White Paper
Smart Sales Training:
The Slack and Salesforce Solution
Learn how to power up your sales team with frictionless training and customer education using our advanced LMS technology inside Salesforce and Slack.
Introduction
Sales teams have always been the lifeblood of a company, establishment, or corporation. Their ability to consistently perform at their peak directly impacts the bottom line and can ultimately be the difference between the enterprise’s profit and loss. However, gone are the days of finding natural-born sellers and just
putting them in the right place at the right time to be successful.
As B2B buyers take advantage of increasing self-service digital channels to learn about and purchase products, their expectations of salespeople are also evolving. Buyers now want salespeople who can help them navigate through the glut of information. They are looking for sellers who can provide clarity on how to best tackle their unique problems and accurately evaluate potential solutions.
As a result, sales are becoming a digitally-intensive job—one that requires more than just good calendar management and interpersonal skills. To be successful, salespeople need proficiency in using CRM platforms, social media, digital research, content curation and creation, managing email sequences, multi-channel outreach, and analytics, just to name a few. And on top of that, knowing the nuances of when their prospects want technology and when they want a salesperson’s live input or help.
That’s a tall order. And certainly, one that can’t be solved just by hiring new people. To create a profitable team, sales leaders need to look at consistent training,
coaching and mentorship to make every member of the team better and retain top talent.
In this paper, we discuss our recommendations for how companies can implement learning and enablement programs that bring together the key skills, assets,
and processes that produce consistently successful salespeople.
Slack and Salesforce
Together, providing more power and speed to make sales learning and enablement actually stick.
Key challenges
- Onboarding new hires have a low ROI as ramp-up times take too long, leaving customers and territories uncovered.
- Access to helpful resources and identifying which assets have a positive impact is challenging.
- Delivering training can be challenging and time-consuming because salespeople have different levels of knowledge and digital proficiency, own different parts of the funnel, and sit in separate locations.
“Salespeople need to learn efficiently, effectively, and constantly in order to keep pace with digitally-savvy buyers. Sales leaders responsible for sales enablement must leverage technology to provide consistent training and coaching that drives learning retention, seller performance, engagement, and measures business impact.”
– Ramesh Ramani, ExpertusONE CEO
Recommendations
In order to effectively implement effective learning and enablement programs, sales leaders should:
- Leverage LMS technology to onboard, house self-paced training, and provide sales training so salespeople can speed up their learning and deepen customer engagements.
- Deliver learning and resources to salespeople through the apps they already use every day to improve engagement and productivity.
- Deliver training and continued education through instructor-led classes and group and one-to-one coaching in a technology-driven virtual environment.
Smart Sales Enablement
How to Leverage LMS Technology
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of providing sales organizations with the training, coaching, internal assets, and data required to engage buyers effectively. The idea of sales enablement has been around for a while but has been traditionally thought of as just training or sales asset management (e.g. providing them with data sheets, web content, etc.) Today, sales enablement has rapidly evolved into a more strategic function. What was once the responsibility of a marketing professional or of a single sales trainer; sales enablement is now supported by dedicated teams funded within the sales organization.
Sales enablement makes teams more effective by:
- Giving sellers access to relevant content at each interaction with a buyer
- Present content to customers in their preferred format
- Deliver data and visibility on how buyers are engaging with content
- Providing advanced analytics so content can be optimized
- Giving sellers the training they need and measuring how it helps them close deals
Why is Sales Enablement important?
According to a study by Accenture, the average time-to-proficiency for new hires is about 9 months. This “ramp-up time” leaves 15% of customers and territories uncovered, directly resulting in lost opportunities. And that doesn’t even include the opportunities lost while employers try to find the “best” salespeople in the market to hire. Sales enablement therefore cannot be left to chance.
In a competitive landscape, salespeople not only need to make every buyer conversation, email, pitch, or general interaction count, but they also need to be focused and extremely fast to respond to keep the interest of all their prospects. The best way to do this—share learning and knowledge resources through a modern sales enablement technology stack that shifts the status quo.
Buyers never have the time or patience to comb through the glut of information available. So, they expect to be able to lean on salespeople as trusted advisors to provide clarity on how best to tackle their business problems. Reps can only do this if they can think fast, act deliberately, and get access to the relevant knowledge they need at the moment as an engagement deepens.
Technology-Driven Sales Enablement Tactics
No two salespeople are the same. They are likely distributed across wide geographic areas, with varying skills and digital competence. Therefore, it is imperative to have a training approach that caters to each individual’s needs. LMS technology can be leveraged to quickly engage sellers and provide training “just-in-time” using these tactics.
- Personalize content with self-paced learning – allows salespeople to access training based on their role and experience level at a time that works best for them. An LMS can easily prescribe learning paths that only contain training about products and territories that a salesperson is responsible for rather than mandating the entire catalogue, quickly creating personal relevance, and saving them valuable time and energy.
- Use microlearning as much as possible – delivers skill-based learning in small, highly focused chunks; ideal for salespeople who need to find answers to specific problems quickly and for retaining the information long-term.
- Deliver learning where they already are – deploying training courses, performance support, sales assets, and knowledge sharing within the sellers’ preferred devices and applications make learning more accessible, and contextual, and keep it top of mind.
- Digital content management – provides training material within a searchable platform that managers can easily update with robust version controls.
Fundamentally, sales enablement can increase revenue by creating a bigger pipeline with more leads, increasing conversion rates, boosting the average deal size, and decreasing the resources required to onboard high-performing sales teams. Making sales teams faster and more powerful than they ever thought imaginable.
