The war for talent is raging. On top of that, B2B buying behavior is changing dramatically. Commercial teams have a hard time finding answers to these ongoing challenges. The changing environment has a serious impact on sales functions, responsibilities and competencies. What your sales team needs now is new skills. Even more than that, it needs a program that enables your team to continuously develop and hone its competencies, through an effective learning method. At Perpetos, we call this your Sales Academy.
We can think of at least five reasons why your team needs its own Sales Academy:
Consistent training: A Sales Academy will provide your team with consistent commercial training, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working towards the same goals. This will help to deliver a consistent and positive customer experience in all the touch points with your organization. In turn, this will lead to improved sales effectiveness and better results.
Customized training: By developing your own Sales Academy, you can customize learning according to the specific needs and performance priorities of your company. This requires a company-specific integration between individual competence gaps, business performance gaps, team interactions, effective messaging that engages customers, and new ways of working. This can include messaging about specific products and services, that are most effective and translated into your sales teams’ reality.
Increased sales: Sales is not that different from athletics. Training and mental fitness are key for a top performance. By providing your commercial team with the tools they need to succeed, you can improve their ability to close deals, improve customer loyalty and maximize revenue for your business.
Improved customer experience: Well-trained people in today’s reality understand how people buy and are also better equipped to do their job. By understanding the different phases of the customer journey and knowing how to adjust messaging accordingly, your sales team will be able to influence buyers more successfully and build stronger relationships.
Increased employee retention: Providing continuous learning opportunities will help to improve employee satisfaction and retention. But just as important is a commercial academy to groom sales talent and facilitate internal job mobility, from a technical role into sales and moving on to key account management. All this requires is a well thought out training strategy with competencies linked to learning modules, which allow people to grow in their career and be guided with Just In Time learning.
Signing up for a Sales Academy in your B2B organization means that you are serious about installing a culture of continuous improvement, and that you want to stimulate peer-to-peer learning.
People uplift each other when they are challenged. They acquire new competencies and are being reminded about the things they know but no longer apply. After all, the hardest thing to achieve is closing the gap between knowing and doing.
The digital landscape has profoundly changed the buyer journey. Today, customers go online to find answers. But does this mean that the salesperson is no longer necessary? Not at all. The magic word here is relevance. In addition, sales reps need to find the right balance between digital and personal touch points throughout the customer journey.
We’ve all read it before. According to one study, customers have already completed 57% of their customer journey before the first appointment with a salesperson. According to another study, even 70% of that customer journey has already been completed. No wonder it’s so hard to get an appointment, you might think.
Relevant touch points
And yet, many of those so-called studies on the customer journey draw the wrong conclusion. Not surprisingly so, if you look at who publishes or sponsors the research. Very often they are providers of marketing automation solutions who would love to have all those salespeople replaced by their content marketing platform. If only it were that simple.
What those studies do expose are symptoms of another phenomenon, namely that customers no longer accept being bombarded with irrelevant company presentations or product pitches. What customers do expect however, are relevant touch points tailored to the buying phase the customer is in. This applies to both digital and physical interactions.
An earlier study by SiriusDecisions, now part of Forrester, proves this statement. Their figures show that prospects are willing to interact with salespeople at any stage of the customer journey, regardless of the complexity of the product. The prerequisite is that the salesperson can detect the right buying stage and align the conversation accordingly.
Providing value
This obviously requires a different approach. Now, the focus is increasingly shifting from push to pull communication. In other words, sales reps will need to put less effort into arguing and persuading, but focus more on dialogue and bringing new insights.
In addition, as a sales professional, you are expected to know your customer’s background. Asking about your customer’s challenges is therefore pointless. After all, the customer doesn’t have time to train salespeople on the challenges of their job and their industry.
A relevant contact does not necessarily imply knowing the customer’s exact priorities. What is important here is to deliver a message that is recognizable to the customer’s industry. That is enough to start a dialogue. Once your client feels that there is value in it for him, those priorities will come forward naturally.
