this around. Most people take their foot off the pedal once a meeting is scheduled. But there are things that you and your sales team can do between getting a meeting scheduled and making sure the time your buyers invest with you is engaging and useful.
Whether it’s a meet and greet, a kickoff meeting, a critical sales pitch, or a discovery call, you need to define the parameters that make a successful meeting and help your salespeople skill up in their teaching skills. What’s surprising is how seldom sales teams define meeting facilitation as a critical sales skill to be taught, reinforced or observed in salespeople. There is a need for a systematic process to upskill your people on those critical behaviors that make for a successful virtual sales meeting. They should be part of your onboarding experience and your coaching cadence.
You can’t ever over-prepare people on how to put the ACTIVE in interactive presentations. You have to help them build their mindset and skillset so they have hardened muscles in terms of the core selling skills and habits that apply to greater influence in a virtual world. One that doesn’t require technology, but enables all to benefit from it.
The perfect sales meeting
There are four factors that define a successful sales meeting:
Being on time, prepared, and ready with an “ENGAGEing” presentation
The next meeting is scheduled
Checklist of outcomes reviewed
All standing items are resolved
Without all of these in place, you will probably not get a next meeting.
We are increasingly in a complex buying and selling cycle. Today’s buyer is not a single entity, it’s actually many people working with the buyer – procurement, finance, the user, process owners. Similarly for the seller, the sales experience has gone well beyond simply the account executive.
At the meeting, every member of your sales team has to be on message. They need to know exactly what their role is in the meeting, what specific skill sets they’re going to need and what content they need to bring to the table. This all needs to be completely aligned. Aligning all of your sales team, not just your account executives, is crucial because you need to help them understand their audience and empower them with the right content with the right skills to conduct a successful virtual sales meeting.
Engaging virtual participants
Too often, salespeople can sound robotic as they focus on pitching rather than engaging their buyers. You need to make sure you understand the persona of your buyer and tailor your content, pitch, pre-work and facilitation to engage and add value in the time you have with them.
To engage them, design your meetings so people feel like they are the center. This means you also need to know your technology so it’s seamless for you. You can then really focus on the people and deliver in a way that brings out the brilliance of your product, service, and how you are solving the buyer’s unique challenges.
When designing your sales meeting, you can engage buyers by thinking about it differently. You’re not running a sales meeting, you’re training your customers. This means your salespeople aren’t selling, they’re teaching. This is a big differentiator. If you have a 20-minute sales call, your mission should be to teach your buyers everything you can.
A seller may spend most of their time thinking about what they want to share and very little thinking about how to share it in a way that resonates. You need to flip that equation and spend most of your energy designing your virtual meetings so that the buyer is fired up. You want your buyer to spend 30% of their time learning the content and 70% practicing.
When people log into a sales presentation they want it to be all about them. That requires some very powerful shifts. You want to let people talk and open up to you. This flips the design of a typical sales meeting where the presenters usually do all the talking and the buyers are processing.
You want your buyers to have a high level of involvement. To engage them and prevent them from multitasking you need interactivity every two to three minutes. This can be listening to other voices, talking themself or doing fun stuff.
There are lots of ways that you can do this virtually, and I’ll explain some of these in more detail below.
To help you achieve this, I’ve identified six steps to holding an engaging virtual sales meeting.
1. Energize participants
Really engaging participants starts by energizing people. Data tells us the average human attention span is 20 minutes, but for online video interactions it’s about 60 seconds. We’re competing for attention span from buyers trying to get work done on a 10 by 12 inch screen.
The faster you energize people when they log in, the faster they’re involved. Ask them a tough or interesting question and get them to type their answers in the chat box. You want them to realize that it’s important that they show up to this meeting, they can’t just sit back passively. A hint, don’t start with a super tricky question. Perhaps start with a simple question, like where they’re dialling in from and then move to more complex questions.
You can also energize people ahead of the meeting. Send out a book, article video or even an online survey, and ask them to take a look at it if they have a few minutes before the meeting. This activates the reticular activating system in their brain so they come in already energized and excited to learn.
2. Navigate content
Before you share the information that you want to share, you need to be crystal clear about what your objectives are. What do you want your buyers to do differently as a result of the time with you?
If you know where you want them to get to, then you can work out how you’re going to get them there. When you’re face to face, it’s pretty clear because you can see people nodding, but virtually you have to put in interactivity along the way. You can do this by asking them questions or putting them in a breakout room with a buddy and ask them a powerful question that you need to know so you can position your solution. You could also get them to experience what you’re selling and then go back and deconstruct it.
When you’re presenting, you want to use multiple modalities so you can connect with multiple senses. Every time you shift the modality or the sense, you’re activating a different part of the brain which captures and keeps attention as well as helps people retain what you are sharing.
3. Generate meaning
Generating meaning is about letting your buyers know what’s in it for them. If you just keep sharing more and more information, their brain tries to work out what’s important to remember and what has no relevance to them. By generating meaning you stop people from checking out, reengage them in why it is valuable to pay attention and it allows you to move to the next step.
You can do this by overtly asking your buyer questions. What does a tool like this mean for you? What does it cost you not to have this tool? What are you currently doing?
Buyers can put their answers in the chat and you could then call them out by their name and ask them to tell you more. This not only generates meaning but it also helps you make a connection with the buyer. For other people on the call, it also engages them. They’re hearing different voices and they realize they may be called on to speak soon.
You can also use breakout rooms as another way to build interaction. Ask them to tell each other their stories.
What I’ve noticed in a lot of sales calls is that salespeople often tell buyers why their tool is important. When you ask the buyer to tell you what’s important, it flips it around and their answer allows you to fine-tune your sales approach.
4. Apply to the real world
When you generate meaning you can see how your buyer will apply what you’ve taught them, or your solution, in the real world. Help your buyer practice what they’ve learnt immediately by popping them in a breakout room immediately.
