Step-By-Step Guide To Deploy A Successful Sales Enablement Course
While sales training is geared toward instilling product know-how and mastering tasks, sales enablement is a more holistic approach. For example, employees learn how to overcome customer apprehensions and lead nurturing. Let's take a step-by-step look at how to launch your sales enablement course to improve CX scores and staffer confidence.
6 Easy Steps To Launch A Sales Enablement Program To Improve Customer Relations
How do you deploy a sales enablement course that helps your team hit their targets and keep customers coming back for more? It all starts with a solid strategy that's backed by analytics and measurable goals. Here's a step-by-step guide to launching sales enablement training programs that increase customer satisfaction stats and foster brand loyalty.
1. Identify Existing Gaps
Start your process by assessing the current state of your business. Which, if any, sales enablement techniques or tools have you been using until now? Do they align with your overall revenue and development goals? What’s the level of your staff’s skills and knowledge? What could change in your customers’ buying experience? These are some of the questions you must ask yourself to identify the gaps that a sales enablement course can help bridge.
2. Create Targeted Objectives
Once you have a complete picture of your company’s current situation, you are ready to create the vision that will take you forward. For your sales enablement course to take form, it is crucial to lay out time-bound and measurable revenue goals, targets, and objectives. This way, you will be able to effectively evaluate, analyze, and report on the aspects that may or may not be working. For instance, you might want to increase your customer retention rate or reduce the onboarding time of a new hire.
3. Choose The Right Tools
Selecting the right tools will take your project from paper to reality. Now, when it comes to sales enablement, there is truly no shortage of choices. So, it all comes down to your organization’s budget and specific needs. For example, you could use video-coaching tools that expose employees to new products and highlight their key selling points. Another choice is sales management tools to improve sales forecast accuracy by collecting and managing raw data, while also tracking key performance indicators in real-time.
4. Weigh The Benefits Of Outsourcing Vs. In-House
Another important decision is whether you want to design a sales enablement course on your own or outsource. You might be tempted to think that doing everything in-house will save you money in the long run. However, it's possible that your team might lack the knowledge, time, and resources that are necessary to undertake such a project on their own. Therefore, hiring a third party who brings their own tools and expertise might make things a lot easier for you. Also, since this endeavor involves the collaboration of the sales and marketing teams, some outside guidance could help things run smoother. At the end of the day, it's up to you to decide what fits your business best.
5. Develop A JIT Support Library
Whether you choose to outsource or not, now is the time to start thinking about the content development process. The most important weapon in your arsenal is your just-in-time support library. It contains all the tools that enable your employees to use a few clicks or taps to directly access any information they might need. For example, a customer wants to know how a product works. Using their handy JIT support library, the employee can access a video demonstrating exactly that. This improves CX and the chances of a sale going through. Don’t forget to make your content bite-sized, targeted, and, most importantly, easy to find.
6. Launch Certification Courses
The last step in deploying a successful sales enablement course is launching certification courses. Don't rule out certifications by thinking that their only use is to provide you with proof of competency in the event of an audit. There are so many benefits to certification courses, the first of which is upholding standards by effectively monitoring your employees’ existing skills and their progress. At the same time, it helps you keep employee knowledge up to date, discover problem areas or even new talents, and offer a personalized training experience. You can also implement a reward system that will keep employees motivated and on a path of constant personal development. Ultimately, it is one of the best ways to assess and ensure the success of your sales enablement program in the long run.
6 Ways To Assess Sales Employees' Skills In Online Training
Before you can roll out a successful sales enablement course, you need to identify gaps and emerging challenges. These 6 assessment techniques can help you disclose areas for improvement and create more personalized training resources for your remote workforce.
1. Simulations
When it comes to assessing your employees' training gaps and existing knowledge, it is vital to set up a controlled environment that doesn’t involve the actual customers. Being performed in a virtual setup, simulations can offer your team just that! And as the employees tackle real-life situations, take risks, and learn from their mistakes, you are free to gauge their weak points and strengths without having to worry about your company’s reputation. For example, you can assess an employee’s ability to engage leads and turn them into customers using prospect simulations. This activity will let you know whether their approach is effective and which aspects require improvement.
2. Peer-Based Feedback
No one knows the ins and outs of the sales process better than the people performing it. Therefore, it only makes sense that you would turn to your employees to find out what’s working and what needs tweaking. Constructive criticism is key in the work environment if you want to identify weak points, but some planning has to go into it. Make sure that you give guidance to your employees on how to give—but also receive—effective and constructive criticism. This way, you can add value to your employees’ opinions and quickly overcome any challenges.
3. Branching Scenarios
A branching scenario is a great way to assess your staffer’s skills, as it places them in the position of the decision-maker. Essentially, a branching scenario maps out a task and allows the employees to make their own choices and see where it takes them. For example, you can design a branching scenario that focuses on upselling a specific additional service. By the end of the process, any less than optional choices highlight the issues that you will need to address in the sales enablement course.
4. Knowledge Checks
Another way to identify areas for improvement is knowledge checks. This is not a formal assessment method, but it can be very helpful in providing you with immediate feedback regarding the learning progress from the perspective of the employee. Usually, knowledge checks are made up of a set of questions that are not graded in any way but can give you a clear idea of gaps in employees' training.
5. Serious Games
This online training tool has recently grown in popularity due to the many benefits it can offer. Serious games promote user engagement, interactivity, motivation, and direct feedback, while never veering from the training purpose. At the same time, they unobtrusively gather data that is crucial for the assessment of their skills. For example, time to complete tasks, numbers of attempts to complete tasks, and difficulty levels. Also, they're a discreet and fun way of giving feedback that prompts users to continuously strive to get better results, thus improving their skills.
6. Gamification
Although many times serious games and gamification are used in the same context, these two approaches are vastly different. While one is focused on completing the task, the second is a more holistic strategy centered around leaderboards and reward systems. You can use gamification prior to launching your sales enablement course—or even incorporate it—in order to give your employees the opportunity to explore real-world problems in a more engaging, fun, and rewarding way. Once they have developed an array of vital problem-solving skills in the context of the games, no challenge will be too hard to tackle in the actual work environment.
Conclusion
Sales enablement training gives your team the skills, expertise, and real-world experience they need to not only pitch products but maximize CX. They have the opportunity to fill personal gaps and continually broaden their knowledge base. However, you must choose the right support tools for the task and launch a learner-centered program that takes all of their goals, job duties, and roles into consideration.
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