If you could reduce the ramp up time of your new inside sales hires by 40%, wouldn’t it be fun?
Being sales ready makes your inside sales professionals 2x more effective. Sales ready in this context means, ‘state of preparedness of inside sales reps, systems or organizations to meet any sales situation and carry out a planned sequence of actions’.
Our multiple consulting assignments with tech/ IT/software Start-ups and small businesses made us understand the key sales and marketing problems faced by them such as:
- Selecting right target market
- Framing right value proposition design
- Selecting the right marketing channel
- Setting a seamless inside sales process, so on.
Marlon Thompson (a fictitious character but clearly inspired by real life inside sales leaders)
Is the inside sales manager at Mayfair logistics systems, a logistics software solution provider from Chicago.
Assume that Marlon is in charge of setting up inside sales process for the Euro region . He hired a team of 5 people; 2 fresher’s externally and 3 experienced inside sales people from internal talent pool. Now, he needs to make them ready for sales profession that means, for the next 3-4 months they are going to be trained, coached, tested and exposed to the sales world.
The fresher’s Jeff and Jamie who are part of the fresher pool need to be trained on:
What is the Mayfair logistics all about?
How has it improved the customer’s’ life?
How has the company fared compared to its competitors?
The team also needs to work on communication skills, sales skills etc.
Marlon understands that Jeff and Jaime (the two fresh hires) require a lot of individual attention. It’s always a hard job to make fresher’s or for that matter experienced people understand nuts and bolts of selling a solution.
Marlon is also in charge of tracking inside sales team’s performance and sales skill development and he has to check:
- Can the word ‘sales ready’ be applied to his sales team?
- Is his team continuously having quality conversations with prospects and customers?
- Is his team ready to deliver ‘VALUE’ which moves deals to the next level?
Let’s see how Marlon tackles this. The easiest way to know if someone is sales ready is to see, how many deals he/she consistently bringing.
But is it really that easy?
The TAS Group found out, “almost 67% of sales reps fail to reach quota every year”. Forrester Research reports that “nearly 90% of sales conversations fail to meet the expectations of executive buyers”.
Marlon thus feels overwhelmed by the process of making his team sales ready. So, the real question is:
Do you have some easy way to make ensure sales readiness of new hires?
Sales leaders like Marlon daily face this difficulty of making a sales team market ready. It becomes even tougher, due to many responsibilities he has on his to-do list. So aNY STEP which simplifies sales readiness, which includes the below factors easy is a necessity for sales leaders like Marlon:
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On-boarding process:
Here, Jamie and Jeff need to gather an understanding about:
What to sell?
How to sell?
How to assess and qualify sales leads or potentials?
How to perform according to set targets and quality benchmarks?
But Sirius Decisions found that 38% of companies lack formalized sales on-boarding program.
If Jamie is taking time to be productive then the company is losing revenues. A formalized onboarding roadmap sets an accelerated knowledge absorption process in motion. For people to be trained on various facets of sales, this is done with help robust coaching regime.
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Coaching process:
Any agile learning program starts with identifying knowledge and skill gaps. Only continuous analysis of knowledge levels of inside sales trainees will make coaching for a skill gap effective. Learning based out of classroom and training hall has become old fashioned. This primarily is due to the information fatigue and attention deficit that occurs in corporate trainings. So trainees should be given an option to get online and learn. An on-demand e-learning module is a prerequisite to an intuitive sales enablement process.
These e-Learning solutions should permit access to recording of top performers, best practices advice by managers, sales software tutorials, pitching coaching videos and more. These e- modules should be available for fresher like Jaime to work on their own time; it in fact creates a knowledge multiplier effect. Because the trainee works on the material without stress and fatigue.
Companies need to reduce learning stress by reducing F2F (face2face) meetings and conferences or trainings. One problem trainings is that different trainees has different learning pace, but trainers go at their own pace.
One way to make things simple for a fresher is to make inside sales videos, then guide trainees use it at their own pace.
Embrace Videos:
Start recording videos of your top performers and make interactive sales training videos where they share their secrets of performance. Embed quality video materials from various free resources and differentiate sales training programs.
Marlon knows that he can effectively use the F2F training time to interact, discuss, apply and reinforce sales, product, and company knowledge with advanced learning methods such as:
- Role plays and simulations
- Peer-to-peer feedback
- Real time data driven coaching
Continuous testing, to check and see the readiness is also important. This is done through pop-quiz. Reps like Jamie don’t recall about 80% of the subject they learned within 6 months of their initial training sessions. So, refreshers quizzes are a necessary part of learning and unlearning and reinforcing process.
Jaime should also be able to clear doubts real- time so, access to sales training materials on the go is an urgent requirement.
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Updates:
Likewise Jaime and Jeff need to be updated about recent:
- Product tweaks and improvements
- Business case studies and success stories
- Competitive landscape
Real time sharing of the above information gives them a decent understanding of the key aspects to highlight on a sales call. Obviously, this allows everyone to be on the same page on tactics and strategies that work, so as to learn and benefit from it.
Sharing inspiring stories via email or social network of how sales teams in the company add lot more visibility about what inside sales reps are doing extra to acquire each new customers they get can prove beneficial.
Thus, Marlon finds an urgent requirement for a solution that bridges the gaps in sales personnel’s knowledge at all levels.
- Last minute research:
Last minute preparation usually defines whether a call is a good one or a bad one. So, Marlon must provide relevant content and the resources should be easily accessible and logically organized because inside sales professionals don’t like to go searching for content.