You can also structure your questions so they see the need for what you’re selling without realizing it. This is tricky but you can do it.
For example, I’m working with a group that teaches people how to use cameras and systems in the operating room. They ask a range of questions to help the buyers understand how they would apply their solution in the real world. Does your patient need a stent? Do they need open heart surgery? What if you saw this with the camera, what would that mean?
These questions position their product. They can then let the buyer practice with their product so they can see how it would apply to them in the real world. Anything you can do to have them demonstrate that they learned something from you in your sales presentation, and can apply it in the real world will help you.
Other things you could try include giving your buyers a mini case study and letting them go into a breakout room to figure it out. The more they apply the information you’ve taught them with you, the better the questions they’re going to ask and the more you can refine how you’re going to train them next time. Your buyers will also feel more excited and engaged with the learning experience they’ve had.
5. Gauge and celebrate
The next step is to gauge what your buyers have learned and celebrate it with them. You could do this by having a little Jeopardy game or quiz where they test their new knowledge. This gives them a chance to feel empowered that they’ve learned and sets both them and you up for success. People love to feel like they’ve achieved and it will let them log off on a high.
You can also use this approach in your own internal meetings. Ask your top-performing peers to show others what they’re doing to get those sales. All of a sudden you have a much more engaging team meeting because one of your superstars is presenting their success drivers.
6. Extend learning to action
Giving a buyer the gift of extending learning to action keeps you top of mind. This involves following up after the meeting. In this age, where everybody is multitasking, follow-up is one of the most critical things you can do to keep the learning alive and keep the focus.
That follow-up should happen the next day. It can be as simple as sending an article, book or job aid to the buyer. There are a range of things you can do to keep your organization top of mind with buyers from holding regular learning sessions to sharing success stories to email campaigns.
At the end of the day, these principles really come into play best when people have been taught, they’ve prepared and they’ve been assessed. Enable your salespeople with best practices like agenda templates, pre-meeting reminders, polls and surveys so they can go into their meetings prepared. Also give them the opportunity to drive self-confidence by developing their skills, whether it’s by role play, model pitches or accessing great examples of openings and closings.
You can also crowdsource social learning. This involves enabling your managers and top performing peers to mentor as part of your ever boarding experience – that starts with onboarding and upskilling over the journey. You can also leverage tools like artificial intelligence and embed that into your sales coaching cadence at scale to help your managers become more effective because they no longer have the luxury of shadowing or doing ride-alongs.
When building sales skills, practice really does help people make progress because we never get it right the first time. It’s not what you do once, it’s what you do better the next time. This applies to teaching in sales presentations. Teaching, in any forum, is the art and science of bringing out the brilliance that drives transformations. These tips will help you achieve brilliance in your sales presentations.
The shift from office to work from home has made sales enablement even more essential. As we prepare for 2021 and beyond, the promise of learning from our mistakes and the ability to pivot is critical. Companies around the world are changing at a rapid pace unlike anything we’ve experienced before. As companies re-evaluate and re-prioritize, they need to ask critical questions about how to succeed. What kind of mindset is needed to thrive today? How is this mindset and plan for development built? How are we helping our team with coaching, competencies and experiences that are most valuable for the future of sales? The how and why of enablement must adapt accordingly in order to thrive in today’s remote/hybrid-remote environment. Passionate enablement professionals must shift and ensure a deep belief in the power of customer-driven innovation. While the world may prefer to return to pre-COVID experiences, the reality is: only those that are resilient will quickly incorporate the wins and benefits of virtual sales and enablement and will expand the scope into a new future.
Shift gears for higher win rates: build an engaging enablement experience
In 2020, remote video was effective, as people were working hard to keep their jobs. In 2021, video training alone will be less effective and take longer to get teams aligned on goals and to be able to effectively shift. There is an abundance of data and information at people’s fingertips. 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years alone. Couple this with the fact that technology is advancing quickly. The rapid development and adoption of breakthrough technologies are changing how we interact with each other. In 2020, content was king but not any longer. Content provides background and a frame of reference. Now it is “what is the right solution to support the customer and is it the right solution?” Innovative companies are moving from having thousands of assets and high consumption of resources, to designing experiences unique and personalized to give teams the practice, confidence, competence, and resources needed to help clients.
Improve time to productivity: continuous onboarding and reinforcement
How do you provide a frictionless experience for new team members remotely? Engaging and interactive technologies help teams learn and develop skills in a simulated environment, thereby increasing engagement, productivity, and retention. Strong virtual onboarding, reinforcement, and ongoing training programs help fuel enterprise growth in an intentional and responsible way while enabling teams to do more with their current resources. Peer-to-peer collaboration will help teams become problem-centric, not program centric. As enterprises limit available financial resources, tech that helps sales teams become more nimble, more efficient, and successful will continue to deliver value that extends far beyond this pandemic.
Growth mindset: leveling up sales skills
High-growth companies require today’s teams to have a mindset geared toward continuous innovation, constant re-invention, and continual improvement. Enablement teams are in a key position to help their company succeed throughout this fundamental shift. Virtual practice empowers people to learn the skills needed to execute. Teams gain experience to broaden their perspective and their belief in what is possible. This provides the foundation for today’s workforce to be successful. During monumental shifts, reputations are either won or lost. Who on your team is positioned to succeed in times of adversity? How are you helping them execute virtually? The speed of change, the challenge of change management, and speed of content and experience creation are critical to keeping pace with the speed at which a business must move.
