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What Is Sales Mastery?
New Hire Onboarding: The Path to Mastery Starts Here
Continuous Learning: Sales Training Never Stops
Coaching: The (Too Often) Missing Ingredient for Mastery
Peer Learning: Help Reps Learn from the Best
Sales Manager Enablement: It’s Not All About the Reps!
Sales Transformation: Keeping Up with the Pace of Change
Sales Readiness Software: Accelerate Mastery with Technology
About Brainshark
Table of Contents
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What Is Sales Mastery?
There are many reasons why sales reps win or lose deals, but lack of preparation should never be one of them. Unfortunately, Forrester Research reports that 81% of sales meetings are ineffective (and some executives would go so far as to call them a “complete waste of time.”) The fact is, too many reps simply aren’t prepared to have the types of conversations today’s buyers expect. It’s the job of sales enablement – and sales leaders – to ensure reps are part of the other 19%: always ready to seize every opportunity.
The challenge, of course, is tied to how you get there. After all, sales training is different than other forms of corporate training. For salespeople, training is not about simply checking a box. A “one-and-done” approach to learning simply isn’t enough. To truly empower salespeople to make the most of every buyer interaction, they can’t just complete their training – they need to master it.
Are they retaining information over extended periods of time? Can they demonstrate comprehension in real-world scenarios? Are they keeping up with the pace of change as your business and offerings evolve?
This need for mastery is what makes sales training so unique.
Achieving it requires a strategic approach to sales enablement and readiness that emphasizes training, coaching and reinforcement; that encourages learning from both managers and peers; that keeps up with
the pace of change; that validates whether reps can demonstrate what they’ve learned in the field; and that leverages technology to scale and simplify these processes.
This eBook will take an in-depth look at the keys to putting your team on the path to not only sales readiness – but mastery.
"If the mission of sales is to make money, then the mission of sales enablement is to provide reps with the training, content and information they need to be successful in that goal.”
Christi Wall, Sales Enablement Manager, Ping Identity
It should come as no surprise that a comprehensive onboarding process is the first step in a rep’s journey towards sales mastery. While the majority of companies have some form of sales onboarding program in place, most have a lot of room for improvement. The Sales Management Association found that 1/3 of reps still lack proficiency in up to a dozen key selling skills post-onboarding, and only 40% of companies consider their sales onboarding efforts to be effective.
The goal of onboarding is to accelerate new reps’ time to productivity. A flawed program leads to slower ramp-up times, lower quota attainment, and higher rep turnover. In other words, sales onboarding is too important to not be done well.
New Hire Onboarding: The Path to Mastery Starts Here
DID YOU KNOW:Firms with effective onboarding report:
The Sales Management Association
Greater sales growth rates
Higher sales performance&10% 14%
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Quick Tip:
An onboarding program that’s built for success takes planning. A smart initial step is to make a list of the core competencies that your salespeople will need to be successful. Create content based on what reps need to know (product information, CRM training, competitive intelligence and so on). Sales readiness technology can make it easy to not only create this content, but deliver it in a consistent, scalable way.
Learn More: The Blueprint for Better Sales Onboarding
Quick Tip:
For the best chances of retention, ongoing training should be made up of short, bite-sized learning modules that won’t cut into a rep’s selling time. Kevin Starner, VP of sales enablement at Iron Mountain, says:
“If you fill a water balloon too fast, it’s useless. Think of that from a seller’s perspective. If you give them too much information too fast, you burn them out. If a seller wants to [achieve] sales readiness, they’re more likely to invest four or five minutes than 30 or 60.”
Events like new product rollouts or mergers and acquisitions create a slew of new information for reps to understand and master. Stay agile and adapt your program to help reps stay prepared as your business evolves!
ADAPT TO CHANGE:
Continuous Learning: Sales Training Never Stops
A common misconception is that onboarding ends when reps have been deemed fully ramped up.
Unfortunately, as CEB reports, 87% of training material is forgotten after 30 days. If reps are hemorrhaging information at that rate, then there is little chance of achieving mastery.
Continuous training and “re-boarding” are necessary to reinforce onboarding material, ensuring that there are no learning gaps in the salesperson’s journey to mastery. It’s also needed to keep reps up-to-speed on new initiatives and events, such as product rollouts, sales kickoffs, new selling methodologies or other changes within the business or product portfolio. While informal or “just-in-time” learning plays a role here, your approach to continuous training should be formal and consistent.
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Quick Tip:
Video-based coaching technologies allow managers to scale and execute coaching programs for reps no matter where they are located. Managers can more easily execute the coaching process through virtual challenges that help validate that salespeople have truly mastered the material they’ve been trained on.
Learn More: Playbook: Choosing the Right Sales Coaching Solution
A WORD FROM THE EXPERTS:
"Coaching does matter. The impact on quota attainment is remarkable, and the impact on win rates is significant."
