The ultimate goal of any company is to grow and improve sales. Some groups have more direct responsibility for that metric (as in the sales team) while others are in a more defined sales support role (such as marketing).
Of course, it could be argued that everyone has a responsibility to support sales and help the company be successful. Whatever your role, just imagine the impact if you could help your sales team close more deals.
In order to truly impact revenue, the sales team needs the best tools and technology to reach company goals. Here are three signs that your sales enablement efforts need to be updated and how to fix them.
Sign #1. Your reps are constantly asking you where to find content and/or asking to create something you already have.
Solution: Organize your content in a mobile-ready sales enablement portal.
Just because you are creating lots of valuable content resources doesn’t mean reps know where they are or how to find them. Fortunately, this is a pretty straightforward fix: make it easy for your reps to search for and find your content by putting it in a sales enablement portal that can be accessed from multiple mobile devices. This way, they will have one centralized location to find all of their selling tools in a way that’s easily accessible and organized to suit their needs.
Sign #2. While at live meetings, remote attendees are sprung on reps and they don’t have a good way to include them in their presentations.
Solution: Broadcast PowerPoint slides live to remote attendees.
Presenting to a mix of live and remote attendees is becoming the norm these days. When reps don’t know ahead of time, it can really put a wrench in their presentation. They either have to scramble to get a video conference set up (which takes precious time and often money) or send along the PowerPoint slides which then lose all the impact as attendees can skip around.
With SlideShark Team Edition you can enable your salespeople to send remote attendees a link to their presentations through email, allowing them to follow along in real-time while reps deliver the presentation straight from their iPads. (For more details on why the iPad is such a powerful selling tool, check out this webcast from Sales Management Association.)
Sign #3. The pipeline forecast is not in alignment with actual deals closed.
Solution: Send on-demand video assets and analyze the viewing data.
Picture this – the client is enthusiastic about your solution, agreeable every step of the way and all signs point to a closed deal. Then, at the very end of the quarter, they pull the bait and switch on you. It happens more than organizations would like and can seriously mess up your quarterly numbers. So how can we know for sure if the client is actually interested and serious about buying? It would help to have some analytics on whether or not they are looking at the materials you give them and if they are forwarded throughout the organization.
SYKES, a global contact center company, has done this with their proposals to great success. Not only does a personalized video proposal differentiate them from their competitors’ run-of-the-mill Word documents, it also provides a way to track who is viewing the proposal, how many times and if it is being forwarded throughout the company. To hear SYKES’ video proposal results, check out their testimonial.
All you need is a little help from everyone’s good friend technology. When used to boost sales enablement efforts, productivity increases and more opportunities are won. Give it a try – you have nothing to lose and everything to gain!