What does “good” look like? Raise the bar for your sales team by sharing insights from the field

Imagine a scenario where a rep is sitting in a parking lot preparing to head into a meeting with a prospect.  The rep is pretty seasoned, but it’s been awhile since she’s been in this particular selling situation, and to make matters worse, there are some new product features that are likely to present objections she hasn’t had to deal with yet.  Of course, she heard all about these new features and the objections they might create at the national sales meeting, but truth be told, she heard all about a lot of things at the national sales meeting and she’s struggling to keep it all top-of-mind.

Traditionally, her course of action would be to review pages of product documents as well as any notes on objection handling she may have jotted down. The problem with this approach however, is that aside from being incredibly tedious and boring, it isn’t effective.  According to Psychology Today the human brain processes text 60,000 times slower.  If you also factor in the level of nuance contained in body language and other non-verbal communication – which is absolutely essential to sales success – it becomes clear that she’s not fully set up for success having to rely on this traditional method.

The Power of Video

Many industry leading companies, such as Bullhorn and LogMeIn are integrating mobile-video technology into their sales training and enablement strategy as they work to remedy the inherent flaws in traditional training methods.

Imagine how much better positioned our sales rep would be if she could easily access a library of bite-sized videos of other reps at her company delivering their handling of this selling situation and any potential objections?  She could pull it up on her mobile phone or tablet and do a quick keyword search by objection, product, product category or any other relevant term to access digestible videos at the moment of need – right before she goes in.  That way, the most relevant information is top-of-mind while she’s in front of the prospect.

This kind of just-in-time access to company-specific best practices and insights on how to deliver certain aspects of key presentations has truly raised the bar for leading sales organizations.  It has created an environment of ongoing peer-to-peer learning and best-practice refinement where sales executives and managers can finally leverage the collaborative strength of their teams – even when spread out over large territories.

A New Era

The fact that this new paradigm in sales learning has had a revolutionary effect on companies’ sales performance should come as no surprise to any experienced sales professional.  Anyone who’s been successful in sales can attest to the power of being able to watch the performance of another rep in your company to gain perspective on how to handle a certain situation, frame a challenging aspect of a product, or overcome a tricky objection.

After all, according to Aberdeen Group, best-in-class sales organizations are 30% more likely to formally collect and share sales “tribal knowledge” than laggard firms, and having a best practice library of short videos capturing and categorizing all of this is proving to be the most effective way.

With the swipe of a finger, sales reps can find inspiration from an awesome presentation they viewed a week ago and use it to produce a killer sales pitch.  All while on the go when they need it most.