Based on dialogue, the customer and salesperson can decide together whether a follow-up action or further contact is needed. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a physical appointment. As a salesperson, you can also keep the relationship warm by offering valuable, relevant content. That’s why a good collaboration with the marketing team is recommended. They can offer you the tools you need to keep the contact with the customer going.
Some examples where the marketing team can help you:
Background information and descriptions that help you empathize with the different roles and markets where you want to build and maintain relationships
Clear value propositions that demonstrate the link between customer challenges and aspirations and the products and services you offer
Relevant content, such as case studies, ebooks or research results, which allows you to communicate digitally in a relevant way in between your face-to-face contacts with customers
A digital preference center, where you can link content to customer profiles and topics, and which is customizable by the customer
A CRM where you can easily start linking relevant content to a contact that has not been added to the system
Don’t believe the hype
No appointment? No panic. There are ways other than physical contact to keep the relationship with the customer warm. Despite what many ominous studies tell you, the salesperson remains relevant, and at every stage of the buying cycle. So, don’t believe the hype. Do try to stay relevant and engage with the customer. With the right marketing tools, that task will become much easier. Good luck!
Today, investing in learning and development is a must. But does it actually pay off? Far too often, training is just a box-ticking exercise and knowledge is quickly forgotten. So, how do you build an effective learning journey, one that embeds knowledge into your organization, and that drives a change in behavior and mindset?
2 rules of thumb before you start
When we map out an effective learning journey, we always consider the following rules of thumb:
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: up to 90% of new tools and concepts get forgotten after a workshop or training.
The 70-20-10 rule, or the balance between the different modes of learning:
70% = on-the-job learning
20% = social learning by working together, coaching and mentoring
10% = learning from courses and workshops
3 stages in a learning journey
1. Train
Trainings and workshops are only one stage of the learning journey. For optimal effect, we work with various techniques in this stage, such as breakout sessions, self-paced learning and role-playing. These techniques make knowledge more digestible.
2. Transfer
In the next stage, we apply that knowledge to the workplace. Again, we deploy a mix of techniques and formats, such as working with assignments or incorporating learning nuggets.
3. Sustain
The most important thing, of course, is that learning not only leads to one-time knowledge accumulation, but also to long-term impact. Through coaching or peer-learning, for example, you not only embed knowledge, but you can also achieve a change in behavior and mindset.
From our experience in designing learning journeys that really pay off, we’d like to offer some tips & tricks:
5 tips for an effective learning journey
Make room for spaced learning. This is learning over a longer period of time combined with repetition. Very useful tools are assignments, interactive short refresher videos (like our learning nuggets) and webinars.
Make knowledge digestible with micro-learning. Split up complex material into digestible pieces. This not only ensures that knowledge will stick because of repetition, but it also prevents mental fatigue.
Translate knowledge to the work context. Applying abstract concepts in their own work environment enables people to change habits and behaviors. We often link this to group coaching, peer coaching or mobile applications, such as Qstream (= targeted individual coaching of sales managers based on data insights).
Provide content that is relevant to your business and your team goals. This seems obvious, but it requires an accurate analysis of the challenges within your business and team. Relevant content increases engagement, enhances applicability on the job and leads to tangible results.
Build a performance dashboard. This enables you to officially embed the tools and concepts within your organization and to measure growth, results and engagement.
In these times, professional salespeople are witnessing an unprecedented change in all aspects of the business world that will echo for years to come. Being an active part of this shift is crucial to the success of your business and the individuals that keep it running. What the sales function is confronted with is an unavoidable shift to remote learning in support of the demand to master the skills of remote selling.
In this blogpost, we discuss strategies to remotely train salespeople with new skills, refreshing their existing skill sets, and how to keep them motivated and engaged along the way in today’s hybrid selling world.
