Sales teams move quickly. But traditional learning content and sales collateral can take weeks or months to create. Here at Allego, we use agile approaches to sales enablement to quickly empower reps with content captured “in the wild” by other reps and subject matter experts (SMEs).

Research shows that high-performing sales reps—those who have made quota for at least the past two years—list in-field observation of others, on-the-job, informal learning, and peer collaboration as their top three sources of learning.

It turns out, salespeople want to learn from other salespeople. And you can help them with agile content.

What Is Agile Content?

Agile content differs from formal collateral produced by marketing. It is activated with “how to” context, can be crowdsourced, and is often created by people on other teams.

Agile content helps ensure salespeople have the most recent information and are equipped for every selling situation. It’s time critical and tends to have a shorter shelf life than formal sales and marketing content. It’s also used internally to share hard-won insights within the team.

Examples of agile content include:

• Seller win / loss stories
• Competitive intelligence from the field
• Call clips
• Virtual brainstorming
• Customer stories
• News flash & commentary
• Demo pro tips
• Sales leader market updates

Agile content feeds just-in-time learning—which sellers crave—and enables them to have more meaningful conversations with buyers.

14 Steps to Amplify Success with Agile Content

You can strengthen your sales enablement initiatives with agile content. It starts by building a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration. Follow these steps to learn how to capture and share insights from your top performers.

Step 1: Identify Champions

Ask an influential leader to help drive adoption by promoting the program and giving it visibility from the top down. Then, identify a few high-performing sellers and ask them to participate in the project. Sellers are more likely to get involved if they see top-performing peers sharing advice.

Step 2: Create a Brand

Branding your agile content program with a name (like “Amplify Success,” for example), can create stickiness with sellers. When sharing content, label each submission with that name before sharing it with the broader team. Once sellers recognize that name and the value the content adds for them, the more likely they will continue to engage and participate in the program.

Step 3: Pick a Launch Event

Piggyback on any large event such as your sales kickoff, customer conference, or other team meeting to launch your agile content program. You’ll have a captive audience, you can tie the program to the event theme, you can request submissions as pre-work, and you can share submissions before or after the event.

Step 4: Automate Submissions

Use your sales enablement platform or other system to automate prompts and requests for seller videos. For example, the Allego platform includes smart exercises that allow you to choose the users and roles that can review exercises, plus channels where responses will be automatically listed. For ongoing collecting of agile content, you can create a channel, subscribe your users, and route all videos to that channel.

Step 5: Bring the Fun

Your request won’t feel like a mandatory assignment to your sellers if you make it relevant and fun. One way to create stickiness is to tie the initiative to company objectives or a fun theme. Be creative.

Step 6: Make It Collaborative

One of Allego’s key benefits is the ability to leave in-line comments and feedback. Encourage people to give a thumbs-up and leave comments on each others’ videos and ask managers and leaders to share their thoughts, as well. Enter all participants into a raffle for each video they share or comment they leave on a peer’s video.

Step 7: Make It Competitive

Lean into sellers’ competitive natures and have them vote on the best submission from their peers. In Allego, you can have viewers give the video a star rating or create a poll and have viewers vote that way. Recognition, gift cards, and other prizes can motivate sellers to participate.

Step 8: Consider Your Audience

You need to have a strategy for sharing and maintaining all of the great insights that you receive from your sellers. Some content may be applicable to the entire organization, while other content may be valuable to only a specific team or role. Consider the audience for each submission carefully and share only with the relevant teams and roles to ensure that content stays relevant and valuable.

Step 9: Make It Easy

To make it easy for reps to watch, you can assign a series of videos using a course as a “playlist.” If you have a lot of videos, consider creating a schedule of small video drops, which can be achieved manually or automated.

Step 10: Get Organized

A collection of agile content can become a library of best practices. Consider where agile content fits into your existing content management system. For example, if you receive a lot of great competitive insights, those might fit into an existing competitive “channel” alongside more formal content.

Step 11: Keep Momentum Going

Once you’ve rolled out your program, you can keep the momentum going by carefully planning and building this process into your enablement efforts. Make sure to recognize those who shared exceptional content. This can be especially effective when the recognition comes from a leader, so ask your executive sponsor to recognize content and add comments to videos. This will help keep the momentum going.

Step 12: Measure Engagement

Make sure to track and share metrics on views or feedback with key stakeholders. Highlight lessons learned or action items that the team can take based on someone’s submission.

Step 13: Create a Cadence

Decide how frequently you want to collect content. Do you want to request content monthly or quarterly? Can you align with key events throughout the year? Review your enablement calendar and identify opportunities where gathering agile insights could be beneficial.

Step 14: Keep It Fresh

Agile content typically has a shorter shelf life compared to more traditional content. Consider how frequently you want to review this content and set expiration dates to keep content fresh. Competitive and market intelligence are examples of agile content that changes rapidly. You may want to review this content every quarter.

Agile Content for a Fast-Paced World

In a rapidly changing world, agile content helps ensure salespeople are equipped for every selling situation. By providing agile content, your organization gives salespeople a continual stream of product information, messaging, and peer-created best practices that keeps them one step ahead of the competition. Use agile content to enable your reps with the information they need to have better conversations with buyers and win more deals.

Learn More

Get your copy of How Agile Sales Enablement and Readiness Boost Performance: 2023 Guide to learn more about agile content.