Supercharge sales enablement with a learning app inside Salesforce
The ExpertusONE app for Salesforce is a powerful LMS designed for businesses who want to publish training content quickly, run in-person or virtual classes, and drive training compliance. Housing your learning platform in Salesforce eliminates sales people having to access a new system and allows you to link learning activity and training completion with sales performance metrics. It sends automated reminder emails and in-app alerts to ensure sellers actually complete their training, attend instructor-led classes and coaching sessions, or review newly updated content.
LMS technology makes it possible to capture and catalog valuable knowledge from your best people, preserving it for future on-demand access. Video clips, meeting snippets, Q&A docs, case briefs, proposals, and more can easily be found, shared, and discussed using built-in search and social tools. This means all salespeople have instant access to reliable resources at every stage of the cycle. ExpertusONE for Salesforce is now available to install from the Salesforce AppExchange.
How you can upgrade the status quo:
| From: | To: | |
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| Training |
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| Knowledge assessment |
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| Coaching |
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| Pitch review |
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| Sales content and asset management |
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| Guided selling |
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| Real-time knowledge |
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| Tracking and reporting |
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Fast-Track Training Adoption by Reducing Context-Switching
New tools and social channels are opening doors for salespeople to an endless stream of prospects. However, if not used correctly, consistently adding new technology and information can also sink your sales team’s productivity; disrupting their workflow by requiring constant context-switching (e.g. navigating between multiple apps to complete a simple task).
Typical interruptions throughout the day like an incoming email, checking LinkedIn, chatting with a colleague on Slack, a virtual meeting, or just starting a different task make it incredibly hard to focus—resulting in a context switching penalty. The additional cognitive load the brain needs to process moving from one task to another inevitably takes a toll on productivity. Computer scientist and psychologist Gerald Weinberg stated that switching between different tasks destroys productivity by as much as 80%. Knowledge workers in the United States alone waste 25% of their time at work, costing the economy $997 billion annually.
Accenture Strategy’s research shows that 55% of sellers found the usage of their company’s sales tools to be more of an obstacle than a facilitator of sales performance. Additionally, 59% reported that they had too many sales tools. As a result, many sales enablement programs intended to boost productivity have instead diverted sellers off course with more product data, competitor data, and customer data than they can effectively absorb or use.
Organizations can turn this on its head by enabling consistent knowledge propagation without forcing employees to switch platforms every time they have to learn something. When organizations are able to deliver training within their employees’ preferred tools, learning becomes a seamless part of the daily workflow. Knowledge can then be delivered inside core business tools like Salesforce or Slack.
Salesforce is the ideal environment for embedded sales training since it’s where salespeople spend most of their time. Account execs, solutions specialists, help desk staff —everyone who works with prospects and customers—relies on Salesforce as a business tool every day. Integrating a learning application with your CRM simply makes it easy for the entire organization to stay skilled, informed, and on track.
A Fortune 100 insurance company providing coverage for over a million customers in the education, public sector, and healthcare industries has found that the speed and efficiency with which they can access knowledge resources during customer interactions has helped them build stronger relationships.
Using ExpertusONE, they’ve seen a
38% increase in salespeople accessing learning resources via Salesforce
20% uplift in productivity
Make learning as simple as talking
The ExpertusONE learning app for Slack is designed to help sellers skill up by integrating the learning experience with the productivity and collaboration capabilities in Slack. It takes learning where the seller is and makes it simple for teams to share and discuss training resources. By harnessing LMS technology and deploying it within Slack, sellers can access everything from traditional learning courses to microlearning content as a natural part of their workday. They can discover, share, and launch resources easily and track progress seamlessly. The ExpertusONE learning app is now available for download from the Slack app directory and integrates with the ExpertusONE app for Salesforce.
Sustainable Sales Training
Reinforce Learning with Consistent Coaching
Most sales training programs lack the necessary reinforcement to close deals more effectively. Utilize virtual classes to provide your team with ongoing education, action-oriented tasks, group discussions, and coaching sessions to see performance improve over time. Here are the top 4 strategies you can employ to power up your coaching sessions:
Be consistently inconsistent – instead of doing the same thing week in and week out in your coaching sessions, try new things like testing a new format or targeting a new skill. Introducing a level of inconsistency to regular sessions keeps sellers on their toes and increases engagement.
Set up virtual office hours – it’s easy to feel isolated especially when everyone is working remotely. Virtual office hours give your team an additional and more informal touchpoint outside of a formal 1:1 or group stand-up. Most enterprise-grade LMSs have the functionality to create virtual classrooms and sign-up sheets without putting you through the pain of sending Zoom invites to everyone and then not having a clue who will log into the call and when.
Run call teardowns in small groups – instead of just letting meeting recordings sit on someone’s drive, gather sellers in groups of 4-5 to listen and brainstorm together. Sellers can level up their skills by working in peer groups while managers can scale their coaching time.
“You can’t tell reps to go listen to 10 cold calls on their own, you have to create an environment where your team can have that organic back-and-forth and listen to a call together. I don’t want to have people listening to calls in a silo, I want to hear their opinions to make sure they’re thinking about calls the right way, and then help other reps think that same way.”
– Armand Farrokh on the Predictable Revenue Podcast
Encourage ride-along – the advantage of virtual sales calls is it’s easier than ever for sellers to shadow each other. By encouraging peers to sit in on each other’s calls or work together on deals, they can learn by doing and facilitate fluid knowledge transfer within the group.
“Sales reps really learn by mirroring and imitating the best of the group. I think that one of the important things is to create a holistic learning environment that doesn’t just rely on sharing good calls, sharing best practices, and sharing calls of the week.
Those are things we do, but reps should also sit in and work deals together sometimes. Then they’ll understand what’s really effective messaging because they can hear it, and they can see it. It’s not just about someone telling them, “Say this,” it’s really about understanding your customer.”
– Derek Rahn on the Modern Sales Podcast
