Dramatic increases in salesforce productivity can be realized when an organization’s learning strategy is based on business priorities, with the needs of increasingly mobile sales professionals clearly in mind. Success requires focused execution with a st
by Site Staff
December 28, 2005
Dramatic increases in salesforce productivity can be realized when an organization’s learning strategy is based on business priorities, with the needs of increasingly mobile sales professionals clearly in mind. Success requires focused execution with a state-of-theart, technology-infused blended learning methodology. When done right, sales training is the most rewarding because the results are the most visible—you see appreciation in the form of smiles on sales professionals’ faces from delivering what they need, as well as seeing the results reflected on balance sheets.
Sales professionals like to keep things as simple as possible. Give them exactly what they need to succeed, help them put it into context with the big picture, minimize the administrative burdens that inhibit them from doing what they do best while helping them cope with life on the road and recognize them for their results, and you have a recipe for productivity and success. But how do you do this in an increasingly complex, competitive and global economy with limited resources?
The keys to salesforce productivity can be summarized as: what, why and how. Sales professionals need to know what to sell, why they are selling it and how to best sell through access to world-class learning opportunities and internal expertise matched to their needs. While technology itself can be complex, it can assist each component of the what, why and how to enable efficiency, simplicity and global scalability.
What: Delivering Content
Important factors in disseminating product knowledge include clarity, timeliness and a format that is desired and used by the recipients. Cooperation with internal marketing groups is important to ensure that they understand how the information will be used and repurposed as needed for specific clients. Speed to competency is critical as well. Surprisingly, there are still several weeklong induction programs for new salespeople to learn about the products they will be selling. This costly approach could be improved by shifting the content to be remotely accessible while salespeople are at client sites, shadowing their colleagues and getting more of a “here’s what you need to know now” approach, versus trying to remember everything before the first visit. Building trust and a culture in which salespeople and their support colleagues feel comfortable reaching out to each other with questions can be a competitive advantage as a performance accelerator.
Product knowledge should be accessible anytime, anywhere for those who need it, negating the need to remember the specifics and instead focusing on the concepts and selling points. This type of information can be updated centrally so it is always fresh, with the ability to push updates when there are important changes, upgrades and line extensions. This would require a strategic rethink of how product information is produced from market research to product research to production to sales, all working off of the same core content, rather than “passing it over the fence” as is often done at the expense of productivity and timeliness. Why not request key suppliers in the value chain to produce product information with the same systems where possible and further cut effort? Why not use a template-based approach for all “sell sheets” that reduces their production time and gets them into the field’s hands quicker, so feedback on what’s working with customers can be shared across the organization? What about making more information directly available to the customers to free salespeople from finding and sending it themselves? These types of approaches require systems thinking that is not yet commonplace in traditional “silo” organizations.
Current distribution of new product launch information is still primarily done at national and global sales meetings, and is often a squandered opportunity at best, and at worst, a waste of time and money. Getting the sales force together can be really powerful for building momentum, finding out what’s working, learning what key customers are saying, understanding industry trends, etc., as well as for building trust, culture, motivation and loyalty. PowerPoint business updates delivered without passion, detailed product training and, even worse, administrative systems training delivered by the system technicians instead of effective trainers wastes time, money and opportunity. Learners have a limited ability to “cram it all in” during the meeting, and still have mental space available for the short term that might be devoted to team building—a necessary component to foster collaboration over distance. Many organizations want to encourage sales teams to stay in better touch with their customers and colleagues, but haven’t yet been able to show results. Time-shifting the detailed content normally broadcast at these events to reach field sales exactly where and when they need it would boost both productivity and morale.
Why: Context, Context, Context
While informing the sales force of new products, features, administrative and regulatory news needs to be pushed on a timely and nonvoluntary basis, enabling employees to learn about their industry, company and customers at their own pace and with the device they choose provides sales professionals with knowledge and confidence they can build on for success. High-performers often take it upon themselves to know everything they can about their customers and industry. Enabling them with mobile tools to access this type of learning in their moments of downtime is a boost and can spark new business ideas. There are easy-to-use, free or nearly free tools such as AvantGo, where people can subscribe to daily news feeds of interest on their BlackBerrys, PDAs and Smart Phones. Increasingly popular RSS (really simple syndication) subscriptions, blogs, podcasting and now videoblogs are all portable media-rich information sources worth leveraging for internal and external news and can provide that competitive edge of insight gained from the most up-to-date information pulled from increasingly informed sources, including those on the inside who can shed light on how things really happen. More than a few organizations have started podcasting to disseminate internal corporate updates (including Cisco) and to communicate with customers (including General Motors and IBM) while enabling access to external sources that are rapidly growing in sophistication and value. Internal tools including mobile photo blogging, podcasts and wikis also can be used to collect information instantly from the field to inform headquarters of emerging developments and foster collaboration and action.