Leadership: where deals are either won or lost
This changing world requires a fundamental shift from managing to coaching. Leaders need to be less focused on the rear-view mirror or taking over a deal, to be more of a guide who provides suggestions. Companies, like Chamberlain, Schlumberger and Farmers, who have made this shift find it accelerates revenue. Leaders and coaches drastically impact performance in a positive way. The beauty of coaching excellence is that it is never about you. It is about discovering the individual strengths of the person you are coaching. It is about using that experience to turn those strengths into a solution that provides real value to clients. A coaching culture is required to develop rock stars and innovators in the next year. Leading-edge companies gain insights into the coaching capabilities of their leaders. They are then able to use these insights to level up their leaders and align these capabilities to accelerate a positive cultural change within their organization.
Sales productivity, capability and results: where opportunities are either won or lost
Readiness only gets you so far. Your most successful reps are driven by emotion. How do you challenge your team or plan to do so in 2021? How are you evaluating productivity and capability so you can bridge skill gaps? Everyone learns differently, so how are you handling continual training virtually and differently? Revenue leaders must see stronger correlations between programs and outcomes, and quantifiable insights. Furthermore, it is critical to have the right mix of up-front, just-in-time, coaching, reinforcement. This effectively delivers the largest return on investment when the company scales and expands these behaviors across the sales organization. As business leaders aggressively look for strategies to increase output while keeping costs in check, having the right mix positively impacts performance.
In 2021, teams need the right foundation, info, tools, and confidence to be at their best. The goal is for enablement to provide the formula for the best customer outcomes. Doing so provides the roadmap to drive the choices, systems, and behaviors that drive effective selling. It also will enable your teams to sell more, better, faster, and easier in order to ensure company and customer success.
This month, we held our second all-virtual sales QBR (Quarterly Business Review) here at Mindtickle, and like the one we held last quarter, we had some successes, but more importantly some lessons learned. These points are what I want to focus on here in order to help fellow enablement professionals as they are thinking about executing all-virtual events, especially ones that hold as much importance to field reps as a QBR does.
The Successes
Success #1: Gathering input from the teams is extremely important not only for setting the agenda, but also creating an atmosphere of collaboration. I sent a survey beforehand asking the field if they preferred two half-days, or one longer day of sessions. The consensus was that two half-days would be better, so we delivered sessions over two days, 4-hours a piece. This small change helped keep attention towards the sessions without getting Zoom fatigue. Also, using Mindtickle’s pre-built templates helped ensure that the content over the two days was aligned with the time expectations of the field.
Success #2: Pre-work is just as essential if not more so than the actual QBR itself. Work done before fosters engagement with the team that will help them get more out the session. The pre-work we asked the field to complete included a series of videos highlighting each session with the following:
3 objectives the participants can expect to learn as a result of the session
Best next action or takeaway that the rep can expect to take back to their territory as a result of the session
An opportunity to ask the presenter a question based on the topic they were planning to present
Completing this pre-work allowed the participants to get a glimpse of the agenda while providing context. An additional benefit is this drives more interactivity during the actual sessions with the built-in questions as pre-work.
Success #3: Another part of the pre-work was their response to a simple question: What do you want to learn at the QBR? We caveated that with the fact that we would not be able to address all topics, but I took the feedback and customized the topics to cater to the specific needs of the field. More importantly, as we prepped the presenters, we were able to verify that their topics matched the expectations of the team, which we further emphasized during our dry runs with each presenter.
Success #4: Having a theme for your QBR provides focus for the agenda, the speakers and the presentations. Last QBR, I wasn’t explicit or direct with a theme. This time, however, I made sure that our theme was emphasized in some form during each of the presentations. Additionally, the post-work we set up to follow QBR was specifically tied to the theme in order to reiterate the importance to the field. Furthermore, we put together role-play exercises so the field felt more confidence around that theme.
Lessons to Remember
Lesson learned #1: Keeping speakers on schedule and within their allotted times is difficult no matter how much you plan. But within a virtual environment, this is even more essential. Although some flexibility is required, virtual meetings can quickly get out of hand in terms of time allotments, and it is important to moderate the time slots and keep presenters on topic. Always provide some buffer in the time allotted to each speaker and build that into your schedule.
Lesson learned 2: Ensure the team is engaged is a challenge regardless of how much you plan especially because of the volume of content and topics. For me, organizing sessions through a sales readiness platform such as Mindtickle allows other presenters and participants to review the agenda and enroll in individual sessions ahead of time. Also, I used quizzes and games tied to a leaderboard to showcase team members completed assignments and retained knowledge of what they learned.
Lesson learned 3: No matter how much you shorten the agenda, QBRs require a significant time commitment from the team. The virtual QBR is even more difficult because you’re either focusing on the video call intently or you’re easily distracted (e.g. emails, phone, etc.). So remember to build in sufficient breaks for attendees. I like to fill breaks with small tasks and knowledge checks, but it is important that we give people TRUE breaks to let them take a breath and reset for the next set of sessions.
Overall, a successful virtual QBR relies heavily on preparation from both the enablement team who is organizing the event, to the participants who will be consuming the content. Keeping the presenters aligned to the specific needs of what sales needs to know in order to sell more software is key. Knowledge fall-off is a real thing, and without a plan around reiteration and reinforcement, the topics will quickly be forgotten. If the presentations and topics are relevant, tied to a sales role, quick to learn, and aligned with the initiatives of both the department and the company, your QBR has a higher likelihood of success. The most important thing to remember is to have fun!
6 weeks ago like for every other profession, what it meant to go to work changed for marketers too. We gave up commuting, dress shirts, dropping by unannounced to ask our sales friends how the quarter was going, and worrying about expo hall logistics.
COVID-19 also had an unexpected, positive side effect. It has reinforced the importance of marketing as a function to coordinate the GTM response across different field organizations as we move to a new normal in which remote or hybrid-remote is here to stay. This makes three GTM priorities even more critical than usual.
