Part 3 of Driving Success from Sales Enablement Investments Blog Series
Learning is not connected to sales execution
Traditionally, teaching sales people about markets and customers, and equipping them with product knowledge have been viewed as ‘learning activities’ undertaken in the classroom or through eLearning. There is usually no connection to the sales process – making it hard for sales people to know where and how to apply this knowledge on deals.
To make things worse, the way people learn is changing. After we leave college or university many of us appear to lose the habit of reading through materials to accumulate and store knowledge. The preference now is to search for bite sized pieces of knowledge when we need it, consume that information there and then, and perform the task.
Sales people are no different. In fact, many of them are at the extreme end of the ‘spend less time learning and more time doing’ spectrum! And this is at a time when customers expect sales people to know more – about companies like theirs, the markets they operate in, and their possible goals and challenges.
Because of this, the old model of providing learning and learning systems that are completely separate from the tools sales people use as they pursue deals no longer works.
Integrated learning and sales enablement solutions
The market seems to have recognized this problem and we’re seeing a lot of merger and acquisition activity between learning management system (LMS) vendors and sales enablement platform (SEP) vendors.
The objective is to bring together the selling knowledge and materials sales people need into a common repository that can be accessed either via conventional learning pathways (e.g. eLearning) or just-in-time as you pursue an opportunity.
Digital guided selling tools
But how do you make it easy for sales people to dip into the knowledge they need to sell effectively, as they move a deal through the sales process?
The arrival of integrated learning and sales enablement systems provides the tantalizing opportunity to create a single user experience, which connects sales people to knowledge on customers, personas and products, gives them step-by-step guidance on how to sell, and provides easy access to the right materials.
This type of digital guided selling tool that brings together selling methodology, sales skills, learning, and selling knowledge has the potential to revolutionize B2B sales performance.
More from this blog series:
Part 1 - Making Content Discoverable
Part 2 - Moving from Sales Documents to a Database of Selling Knowledge
Part 4 - Digital Tools for Effective Call and Meeting Preparation
Part 5 - A New Dawn for Sales Coaching
Part 6 - Sales Presentations: How Much Control Should Marketing Give?
