Sales Team Enablement: Prescriptions for Success (Part 3)
What attributes enable your sales team to achieve peak performance? In this third installment of our four-part article series, learn how defining value can increase both product adoption and your sales team enablement.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ When it comes to overcoming obstacles related to enabling your company's sales team, here's another prescription for success you can try.
Ailment: Your market is continually changing, and so are your sales strategies and product offerings. Sales team adoption and enablement can be difficult, even futile, if not done properly.
Symptoms:
Do any of these adoption/enablement symptoms sound familiar to you?
- You always plan for the launch of new sales strategies, but regardless of the planning and implementation, the sales team's excitement dies down shortly after launch and they never seem fully engaged.
- Because the new strategies are not thoroughly adopted, the organization faces uncoordinated, inconsistent activities, which makes supporting the sales team quite a challenge.
- Because new products are not thoroughly adopted, clients aren't learning about the latest offerings and you don't achieve sales goals. Customer satisfaction suffers, too, and sales revenues drop.
- When one launch fails, you tend to try new approaches instead of identifying barriers to success in the failed endeavor. Sometimes you feel like you're practicing random acts of sales enablement, and it's tough to see how these acts impact sales in a positive way.
Prescription:
To improve adoption and enablement, salespeople need to know how they should sell the value of a new product, especially if the market is new or evolving. In addition to providing sales brochures with facts, features, functions and benefits, demonstrate how the new product will help customers and prospects tackle problems they're facing. Do you have any stories or case studies of how the new product added value, reduced costs or increased sales for a customer? Can you explain how the actions and performance of the product's users were positively impacted? Armed with this insightful information about buyer motivations and behaviors, the likelihood of salespeople securing appointments and making sales will increase. So, make sure your sales collateral tells a compelling story, and coach your team on how to tell that story.
In initiatives that may need change management, such as using a new tool or adopting a new sales strategy, ask for and encourage involvement from the sales team. They may be too busy to get deeply involved, but they need to know their opinions are important. Early in the tool/strategy development process through implementation, create a feeling of an open, transparent community and provide the team with multiple ways to voice their thoughts and opinions.
Real Life Example:
One of our clients created an online collaboration page where they launched weekly upbeat change management animated messages about a new product/strategy. The messages used a common theme and included timely, appropriate and relevant information based on the progress made and the upcoming activities.
On the page, they also asked open-ended questions such as "How do you think this strategy will affect interactions with your customers?" and "What makes you nervous about using this tool?" Once a few salespeople started adding their comments and sales managers responded with supportive, encouraging replies, the page became a popular "virtual water cooler" and the acceptance and commitment to adoption was obvious. Leaders also used the responses to identify and prevent potential upcoming roadblocks in adoption and barriers to success.
The page continues to be used today, a year after the product/strategy launched, as a place where the sales team can ask questions such as how to improve efficiency using the tool or how to address a client's questions. They also share their successes and celebrate others' success.
In part four of this article, we will discuss the challenges of developing support resources for your sales team and a prescription for success. Until then, we welcome your thoughts and would love to include your comments in our published series of this article!
Continue reading:
Sales Team Enablement: Prescriptions for Success (Part 1) →
Sales Team Enablement: Prescriptions for Success (Part 2) →
Sales Team Enablement: Prescriptions for Success (Part 4) →