Ensure the category, company and its solutions are more relevant than ever
Ensure company executives, customers, frontline personnel and partners are staying up to date on market changes and the company’s response
Leverage expertise across the business to rapidly roll out initiatives to reskill, re-message, and engage customer-facing teams.
This makes regular field communications and updates one of the most critical initiatives marketers can execute to engage their increasingly remote and virtual field teams. For those of us in the community sharing notes on emerging best practices for updating the field, three common, positive trends have emerged in the first wave of response to the new normal.
First Principles for Field Communications in the remote-hybrid environment
The best marketers in the business have quickly pivoted to:
Agile re-planning and management, manically focused on bite-sized updates produced through cross-team collaboration, while pushing urgent and transparent communications to the field
Continuous 1:1 feedback loops and micro-updates with individual sellers and other representatives to inform and prioritize efforts including new messaging and demand gen mechanisms like virtual events
Setting the expectation for scheduled, consistent field updates delivering usable information and tools with lower emphasis on ‘video perfect production values
Making the sensible pivot to a single cost-efficient platform like Mindtickle for communication and updates
Already familiar with product marketing, enablement, and content teams, as well as their audience in pre-sales, sales and services for learning, skill development, coaching and updates, the delivery platform, became a non-issue
My own team and I have been fortunate to learn from, adopt and implement many of these first principles for our own field updates and communication. It has been one of the most strategic projects we have undertaken in the last month. The result has been consistently positive feedback and demonstrable value in the field. There are a few reasons for this, many of which are core principles that we talk about in sales readiness and enablement.
(Engage, Motivate, Measure Effectiveness with customer content and social sharing)
Principles Driving Mindtickle’s Effective Use of Mindtickle for Field Communication and Updates
An agile mentality and personal commitment from every member of the extended marketing team to focus on usable deliverables
Enabling our SDRs, AEs, CSMs and other colleagues to get meetings and drive value-added conversations with customers is the single filter we use to define and execute content.
Load sharing, cross-training and democratizing the ideation and feedback-loop
Implementing a tiger team, sponsored by me and led by product marketing and enablement has allowed us to draft campaigns and roll-out across pre-sales and sales initially, then to customer services and now the entire company.
Using multiple tools, but focusing on Mindtickle for Mindtickle as the defining authoring, consumption and tracking mechanism as the measure of effectiveness. This has been possible because of our approach to
Integrating our corporate collaboration hub and channels, content repositories, email, web conferencing and work management platforms with Mindtickle.
Enabling the marketing team to be power users of the platform across basic features such as native content collaboration and authoring tools, as well as interactive elements like gamification, social learning, surveys and polls.
For the first time, getting direct insight into how the messaging updates and tools are translating into improved field capability from advanced Mindtickle capabilities like call and web-presentation intelligence (integrated AI-evaluation) and coaching feedback.
Constant outreach to customers, partners, analysts, board members and industry colleagues to share and validate ideas on how to best position and deliver new messaging, virtual field campaigns and tools.
The support of an executive team that is open and welcomes being measured on their participation and completion of certifiable materials in these updates.
Our Implementation and Experience
Finding an agile approach, cadence and a structure that works for us has been an important aspect of why the weekend update, as it’s often referred to, has become something looked forward to by the marketing and consuming teams alike.
A few highlights include
In Mindtickle’s case, we push out our updates every Sunday evening. After 3 weeks of waking up to the Monday morning ‘ping’, we have noticed seller participation and completion rates in excess of 50% within 2 hours of the first digital notification
In our working meetings we iterate on the coming week’s update and key dependencies and resources with the help of a lite Kanban board
Consistent content includes links to an information-packed marketing calendar, mini-customer podcasts, videos or information snippets, content, PR and analyst air cover or wins as well as competitive snippets
Using inputs from field surveys pushed out to the field teams; Since we started using Mindtickle’s native survey tools we have seen field input go up 100% to nearly 90%
While the priority is quality and speed of execution, we engage our Content as a Service team (CAAS) as a secret weapon for design, videos and graphics for market-facing content
Our head of strategic ops coordinates the schedule and team member submissions; By working closely with sales enablement we are now able to create a curated, sub-experience for our sales and pre-sales team while using the same content for the rest of the company
We use one of our most popular modules called the Quick Update to deliver the weekly update; This powerful feature allows the team to use the best possible combination of personal videos, slideware, documents as well as linked materials from customers or partners to serve up content; We are also incorporating simple assessment and certification features like quizzes, exercises and assessments to ensure retention in addition to completion
We regularly meet with the sales enablement and management team to share and receive feedback on completion and engagement blockers and understand how assets and tools are being perceived by customers as well as their teams
(Simple quizzes and polls reinforce key talking points and drive interactivity)
There is more to be done. Content across updates must be ever more relevant and usable, meet higher production standards and we are figuring out how to keep up the pace of producing 3-4 quality assets each week ranging from market-ready content like from how-to guides to fire-side chats with customers. This challenges our nimble, but small team–but the feedback and receptiveness from the company (and hopefully soon our partners) has been compelling and inspires us all to keep aiming high.
(Content and Tools are only as good as the engagement they drive)
New Tools for Remote and Ready Initiatives
This week, with the benefit of not just these outside best practices, but our own evolving experience we are pleased to publish this blog post as well as a comprehensive guide for field communications and updates and a quick how-to video to our remote and ready resources repository.
Whether you are a marketer, in the business of working with customers or an executive I hope you find these resources worth your time and will reach out to learn how I or my team might assist you in your own journey to engage and up-level your customer-facing teams with or without Mindtickle.
Business reviews are especially critical at the moment in aligning sales and management teams to adjusted targets, current quarter forecasts as well as a unified and standardized message. With no options to meet face-to-face, it is imperative that your virtual replanning and review strategy be one that is inclusive and prescriptive, including collaboration with internal departments that have a stake in ensuring messaging and sales execution is done correctly. Getting the same level of involvement and team participation from collaborators (now in different zipcodes and timezones) can be impossible if you rely on a multi-hour or multi-day live streaming session or default to passing documents back and forth over content channels.
