Today sales reps face significant disadvantages that traditionally did not exist. When a sales rep walks into a meeting, often the audience exhibits more knowledgeable buying behavior that poses great challenges to the sale.
If your audience knows more about the products you are selling and they are prepared to critique your product like never before, what do you do to offset this growing concern?
When it’s cumbersome to allocate time to train your personnel on every product detail while more and more content emerges, what do you do?
It’s not reasonable to expect a rep to memorize absolutely all marketing content, nor to be up to full speed on the emerging new material with extensive brand messaging initiatives. It is also not reasonable to expect training to spend time creating an extensive curriculum to immerse these reps when they need to spend their time in front of clients selling. Even in the most proactive of environments, reps are experiencing information overload and this is hurting their performance in multiple areas. This challenge cannot be overcome by traditional methods. The challenge contains a depth of underlying issues and requires an innovative approach. The introduction of new resources or the utilization of newly introduced resources in a more strategic way can become an indispensable solution.
The addressed disadvantages can be not only neutralized, but also worked to the reps favour through the use of digital content while one efficient platform. When high knowledge audiences have their expectations met, or surpassed, you open the window of opportunity to a greater quality sale. Utilizing the iPad or other tablet devices, with effective digital content can solve the problem of memorization (information overload), and training requirements to an extent. Reps must spend time understanding new content and how to identify the right time to apply different marketing collateral. This burden may be shared between reps, marketing teams, and training specialists. The steps to set reps up with digital content and a tablet cannot be overlooked, or the value will not be reached. Reps must feel fully comfortable navigating through content on the device and understand the functionality and features at their disposal. The amount of time required at these preliminary stages of understanding content is manageable within the norms of the vast majority of organizations. The few that feel this type of implementation asks too much of their team simply require the right training partners to ensure positive growth and adoption. They also may benefit greatly from agency partners who can help them create and leverage digital content.
The next step to addressing this challenge is making the tablet the best friend a rep has in addressing the “knowledge barrier” outlined as the focus issue here. Yes the day in the life of a rep just got way better. Let’s not forget the rep needs to take the time to prepare for this change and learn about the new tools they have. In any aspect of life, if you invest in something with a large pay off, the initial step requires you to spend time learning, the payoff that pushes you leaps and bounds ahead follow. The rep must become capable of navigating through content and understanding what content is available to them within the platform. The burden of ensuring this is done in a timely manner is on the performance of the device and platform that plays the content (i.e. the iPad and Skura). Ensuring the platform can operate on and offline is paramount. The user experience must be so seamless, that the rep can focus on delivering the message without any inconveniences/limitations of the platform presenting the content. If the platform is effectively deployed, the rep can now overcome the knowledge barrier. No longer will reps walk into meetings with a stockpile of manuals and content they rarely utilize. The content they drag into meetings historically may be valuable, but the form of its delivery made it obsolete to reps. Again, not that the content was poor, the means of delivery and the expectations on reps to find the right information in a timely manner were not realistic. Reps must be provided with an easy to use environment where they feel positive towards opening content. Reps using a tablet and content management platform are now equipped for unexpected questions and progressions within meetings. Flipping through books and manuals is a source of frustration and time consumption for reps of the past, which did not equip them with what they require to stay sharp, delivering the right message at the right time. Reps of the future have become comfortable transitioning through an extensive variety of content within one digital platform. PowerPoint’s, PDF’s, images, videos, manuals, surveys, Market Research, Case Studies, Web Portals & Deal Rooms, and other forms can easily be pushed to reps as sales collateral in our rapidly evolving and responsive digital age.
What we are witness to ladies and gentlemen, is a time period where you can make your rep “actionable”. You have resources available right now that not only equip your reps with the right material within one platform, you also have the ability to ensure adoption rates of the technology are monitored.
Focus on your content and how it is being used. Any platform showing off content can live and die by the quality of the content it represents.
Analytics is here, and you can use it!
You can know, what content is being presenting, and its sequence and duration in the meeting. Tracking the performance of your content and being able to identify where it is strong and where content can improve makes progress an actionable and realistic expectation. Analytics provides the necessary insight to literally manage the activity of your sales team with precision, while focusing in on improving the sales pitch and sales cycle.
Congratulations, you now have a sales rep armed with all your content in one easy to use platform. Your content is being tracked to ensure you can constantly evaluate asset performance and keep it aligned with goals and brand messaging. You are also able to spend less time talking and speculating as to what the problems are, by addressing the real data collected for you. Your marketing team’s jobs just became much easier. They can edit and expire content to all reps within one platform, create users and groups, and printing costs just went way down. You are now more capable of managing compliance and regulatory issues through tracking, and you are ensuring no deals are being left on the table. Your marketing team can see which content is most effective and collect feedback on the content from reps and clients based on recording options. You can integrate with a CRM to manage contacts and have their interaction logged back to the account. This automated approach saves reps from manually inputting call data, making them more available for meetings and selling. Increased volume of sales activity, higher closing rates, greater quality of deal, and now we have solved the problem of the growing “knowledge barrier”.
Yes… this is happening.
Google+ Jordan Lisacek