CSO Insights
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Coaching: The (Too Often) Missing Ingredient for Mastery
A Forbes Insights study found that 74% of leading companies cite “coaching or mentoring” as the most important responsibility of sales managers; however, only 15% of those polled say they have an adequate amount of sales coaching in place. This is a problem, because effective coaching is crucial to the pursuit of sales mastery.
Sales coaching is the act of practicing and reinforcing material through interactive exercises with the goal of getting a more thorough understanding of the material. It’s also the best way to help reps drive consistency and performance, master critical messages and sharpen their skills.
Leading companies use a dynamic, technology-driven approach to coaching that includes informal and formal challenges, manager-led coaching and feedback, peer-to-peer learning and gamification or
leaderboards. Those who do this well achieve 28% higher win rates and 10% greater quota attainment, according to CSO Insights.
Quick Tip:
Sales readiness technology can be an extremely helpful way of facilitating peer-to-peer learning. The right solution can enable reps to review each other’s submissions and generate an ongoing library of best practices, tips and standout examples. Leaderboards for various coaching and peer learning tasks can also create a sense of friendly competition for reps.
“Knowledge-sharing can help those sales representatives generate results more quickly. After all, there’s something comfortable — and effective — about learning from peers.”
DID YOU KNOW:
Jim Ninivaggi, SVP of Business Development,
Brainshark
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Peer Learning: Help Reps Learn from the Best
Another key way to expand learning beyond training courses or manager-led coaching is to enable reps to learn from each other through peer-to-peer activities. This is a popular method among successful sales teams – according to ATD, 91% of reps say learning from peers is helping them succeed.
Combining peer-to-peer with other forms of learning will help reps get that much closer to sales mastery by observing those who’ve already achieved it in certain areas. From a sales enablement perspective, peer learning provides examples of “what great looks like,” which can be used to help raise the level of underperforming reps. For example, if a rep is struggling with how to whiteboard a new product offering, watching an A-player’s video of the exercise can provide a helpful roadmap for what works.
Quick Tip:
Coach the coaches! Sales manager enablement has a direct correlation to better quota attainment, revenue plan attainment and win rates, according to CSO Insights. The sales enablement department should take the lead in supporting sales managers with enablement programs that provide guidance and resources in areas like coaching (as well as all the same information reps need to be trained on).
DID YOU KNOW:“Our research shows that unless sales organizations invest in developing their sales managers, they have little to no chance of achieving even average sales performance KPIs, including quota attainment, win rate, and revenue plan attainment.”
CSO Insights
Sales Manager Enablement: It’s Not All About the Reps!
There are many forms of learning and coaching tailored to sales reps, but where does that leave your managers? As noted earlier, “coach” is one of the most important roles a front-line manager plays. But coaching is not a natural skill for everyone, and just because a manager was an A-performer as an account rep, that doesn’t guarantee he or she will have the skills needed to coach their team in their current role. Sales managers have one of the hardest jobs in sales. To keep your team on the path to mastery, it’s important to also provide enablement programs that will empower managers to support reps and lead them there.
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DID YOU KNOW
Forbes Insights
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Sales Readiness Software: Accelerate Mastery with Technology
• Quickly create engaging, video-based content for training and communications
• Empower subject matter experts and others to contribute content for training
• Deliver on-demand training to supplement in-person learning sessions
• Facilitate coaching challenges to reinforce material in a scalable way
• Organize peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing
• Generate a library of best practices for continuous, just-in-time access
• Serve up training and coaching resources straight from your CRM system
• Track learning progress and measure performance
• And (ultimately) support reps in their pursuit of sales mastery!
To learn more about sales readiness technology, visit: www.brainshark.com/solutions
Sales enablement and readiness technology is a catalyst to sales mastery. The right technology allows sales onboarding, coaching and various forms of learning to happen in an organized, scalable and trackable fashion. Sales enablement and readiness solutions can help you do things like:
of top-performing companies are investing in sales enablement
technology to drive sales productivity.
55%
Visit us: www.brainshark.comSee a Demo: www.brainshark.com/see-a-demoContact Sales: www.brainshark.com/contact-sales
Want to learn more about sales enablement & readiness technology?
Brainshark sales readiness software equips businesses with the training, coaching and content authoring capabilities to achieve sales mastery and outsell the competition.
With Brainshark, companies can: prepare sales teams with on-demand training that accelerates onboarding and keeps reps up-to-speed; validate readiness with sales coaching that ensures reps master your message; and empower sales organizations with rich, dynamic content that can be created quickly and accessed anywhere.
Thousands of companies – including more than half of the Fortune 100 – rely on Brainshark to identify and close performance gaps, and get better results from their sales enablement initiatives. Learn more at: www.brainshark.com.
About Brainshark
www.brainshark.com | 781-370-8200