Luckily sales readiness technology such as Mindtickle can assist with soliciting feedback from the field team and managers, account planning and pre-meeting territory reviews. By enabling video or screen share submissions, auto- and manager-driven, 1:1 reviews, sellers benefit from proper preparation and are impactful. Activities such as pre-work and video role play are great tools to include to increase participation, while gamification drives engagement that’s fun and effective. In my experience there are two key elements common to every successful QBR or business review I have been part of that I believe are critical in today’s environment.
Consideration #1
Business reviews should not be an anxiety-inducing exercise for sellers…far from it. Sellers should look forward to receiving feedback from leaders and cross-departmental stakeholders to increase their skills and tactics.
Tip:
Sessions need to be upbeat, positive, and encouraging for sellers, and more importantly, this keeps them engaged and involved.
Sales enablement leaders should ensure that the content being presented at business reviews correlate back to competencies and skills that have been identified as key to an individual seller’s success. For sales leaders, this can help in better evaluating skills gaps and learning opportunities that either hindered or helped in driving sellers to get their prospects converted through each stage of the sales process.
Consideration #2
Business reviews shouldn’t be an overwhelming experience in the amount of information that’s presented. Consider the requirements and venue of your remote workforce since the business review will be done via video conference.
Tip:
Enablement leaders will have to reinforce a lot of the messaging, so keep it to just the essentials. If there is content that would be better delivered post business review as a follow-up, don’t include it in the core content. To encourage further engagement, include as much content from the field as possible. No one understands better what is happening in the field than the sellers so learning from each other is key to a seller’s success.
Keep content as applicable as possible. Sales theories and methodologies are important to any sales strategy, but business reviews are a time to put those theories into practical application that lead to closing more business for the sellers.
I hope you enjoyed my thoughts and that you can benefit from the strategies and tactics I mentioned above. Learn more by downloading our Complete Guide and watch our demo video for running a virtual business review that inspires your organization.
According to a recent Gartner CSO report, customer engagement remains critical in addressing both market downturns and demand rebounds. Because of this, executing a scheduled or emergency Business Review (e.g. QBR) is one of the most powerful strategic actions sales, marketing and service line leaders have to strategically re-plan, communicate and set focus on the activities that will drive revenue outcomes for their organization.
Unfortunately, there is typically a disconnect between the strategic intent and the actual execution of a QBR. Sellers oftentimes view the session as a management task, lazily filling out a template the night before their session, and disregard the content and takeaways immediately afterwards so ‘they can get on with their day job’. Presenters drone on, leaving their sales audience glossy-eyed and multitasking. And leadership oftentimes struggle to remain focused and provide consistent, detailed and actionable feedback as the parade of territory and opportunity reviews span multiple hours or days.
So, we all need to flip the script to make your next QBR as strategic as we intend, whether its delivered in-person, remote, or some combination thereof.
Here’s what sales leaders need to do now:
In a virtual setting, the break-out of the focus and effort should be as follows: 3/5 for pre-work, 1/5 in-session, 1/5 follow-on, and keep your in-session review to a maximum of 1 day, with 50% of that day spent on ‘state of the union’ and other important updates, and 50% of the day on upskilling and up-leveling your team.
Move your account and territory reviews into pre-work two weeks prior to the business review. Having your sellers record their presentations and talking points will force them to prepare and helps identify gaps in critical thinking. Mindtickle’s video role play capability provides a forum for practicing, getting automated feedback, and submitting a final presentation that hits the mark while staying on-time.
Plan ahead and ensure your reviewers explicitly carve out time to complete the reviews at least 1 week before the live session. This ensures ample time to provide quality reviews. Mindtickle accommodates reviews on web or mobile, making it convenient for reviewers to squeeze in the time they need to complete quality reviews. Mindtickle also allows for in-line comments with the video recording to deliver targeted feedback that emulates live-session interaction. Pre-built reviewer forms and templates also promote consistent, in-depth, and personalized feedback.
For the live-session QBR – implement a 3/5 presenter rule: push presenters to condense their presentations to 3 slides and a maximum of 5 minutes which forces them to tailor crisp and concise messaging specifically to the sales audience. Also ensure that each presenter outlines a maximum of 3 takeaways or action items. Use these to formulate post-presentation quiz questions to ensure these items are internalized by the sales team.
At Mindtickle, we’re keen practitioners of the concepts I’ve laid out in this blog–regular business reviews like QBRs are an anchor of our revenue planning and alignment processes. Whether you’re a front-line sales manager responsible for a small team or a seasoned CRO managing a global sea of RVPs and seasoned enterprise account executives and have wondered how you can optimize your upcoming virtual business review initiative, I hope you found the read worth your while.
The Mindtickle team has prepared a comprehensive guide to assist enablement, marketing and sales teams in executing an effective virtual business review. For more information, download our Complete Guide and watch our short video demo to learn how to run an effective virtual business review.
We’ve entered a new era of sales training. For many decades, long presentations in classroom environments were the only form of career learning available. But today, sales reps expect more creative and comprehensive career development tools, and customers expect salespeople to be valuable industry experts.
As technology evolves, attention spans decrease and customer knowledge skyrockets. Sales instruction must now include new methodologies that didn’t exist even 10 years ago. Today’s training is fueled by sales enablement technologies, and it’s bolstered by innovative coaching methods.
What is Sales Training?
Sales training is the ongoing process of teaching sales teams how to create profitable, deal-closing interactions with buyers. This may include in-person learning, e-learning, micro-learning, gamification, or other training techniques to help salespeople improve.
Sales training is designed to help sales reps close more deals, of course. But it’s also about teaching reps to build long-term relationships with buyers and guide them to buying decisions that best benefit their organizations as well.