The concept of technology-enabled “push and pull” information availability is supported by David Vachell, head of sales training for British Telecom Global Services, who recently shared his thoughts on the challenges he sees for global sales force productivity and some of the world-class approaches he’s implemented to address them. “As head of sales training for a large and highly globalized organization, the critical issue for me is the ability to manage learning at a number of levels,” Vachell said. “At one level, we have to ensure that ‘hard knowledge,’ relating to operational matters that the salespeople come into contact with on a daily basis, is available to them and easy to find on a pull basis, as well as pushed to them to ensure that they are aware of breaking news. Examples of the former could be information that they might wish to have about recent developments in their client’s business market or new products and services that BT offers. The latter could be information relating to specific campaigns being launched by BT. This sort of learning is managed with a number of approaches ranging from conventional customer and market insight portals through laptop-based tools for proposal builds and product support as well as focused audio and Web podcasts on specific subjects and all the way down to SMS broadcasts for real bite-sized information.”
Being informed of industry and customer news is one of the necessary tools. Understanding internal strategy and how it relates to sales force interaction with customers also is critical. Nascent technologies can help here too. The introduction of new strategies, leaders and approaches can be accelerated by the power of storytelling via portable audio (podcasting), and there is increasing recognition of the power of engaging videogames to introduce complex concepts.
How: Sales Skills Development 101
One of the strongest contributions to sales-force productivity is the skill level of the sales force and their managers. The pressure to improve speed to competency and build the technical skills necessary to keep up with the pace of innovation has never been greater. Minimizing time away from selling is the norm while the epic multiple-day workshops continue to give way to more effective methods. These methods include timeshifting some of the content using rich mobile media and innovating in the classroom with better facilitation and media usage to get more value out of the time spent there. More classroom learning is recorded where appropriate to be re-used as refresher and blended for the next participants. Remote learners increasingly participate in live and asynchronous courses with subject-matter experts and leaders as mobile contributors. The shift to support learning happening over time in support of strategy and leadership development, which is what behavior change requires, is becoming more prevalent. We’re seeing this now supported by blogs, online communities, wikis and other collaboration tools. Having to physically get to the classroom and waste valuable selling time due to unnecessary travel is minimized in high-performing sales organizations with a culture of learning when, where and from whom you can.
Vachell illustrated the importance of blended learning over time and the challenges of reaching a global audience. “At the next level, we need to ensure that our sales force has the basic tools to do the job in a consistent fashion,” he said. “To this end, we run conventional training courses on our key systems and processes, which are backed up by online performance support tools, which allow the salesperson to refresh their learning on a very specific area. Finally, we have recently engaged in a series of skills development programs designed to equip our sales force with the theory and skills required to address a new model of business relationships, which aligns with strategy.
“The key consideration in developing the overall learning agenda for the mobile sales force therefore is to consider carefully the purpose and impact. If the overall learning driver is strategic, long-term behavior change, which needs shared learning space, then we don’t want to consume valuable offroad time with product and technical skills or process activities— these we push down as close to point-of-use as possible.”
Vachell explained the different learning needs of behavior change and product/technical skills. Each must be done, but should be treated differently to optimize productivity.
Enabling Technology & Strategy: Time to Revisit?
The need for skill and knowledge consistency across today’s increasingly mobile and global sales organizations is the primary driver of the need to rapidly build, blend, deploy, update, manage and market learning resources that also require mobile support not found in yesterday’s LMS and LCMS installations. Just as office productivity software, operating systems and collaboration tools are upgraded or replaced as better tools become available, creating a step change in productivity, now more than ever is the time to take a look at your current toolset to assess if it’s truly enabling just-in-time access to the right piece of content or expert knowledge, versus the frustrating inhibition of not finding what is needed or finding learning that makes it too timeconsuming to figure out what is needed.
Salespeople often are mired in a complex world in which they are wrestling with non-stop travel, multiple accounts constantly merging and changing personnel, new products with increasing complexity and relentless corporate initiatives vying for their attention—all while trying to keep their personal lives together on the road. How can one expect optimum performance when the front-line professionals’ minds are muddled with constant interruptions via pushed junk e-mail, requests for information better served by others or different systems in the organizations, and the pressure of what waits back at the office and home? The key to optimizing their productivity is to keep things as simple and consistent as possible in your own what-why-and-how framework, acknowledging the complexity and mobility of their jobs, aided by instant access to what they need to succeed in their professional and personal lives.
Ron Edwards is the president of Ambient Performance. He can be reached at redwards@clomedia.com.