Sales teams face the need to immediately master remote selling
Today, selling has never been more difficult and requires salespeople to be very agile when selling virtually and connecting with their customers on a personal level. Now more than ever before, sales learning and development is extremely important for enabling salespeople to upskill and reskill to meet the new demands of your business and the needs of your customers all while selling from home. Normal methods of learning won’t cut it in these difficult times, a new training approach is required to help your salespeople go through their own digital transformation.
Turning in-person training and delivering via the web is not a solution
It is not just about turning your in-person training and delivering it through a video conference tool like Zoom or Teams. Nor is it effective to resort to traditional e-learning through a learning management system. Content that’s in your learning management systems is most likely not relevant to the new sales models that have been put into place because of all the changes businesses are making regarding the effects of COVID-19. Also, every moment an impatient sales professional spends sitting through time-consuming LMS courses is time away from selling. We must find better ways to reinforce topics throughout the normal workday without disrupting anyone’s workflow.
Step-by-step training
Many learning programs deliver so much information in short periods that it can be unreasonable to expect employees to pick everything up immediately. They are human, and humans have a natural tendency to forget. A more effective and lasting approach is to introduce new skills to employees while continually reinforcing what was previously taught to improve long-term knowledge retention. Once they show proficiency with a particular skill, you can move on to the next one. The key, however, is making sure that employees don’t forget what they initially learned. One way to ensure sales professionals retain what they learn is to embed micro-learninginto your Learning & Development strategy.
Snackable and mobile learning to reinforce learnings
Research has proven that a great way to avoid disrupting sales people workflow is by pushing “bite-sized” chunks – no longer than 2 minutes per topic – so they can stay focused on their work and implement teachings into their day-to-day with ease. Mobile-firstremote learning is essential in this effort. Even with more people at home, the “device of first attention” for most people is their mobile phone (Fig. 1).
Additionally, these reinforced training sessions can be done in pockets of free time rather than salespeople having to carve time out of their day to get it done. This way, everyone gets constant refreshers and reinforcement without any of the inconvenience.
Fig. 1: Bite-sized chunks of mobile learning through Qstream
Personalized learning paths that support corporate objectives
Your salespeople all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences, some may have already sold remotely before, so you need to take into consideration the different variations of knowledge sets by analyzing the knowledge gaps and using personalized learning that will meet the needs of each salesperson. Personalized learning paths can only be routed by understanding the proficiency and knowledge gaps of each individual.
We see 2 ways to personalize learning paths while supporting corporate objectives:
Through popular microlearning applications like Qstream that allow to identify proficiency gaps and guide personalized development programs
By means of qualitative and quantitative interviews, investigating common areas that affect sales performance. This deep dive into audiences’ learning needs will surface blockers and boosters of commercial performance and will allow to go directly into implementation mode with tailored content within a coherent corporate development program.
Interested in microlearning? Qstream is the only microlearning platform scientifically proven to increase knowledge, develop skills, and change behaviors.
Analytics from an LMS is historically insufficient for sales managers or trainers in determining if their salespeople are understanding what’s being taught. Microlearning platforms enable you to track and compare the evolution of sales engagement, proficiency and performance. The insights gained from these can help to leverage each individual’s strengths for the benefit of the other team members. Real-time dashboards and proficiency heat maps (Fig. 2) show initial and current proficiency, allowing you to assess progress and offer personalized coaching for each team member.
Fig. 2: Qstream dashboards with heat maps
Real-world scenarios
The key to keeping reps engaged is to feed them information that is relevant to what they are experiencing every day. Microlearning platforms like Qstream provide an easy method for learning by utilizing spaced repetition, cases and testing (Fig. 3). This way instant learning is obtained, and salespeople are able to incorporate the lessons into their daily routines and use that knowledge in real-time.