Although the terms are sometimes used synonymously, sales training is not the same as “sales enablement” or “sales coaching.”
Sales enablement is a wide umbrella. While it includes training, it also involves tools, content, processes, and other resources that enable sales reps to be at their best.
Sales coaching is a crucial reinforcer of training. It’s the continuous, one-on-one guidance given to salespeople to fill each individual rep’s specific knowledge gaps.
The Best Sales Training Techniques
There’s no single training plan that works for every sales organization, and it’s beneficial to use a mix of different methods to keep things interesting. There are, however, several training techniques that, when implemented correctly, boost the performance of sales teams. Here are key sales training techniques to consider:
E-learning
Technology and flexible work arrangements continue to change how and where work is performed.
Over 40% of U.S. employees worked remotely for at least part of the time in 2017, up from only 23% in 2003.
and salespeople are no exception. Even when employees are in the office, sales teams are often dispersed throughout different cities, states, and even countries to serve different markets.
Traditional, in-person training is challenging to coordinate, expensive to execute, and requires taking the sales staff away from valuable customer-facing activities for hours or days at a time.
E-learning can take different forms, such as instructor-led classes vs. massive open online courses (MOOCs). These are most commonly used to teach several new concepts in a short span of time, such as during sales rep onboarding or training on a new system.
Anywhere/anytime access: By offering training courses online via the cloud, sales reps can access training materials wherever and whenever is convenient for them. The best e-learning technology also enables learners to take courses from any device, whether desktops, laptops, tablets or phones.
Increased sales-rep productivity: The downtime required to travel to a conference center and sit through training would be better served on the front lines with buyers. Because e-learning enables salespeople to take courses whenever their schedules permit, they gain more time to focus on customer relationship building and revenue-generating activities.
Cost reductions: Although e-learning requires up-front investment, it ultimately leads to steep cost reductions. Virtual learning reduces the costs of travel, training centers, physical learning materials (like training guides), and the expenses associated with bringing in dedicated trainers.
Many engaging formats: E-learning can be as creative and engaging as you want it to be. And in our era of shrinking attention spans, engagement is important. The best e-learning training offers a mix of presentation formats that boost engagement. Examples include video, interactive infographics, whiteboard-style free animations, kinetic text, and challenging-yet-fun assessments to test the learner’s knowledge.
Attractive perks for top talent: Companies with the most convenient and robust learning opportunities can win top talent better than competitors. Sales training offers career and skill development—something that millennials want and expect from their employers. A sales organization that offers 24/7 access to industry-leading training materials can highlight their commitment to ongoing improvement in the recruiting process.
Micro-learning
Micro-learning is the practice of offering bite-sized, always-accessible, individualized training content to employees. This practice uses small learning opportunities to reinforce key concepts and drive employee development.
Micro-learning is often focused on one topic or problem, and it is easily searchable so employees can find information on the right topic at the right time. Micro-learning may incorporate a range of content types, including quizzes, videos, games, simulations, audio clips, and more.
Micro-learning taps into a key principle of how humans learn: the more we repeat and use information, the more ingrained it becomes in long-term memory. Research also shows that information is retained more effectively when it is spread over a longer period of time, compared to when the information is presented all at once.
Not only does micro-learning aid in the learning process, but it also saves precious time and helps the learner absorb information in a way that’s fun and engaging.
Here are some important benefits of micro-learning:
Retain more training information: Conventional e-learning typically covers numerous training objectives in one lengthy course. This can create “information overload,” causing reps to struggle to retain a wide range of concepts. Micro-learning flips this tactic on its head by presenting the learner with short-and-sweet training modules.
Fit into busy reps’ schedules: Each training module is quick, fun, and engaging. It focuses on one learning objective, with one vital concept to remember, and then ends. The learner can then either take another training module or go about their day with that one newly-learned concept in mind.
Identify knowledge gaps and track progress: Advanced micro-learning platforms provide the ability for sales leaders to identify reps’ knowledge gaps, assign training to fill that gap, and track the reps’ progress in that area.
Customize and personalize training programs: With larger sales teams, there are numerous knowledge gaps to fill. Traditionally, the way to deal with knowledge gaps was to present dozens (or even hundreds) of reps with one lengthy training session in an attempt to cover every possible need. With micro-learning, sales coaches can assign the exact modules needed to fill every rep’s knowledge gaps. This approach boosts efficiency, saves time for the entire sales team, and gives reps a more customized approach to development.
Provide information that is relevant here and now: Sales training should be refreshed frequently to accommodate the latest product knowledge, buyer insights, and industry trends. Traditional classroom materials or even e-learning can take months to update. Micro-learning modules, on the other hand, can be updated within hours to ensure reps are getting the most relevant information.
Improve training completion rates: The longer and more challenging the training, the less likely your reps are to complete the entire program. With shorter, more approachable training that is easy to fit in with day-to-day activities, reps are more likely to start and complete their training modules.
Gain a competitive advantage: Companies can gain and cement their competitive advantage by using micro-learning techniques. Dynamic learning opportunities like micro-learning improve the onboarding process, increase productivity, help attract and retain top talent, and require less time to find and update than traditional training materials. All of these benefits together help you build a competitive advantage and deliver more value to customers.
Gamification
Gamification provides something that was once unheard of: training programs that are fun. Training that’s enjoyable and engaging helps the learner retain more of the material for longer periods of time.
When training and assessments are enjoyable, reps are motivated to complete modules even when they’re not assigned to them. This provides for more training opportunities and more reinforcement of key concepts covered in e-learning, micro-learning, or other training formats. When salespeople are motivated to complete more training, the result is a more highly skilled sales team that is prepared to drive revenue growth.
