The performance of your salespeople has a direct result on your company’s bottom line. If they hit their targets, your business will hit its revenue goals. Regrettably, the opposite is also true. Because sales practices continue to evolve as time goes by, neglecting the evolution of your sales team could have catastrophic effects.
This is why most companies have been investing in sales enablement—the practice of giving salespeople the tools and resources they need to do their jobs more effectively. With the content and technology at hand, your reps can significantly boost their efficiency. Plus, giving them a helping hand is sure to win you some motivation.
If you’ve been wondering how to improve sales performance, investing in sales enablement tools could be your answer. Keep reading to learn why and what tools you’ll need to evolve your sales performance.
What factors affect sales performance?
Sales performance can be influenced by many different factors. If you want to give your team the best chance of succeeding, you need to consider all of these while coming up with your strategy. Here are five of the main factors that affect your sales.
How well your salespeople are trained
The student is only as good as the teacher. The quality of your training programs will determine how effective your salespeople are in varying sales situations. Give them relevant information and scenarios so they can develop their processes.
84% of sales training is forgotten within the first 3 months, though. That means that even if you’re training your sales team, their learning might dip off soon after.
This is why it’s important to invest in ongoing sales training for your team. Dedicate time to training every couple of months to keep them up-to-date on new techniques and tools you’re implementing into your business. Track their performance and tackle their challenges head-on with new training programs.
The competition
Your competitor’s success also has a major impact on your company’s sales performance. Customer loyalty is the name of the game nowadays, and if they’re going above and beyond your best deals and customer experiences, you’re going to lose your competitive edge over time.
Make sure your sales reps know what the other company is doing right, and emulate their best practices to you can get to the same level of success. Have them focus on strengthening your existing customer base, then have them work on adding to it.
The quality of your product
The quality of your product or service has a significant impact on sales performance. If your product or service isn’t keeping up with the times and updates in your industry, you’ll lose market share. While your sales team isn’t responsible for this, they are responsible for landing deals with clients and showing others the value of your product. Have them strategize new ways to highlight key features.
Building a welcoming customer experience
89% of customers are more likely to make a second purchase after having a positive customer service experience. This underscores why it’s critical to provide an exceptional customer service experience to every lead and customer that you interact with.
Your sales team is directly responsible for this. While your tech department can worry about creating a better user experience online, your sales team should focus on the conversations they’re having with customers and clients.
Collaboration
Finally, cross-departmental collaboration can have a massive impact on your sales performance. If marketing is highly aligned with sales, your salespeople will have more leads to work with and better resources to fall back on during the conversion process. And when your sales team provides your marketers with insights into your customers, marketers can better create content that’s relevant to them.
How to improve sales performance: investing in sales enablement
Now that we’ve covered some of the major factors that can impact sales performance, let’s look at a strategy you can use to overcome them. This section will cover why investing in sales enablement could be your answer and highlight some of the best tools to get started.
What is sales enablement?
At a high level, sales enablement is the practice of giving your sales team what it needs to succeed. Sales enablement is a many-faceted beast. Sales enablement could be new content, learning programs, databases, or case studies.
A hallmark of sales enablement is tools. If you want to give your salespeople the best chance of succeeding, then you’ll need to provide them with several tools to make that happen. This will be an investment. There’s no way around that. However, it’s an investment that should bring more money into your business over time than it takes away.
Build a suite of sales enablement tools
CRM software
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It’s a type of software that is designed to keep everything that your organization knows about leads and customers in a single place. This includes:
- Contact information
- Demographics
- Previous communication history
- Business Information
With CRM software, every person on your staff can instantly identify the most important pieces of information on a client or lead simply by referencing the system.
This is beneficial for a few reasons.
First, it becomes easier for your salespeople to manage many different relationships with prospects and customers at the same time. A CRM can even send them a notification when they’ve neglected one prospect or customer for too long.
Additionally, a CRM will enable your entire team to work more effectively together on the same leads and customers.
A marketing specialist won’t need to wait for a single salesperson to tell them a key piece of information about a customer before designing a marketing email for them. They’ll be able to simply check the CRM and get started straight away, thereby helping the entire sales process move more efficiently.
Sales content management tools
Investing in a sales content management platform could also be a smart move for your company – especially if it’s on the larger side.
Sales content management platforms help companies optimize their content pipelines and the content itself. For example, one could help you both write more impactful blog posts and case studies, while also helping you streamline the product of those posts.
This software keeps your entire content pipeline in a single place that everyone on your team can access. You can use it to create content production queues, promote cross-departmental collaboration, and more.
The net result should be that your salespeople have more impactful sales resources at their disposal to help them while communicating with potential clients. That could be the difference between them closing some deals or not.
Call coaching tools
As much as 93% of all human communication is nonverbal. Therefore, it’s no surprise that many salespeople struggle to develop the same rapport with a potential client over the phone as they can in a face-to-face setting.
That’s why you may also want to consider investing in call coaching tools.
These tools will help your salespeople become more effective at sales calls by teaching them the best strategies for:
- Capturing a prospect’s attention during the early stages of the call
- Answering tough questions without deflecting or losing prospect interest
- Closing the call successfully
While call coaching is going to help your sales team a lot, it’s also important to give them tools that help them engage with an audience virtually. For example, VODIUM is a virtual teleprompter that your salespeople can use to follow the perfect sales script every time without ever breaking eye contact with their prospect.
Learning management tools
The best salespeople are constantly improving. They understand where they have the most room for improvement and focus on those skills every day.
However, not all of your salespeople will be motivated or capable of performing this type of self-improvement daily. That’s why it’s also a good idea to invest in learning management tools.
These tools help your organization create and manage personalized improvement plans for every salesperson. With them, you can ensure that everyone on your sales staff is making taking concrete steps toward fulfilling their potential every day.
Website visitor tracking software
Your company’s website is a powerful, yet often under-utilized source of information. It captures details about who visits your site, what pages they’re looking at, and how often they come back.
With the right tool, you can leverage all of this data to gather in-depth insights into who your customers are and what they care about. This could do wonders for your sales team’s performance.
For example, you might notice that a prospect always looks at the same product when they come to your site. Or, you might discover that they’re interested in blog posts that focus on a certain benefit.
Your salespeople can use that information to communicate with prospects more effectively during their calls. It could help them be much more precise with what they focus on to drive more conversions.
Keep your sales script close at hand with a top-tier teleprompter app like VODIUM
The conversations that your salespeople have with prospects are where the rubber meets the road on sales enablement. Even if you give your staff all of the tools that they need to become more effective, they still need to put those lessons into practice during these conversations to succeed.
That’s why you should also consider investing in VODIUM. Our virtual teleprompter app allows your staff to create carefully-worded scripts for sales calls and follow them to the letter while still keeping their language sounding natural.
It could be just what your team needs to put your sales enablement plan to use and win more conversions.So why wait? Sign up for a free trial today to get started.
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