Fig. 3: Microlearning with roleplay on Qstream
Precise coaching
Mobile platform tools can paraphrase classroom content into 12-15 yes/no, multiple choice or scenario-based questions, helping your team to jog their memories and repeat what they have picked up during training. The system thus reinforces knowledge, not only by testing but continuous retraining at the same time.
Ambition, engagement and improving proficiency are encouraged through competition and gamification – with extra points for both speed and accuracy and real-time leaderboard. Managers receive suggested topics for coaching their team members as well as overview of how much progress individuals have made compared to earlier tests. Data-driven matrixes evaluate the impact of training, offering customized coaching opportunities for the team’s manager, based on individual and team results.
Making Sales training Stick
Competency does not come from periodic, one-time training. According to Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, learners forget 90% of what they learn from an event-based approach within 30 days, with most of the new material being forgotten within the first few hours after the training. A solution to promote knowledge retention is spaced learning.
Spaced learning implies multiple training opportunities. Repetition is indeed the mother of learning. We also notice great results by combining spaced learning with microlearning.
A systemic approach to learning
Key components of a systemic approach to learning for the mobile workforce will typically include a mix of learning strategies:
Virtual training sessions that relate to the day-to-day operations and will equip salespeople with the confidence and capability to perform at their highest potential
Experience-sharing sessions that will leverage peer-based support to unlock current difficult customer situations
Individual coaching sessions to follow up on field implementation of newly acquired knowledge and skills
Supplemental online training that will put the learner in contextually rich scenarios that are cognitively challenging.
Spaced microlearning to break up complex or detailed job-specific learning content into scenarios and delivering this repetitively over time through a learning experience that fits into the daily flow of sales work
Combining these learning strategies will ensure that your upskilling becomes ingrained in individual habits, thereby making sales people better performers and more likely to have a positive impact on organizational goals.
Conclusion
The digital age requires an agile learning environment, supporting continuous learning. Hence the need to integrate spaced and mobile learning for continuous knowledge reinforcement and proficiency measurement. Creating the capacity to objectively measure the impact of improvement initiatives, and even measure proficiency, enables you to create individual learning paths on the one hand and encourage the implementation of effective sales strategies on the other.
Having questions on how to implement effective commercial improvement initiatives?
The major pitfalls of sales trainings are the following:
Lack of reinforcement
Lack of engagement
Lack of business relevance
Competency does not come from periodic, one-time training. According to Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, learners forget 90% of what they learn from an event-based approach within 30 days, with most of the new material being forgotten within the first few hours after the training.
True though; there is not a single, absolute learning curve. Several factors contribute to learning retention, like individual ability and prior knowledge. But the risk of forgetting fast is real for most of us.
A first solution to promote knowledge retention is spaced learning (1). In short, i.e. multiple training opportunities. Many figures like this one show how less is forgotten after each review.
Repetition is indeed the mother of learning. We also notice great results by combining spaced learning with micro-learning (2)! Micro-learning breaks down complex courses into smaller manageable learning content. Not only do we enhance retention rates through repetition, but we also speed up the learning process because trainees avoid the phenomenon of mental fatigue.
Of course, transfer to the job (3) is equally as important. In the end you are aiming for measurable business results, are you not? Knowledge of concepts is one thing, the capability of applying them another. So, if you want to see impact on your sales results and implement lasting positive change, you will want to change habits and behaviors.
That is where the design of the training matters and on-the-job learning and coaching come into play. Think about group coaching, peer learning, in the field coaching done right (i.e. where the coach does not intervene) and using mobile technology with scenario-based challenges.
By genuinely including your team in continuous training opportunities, you can make lasting changes in sales behaviors and positively impact performance.
Next, make sure trainings are relevant to the business and your team’s objectives (4).
Do you remember those compulsory courses you had to follow in school which were nowhere close to your field of interest? Probably not your absolute best. It is the same with business training. Making it business relevant and aligned to individual and team objectives will generate higher engagement, increase on the job practice, and generate tangible results.