Video-game components: Gaming is a familiar format to millennials, who make up the largest share of the U.S. workforce. The gaming format offers fun and engaging challenges to help apply and reinforce what is learned.
Leaderboards: Leaderboards and badges add healthy colleague-to-colleague competition to the training mix. Since their achievements can be publicized company-wide, reps receive more recognition and motivation than they did with traditional training courses.
Social elements: Newsfeeds and open communication between reps make the gamification experience even more rewarding. Social elements can promote new business connections and profitable interactions (like knowledge sharing and meaningful encouragement) within the sales force.
Gamified quizzes: Even quizzes can be fun when they’re turned into games. When reps don’t pass an assessment on the first try, they’re more willing and motivated to play the learning game again to pick up the information they might have missed.
Real-world incentives
Salespeople are goal-driven and competitive by nature. Online training programs should leverage these traits. While many reps complete e-learning courses for their own career development, the right incentives can add motivational fuel to the fire. Here are a few important guidelines:
Make sure the incentives are desirable: Incentives can take many forms, like spiffs awarded after meeting a challenging training goal, or gift cards or concert tickets. Anything that will motivate your reps is fair game. Don’t make the common mistake of assuming your team will be motivated by company-branded giveaway items like pens and sport bottles—your reps are more valuable than that, so it’s worth putting time and thought into your incentives.
Incentives need to be achievable: If the incentive requirements aren’t attainable, such as earning 100% on all training quizzes for a month, reps will be discouraged rather than motivated. The requirements should be challenging, but reps need to believe they can actually win. Consider running “nearly impossible” incentives alongside achievable ones. For example, earning 85% or higher on all training quizzes this month will earn a standard (but desirable) reward, and landing 100% on all quizzes is worth an even more valuable reward.
Get input from sales reps: With larger sales teams, especially when they’re remote, it might be harder to anticipate what kinds of incentives resonate well with your reps. If you’re not sure what to offer, ask reps directly. Consider emailing a questionnaire with a list of rewards to choose from, whether gift cards, a donation to their favorite charity, etc. Then, when a rep earns an incentive, you’ll know their preferences.
Deliver the reward immediately: With remote sales reps, make sure the reward is mailed quickly. For reps working in the office, hand-deliver it the day it’s earned, if possible. To maintain the motivation, reps should see training incentives being received as promised.
How a Sales Training Platform Can Help
There are countless approaches to establishing effective sales training and onboarding at your organization. The right training platform can help your reps achieve quotas faster and improve new reps’ time to productivity. Look for a platform that enables you to:
Identify your reps’ specific knowledge gaps
Assign your reps the right learning paths based on their roles
Track onboarding progress with milestones and certifications
Provide training modules that incorporate gamification elements
Mindtickle is a trusted sales training platform that enables sales teams worldwide to become more competitive and profitable. Schedule a demo to see how Mindtickle can help you establish and refine your sales training program.
Recently, I spoke to Julie Zhang, Director of Sales Enablement for Russell Investments, about how they took their client experience strategy from inception to execution. They achieved this by empowering and enabling their client-facing staff, but it hasn’t been easy.
One of the most important things they’ve learned along the way is that taking an idealistic strategy through to execution is challenging. It’s inevitable that things will breakdown along the way and the end result won’t always look as shiny as the strategy anticipated. Here are five things that Julie learned along the way that can help you execute your client experience strategy effectively.
1. Don’t assume people will tell you everything
When you ask someone whether they understand something, human instinct tells them to say they do know it even if they don’t. This means if your salespeople tell you they understand how a new product works or they know what a good client experience looks like, chances are they really don’t.
Rather than relying on your client-facing people to tell you what they know, test for it so you can objectively understand what they know and where their gaps are. This will give you a baseline to start with and help you put in place a roadmap for what you need to do to achieve your strategic vision.
For example, Julie asked the client-facing staff to record a video of themselves doing a pitch and send it to their managers. While this was uncomfortable for many, it was also a great learning experience because it highlighted to them very quickly that they didn’t know what they thought they did. As a result, there was no push back from the sales team when it came to executing the new strategic initiatives because they already knew they had a knowledge gap.
2. Remove friction points first
It can be futile trying to implement new processes, training or changes if your client-facing staff are distracted by other things. Before you start trying to execute on your strategy, identify and remove some of the areas of friction that are affecting how your people do their job.
For example, Julie identified that there were a lot of internal emails that were absorbing the time of their client-facing staff. These emails included sales collateral and other information that people needed to know. So Julie replaced these emails with bite-sized pieces of content, like a short video where a portfolio manager provided an update on a fund. This content was delivered to client-facing staff directly to the Mindtickle app on their mobile device. So rather than wading through emails, they could watch the content when it suited them.
This change not only gave people more time to focus on the client experience, but it also gave the sales leadership team important information. They could see who accessed the content and who needed to be followed up. Managers could also use quizzes and gamification to test who understood the information and drive engagement.
3. Don’t be afraid to rebuild
Unless you’re starting with a greenfield site, there will be processes and bad habits already in place. While change is hard, it can often be more difficult to try and work around existing processes. So don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and rebuild from the ground up.
4. Layer learning for retention
When you launch a new product or service, it can take up to six months before client-facing staff are comfortable talking about it with clients. To accelerate this process, Julie implemented a series of training that was layered and leveraged multiple mediums to improve retention. The training incorporated a blend of virtual testing, videos, integrated quizzing, pitch back videos and coaching. When combined, they found that this training accelerated the execution of their strategy and raised the bar on the skill levels of their client-facing staff.
Through this process, Julie found that knowledge retention requires a process of continuous improvement. Client-facing staff need to hone their skills and develop their knowledge on an iterative basis to execute consistently. Regular reinforcement and making training part of their day to day was crucial to layer learning so that it’s retained over the long-term. One way that Julie achieved this was by extending Russell Investment’s onboarding program from just two weeks to six months.