A good way to gauge this, is whether people within your sales team take ownership of their day to day activities and proactively ask for feedback about their successes and challenges, encountered while consciously trying to apply what they have learned.
Finally, think about building a performance dashboard(5) measuring proficiency, adoption, and the link to commercial performance. It will enable you to do two things:
See how competency levels are evolving within the group in order to put your time and effort where it matters most
See the direct link between your investments in L&D and business results.
Collective intelligence makes your sales team smarter. Empower your entire team to help one salesperson solve a problem by using intervision techniques to leverage collective intelligence.
Collective intelligence
Put simply: ‘two heads are better than one’. Intervision techniques therefore help you harness every member of a team’s own thoughts and ideas to promote group intelligence – investing in each member and increasing the potential of overcoming one salesperson’s specific challenge.
Intervision techniques call on collective intelligence
Intervision, also known as ‘group coaching’, ‘peer coaching’ or ‘co-development’, refers to an activity with a small group of professionals who have a professional context in common. It emphasizes the multilateral contribution between colleagues – as opposed to supervision – because collective intelligence is a kind of wisdom and knowledge that grows out of a group.
The intervision technique provides sales managers with a different way to interact with their team and team members. Similar to group coaching, it relies on questioning and active listening, but also employs brainstorming techniques and makes it possible to tackle both technical and conceptual problems. The main difference, however, is that intervision covers topics that will benefit the entire sales team and make it more effective, whereas individual coaching aims to solve a problem specific to the salesperson.
What sales problems can intervision techniques help to resolve?
Team meetings are too often laborious and ineffective, and this is where collective intelligence can help. Intervision techniques relate to sales team coaching. They develop sales efficiency, strengthen team spirit, and increase corporate identity. They can be used to generate new ideas, discover new ways to analyze situations, and find new possible solutions.
There are a couple of conditions for its effective use, however: the presented case must be real, and it must relate to a real blocked sales opportunity, for example in a situation where a salesperson experiences repetitive failure or a persistent communication issue.
The exposed situation very often reveals a common problem – something that sounds familiar to all salespeople, which they might have been exposed to in the past or are still facing today. This is why the intervision session can benefit the whole team.
How to moderate an intervision session
The session can be done with or without a facilitator, but it’s always crucial to stick to the allocated time for the exercise to be effective and stop the group from dwelling on details. It is recommended to spend 45-90 minutes on each issue as a group, depending on the group size and complexity of the topic.
During an intervision session, aparticipant raises one issue, which could be a new challenge or a problem that they have encountered. It’s essential that it’s an ongoing issue.
The other participants then act as consultants and commit to share ideas, collaborate, and help the salesperson who wants to overcome a difficult situation. Group members ask questions to find out more about the topic and clarify particular points. It’s important not to start discussing solutions at this stage, but simply to focus on clarifying the issue.
The next stage is for the group to start brainstorming possible ways of approaching the problem and suggesting possible solutions. The issue owner is invited to listen and to take in the proposals without joining the discussion.
Following the brainstorming session, the group makes a number of recommendations and suggestions to the issue owner, who can then provide feedback on what he/she has heard from the group: how it helps or not, what they can take away from the exercise, etc.
Selling in uncertain times
This technique is particularly relevant in today’s market – with fierce competition and rapid change. Sales organizations need collective intelligence to be more agile and adaptive without burning talent.
To stimulate improved sales performance, it’s important to understand and practice digital behaviors that promote a sense of psychological safety. You can encourage this psychological safety in your commercial team by:
Framing the work as a learning process,
Acknowledging your own fallibility;
Modeling curiosity and asking lots of questions.
Remote working and digital communications
Psychological safety and trust in leadership are more important than ever before as sales forces are increasingly working remotely and communicating digitally.
Leverage psychological safety
Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School, defined the notion of psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and being vulnerable in front of each other. In other words: team members feel accepted and respected in psychologically safe teams.
This means that members of effective teams feel comfortable asking questions or bringing up new ideas – without worrying about being judged – and are confident they won’t be embarrassed or punished for making mistakes.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
In line with this phrase first coined by the philosopher Aristotle, we also believe that members of efficient sales teams can achieve more by working together than working alone. An efficient commercial team is therefore more than the sum of its individuals – so even though getting these individuals to all work together can be tough, it’s critical for team effectiveness. They need to plan, solve problems, make decisions, and review progress. And they need each other – and efficient leadership – to get this work done successfully.
3 behaviors that increase team efficiency
A Google study reported in The New York Times Magazine highlighted several factors that boost team efficiency, and psychological safety came top in the order of importance. The most effective leaders are therefore those that create a safe and open ‘digital dialogue’ with their team members.
There are three specific behaviors that strongly correlate with high-performing managers:
Expressing doubts: Do you feel safe saying ‘I don’t know’, or are you worried about seeming ignorant or incompetent? Managers who admit not knowing the answer to a question – and who create the same sense of security in their direct contacts – are more effective than those who do not.
Requesting feedback: Asking for and providing feedback increases effectiveness and engagement. Digital interactions through video conferences, chats, or email are good opportunities for providing constructive feedback – and constructive feedforward.
Sharing opinions: It’s important for team members to feel confident that nobody else in the team will embarrass or punish them for offering ideas or questioning the status quo.
Research by CSO Insights has shown that sales coaching enables sellers to substantially improve their sales skills and so win more deals. The second benefit is that it allows sales managers to shift their focus from simply helping people to do their work to actually developing their skills. Which is surely an advantage, isn’t it?
Sales managers need to use coaching techniques, tips and tools. Even though some may have a talent for coaching, many don’t know how best to go about it. Sales management coaching programs help them gain the skills and self-confidence they need to integrate coaching as part of their daily routine. Fortunately, there’s technology available to help them. Sales coaching software doesn’t just make it possible to personalise the coaching, but also to measure it by looking at the sellers’ individual actions, monitoring their progress and providing a visual representation to make things clearer, rather than simply using their own perception, gut instinct and experience.
Sales coaching tools
Coaching isn’t the same thing as providing solutions or giving everyone the same advice. A good sales coaching tool can chart progress and zoom in on the lowest level of knowledge, and combine this with the extent to which this knowledge is actually applied.
It differs from eLearning or other content offered by Learning Management Systems (LMS) in this sense, because a sales coaching tool combines software for teaching sellers and ensuring they retain this information, stimulating behavioural change, making everything measurable, and providing suggestions for the management to reach the right conclusions and implement the right actions. Altogether, it forms an integrated solution that provides content exactly when it’s needed.
Enabling just-in-time coaching
This flexible (agile) method for developing sellers’ skills is called ‘Coaching Enablement’. It allows you to organise, manage and individualise coaching while ensuring sellers retain the information they’re given. It also provides dashboards for sales managers, higher management and HR. This means HR can now measure, support and adapt each employee’s development and the impact they have. Peer-to-peer learning is also provided.
A good example of this is ‘video pitching’, where the seller records an answer to a client situation using their smartphone, which can then be used as coaching input for the sales manager, and good examples can be shared with other team members. This enhances the performance of the whole team, contributes to continuous development and improves team spirit.
The main advantages of just-in-time coaching are:
Identifying possibilities for personal development
Building self-confidence
Strengthening desired behaviour, knowledge and skills
Installing a culture that stimulates continuous improvement for each individual and the team
Measuring the impact on sales results
Read more about agile learning, knowledge retention and just-in-time coaching
Perpetos Improves Customer Sales Proficiency from 53% to 80%
Qstream’s mobile microlearning application was selected by Perpetos as a continuous sales training reinforcement solution for their sales performance programs which help their customers improve conversion rates and lower the cost of sales.
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Els Costers
Pascal Persyn
Eliseo Manfron
Nicolas Dejehansart