5. Work out what you’re measuring
While measuring sales results is, of course, important, Julie found that measuring engagement was actually more important to implement their strategy. That’s because they needed their client-facing staff to learn, and to learn they needed to be engaged with the process. So Julie focused on engagement metrics, like how often people accessed training and how long they spent on training each day. By doing this, she found that as engagement increased so did their sales results.
To determine what you should measure, she suggests analyzing your data at the outset to identify what things are preventing your client-facing staff from learning and retaining knowledge. For example, Julie found that the enablement software they were using wasn’t intuitive and the training was quite boring. So they addressed these issues by using software that leverages gamification, produced more concise training videos and introduced multiple training formats.
If you’d like to hear more about how to execute your client experience strategy effectively, you can watch the full interview.
Once the bastion of stability, the financial services industry is now facing new challenges from every vantage point. Disruptive competitors, regulatory reform, fickle customer loyalties, changing employee expectations and reputational damage are stalling growth and increasing churn for traditional operators. While your organization needs to defend its ground, conventional weapons are no longer sufficient to maintain revenue or profits. The key to winning the battle is to change how your customer-facing people serve your customers.
There are five factors driving change globally in financial services
Tech-fueled competitors are disrupting sales strategies:With a focus on personalization and self-service, modern platforms deliver superior customer experience quickly. They also use data to understand customer pain points and finetune how their sales teams deliver an effortless experience.
Service excellence and seamless experiences set new benchmarks:In a digital world, customers expect their services to be delivered conveniently and effortlessly. Subscription models have also reshaped brand loyalty with customers needing to experience value or opting out.
Reputational damage has affected consumer confidence:Over the past decade, events like theWells-Fargo scandal
and the subprime mortgage crisis have left customers disappointed and frustrated. Lingering consumer sentiment continues to impact the industry’s reputation.
The financial services industry is under a regulatory microscope:Laws surrounding risk management and compliance are constantly changing. This places additional pressure on your frontline to ensure they’ve met compliance obligations when dealing with customers.
The workforce requires more flexibility:As baby boomers move into retirement, millennials and Generation X comprise the majority of the workforce. Organizations must take into account new preferences, like short bursts of information and digital solutions, when designing how people work.
While your organization can’t directly control market or regulatory responses, you can control how you deal with these challenges. By focusing on the skills and aligned behavior of your employees and the experience that they deliver to customers, your organization can have some control over how your customers respond.
Your people are key to delivering a superior customer experience
With the financial ecosystem evolving so rapidly, customer experience is increasing in importance. It is no longer just about providing good service – it’s about fostering lifelong partnerships that require understanding, problem solving and engagement. This means customer-facing staff need to be ready to stand and deliver every time. By focusing on customer readiness drivers your people can execute a best practice experience.
There are five customer readiness drivers you can double down on to empower your customer-facing people:
Align culturewith customer-focused value: At each level of your sales organization, the desired culture needs to be defined and implemented. For culture to be an effective customer-readiness driver, you also need to systematically test the behaviors you desire to ensure they are executed consistently.
Adopt a solutioningapproach to customer engagement: Thanks to the internet, by the time a customer comes into contact with your salespeople they often know what solution they think
they need. This can create friction in the customer experience that can be addressed by implementing a systematic way of providing salespeople with access to the right information and the capability to apply it.
Facilitate compelling compliancebehaviors: Every back office process and customer interaction is guided by a constantly evolving framework of regulations, processes, and behaviors that must be met. Rather than being a roadblock, these can be an opportunity to reaffirm to customers that they’re in safe hands if compliance is seamlessly incorporated into your salespeople’s behaviors and skills.
Implement agile transformationmethodologies: Most organizations have embarked on a process of transformation to improve and change how their business operates. To embrace accelerated change, your salespeople need to have the agility to keep up and engender confidence in their customers.
Distribute campaignplaybooks to the field: Financial organizations often run multiple campaigns or new solution launches at any one time. Campaigns are only an effective customer readiness driver if they add value to customers, which requires salespeople to understand how it benefits their customers.
Arm your salespeople to deliver a superior customer experience
To deliver a superior customer experience and win and retain customers for longer, your sales organization needs to deliver on these customer readiness drivers. To achieve this, many look to traditional methods of training their salespeople, but these have not been designed to address the challenges facing organizations today. To build salesforce capability and meet customer needs your sales organization needs to be able to:
Build confidence with knowledge:In a digital world, your salespeople need to build more knowledge in a short amount of time. They also need to find new ways to stay one step ahead of their customers while creating a personalized experience. Coupled with generational changes in learning preferences, this requires knowledge to be packaged and delivered in new ways.
Test the ability to execute:While it’s important that salespeople have the right information at their fingertips, that knowledge is of no value if they can’t apply it to specific scenarios. New learning tools, from gamified testing to video practice, allow your salespeople to practice and hone their skills.
Coach for improvement:To be a significant driver of performance, coaching must be targeted and consistent. Smart technology solutions can help organizations create a consistent coaching cadence.
Certify and measure success:Data has the potential to take sales organizations from being reactive to implementing proactive and targeted skill development. Modern tools enable businesses to capture, correlate and apply data across their sales organization in a powerful way.
To address the challenges you are facing in the digital age, your sales organization doesn’t have a minute to lose. You need to arm your people with knowledge, capabilities, and processes that allow them to put their customers at the center of everything they do. To create a best practice customer experience, your salespeople need tools, platforms and services that can help them achieve this. Get in touch with Mindtickle to find out how you can arm your salespeople to deliver a superior customer experience.
(Engage, Motivate, Measure Effectiveness with customer content and social sharing)
(Simple quizzes and polls reinforce key talking points and drive interactivity)
(Content and Tools are only as good as the engagement they drive)
