Bridge the Sales Engagement Gap: Foster Networking & Accountability

• Is my sales team on track to meet our sales forecast for the month and which tools and media are helping us meet this goal?

• Are the product data sheets and demo video for our new offering hitting the mark with both our current customers and new prospects?

• Can I better engage my sales team on cross-functional initiatives inside the company in a way that drives ROI and also makes sense for the way we work?

• Can I increase productivity, accountability, and responsiveness on my team by improving the way that we share and exchange important information every day?

If these questions sound familiar and are ones that come up frequently, it’s likely you may have a sales engagement gap in your sales organization. One that can easily be fixed with better digital communications and information sharing tools, and that enable you to use a combination of media to make data-driven decisions and foster accountability among team members.

The communications landscape for many businesses has become a chaotic, friction-filled space, one filled with bottlenecks and a lack of understanding of the most critical ‘act now’ information. Your sales team deserves the “don’t make me look for it” model when it comes to effectively creating, sharing, acting upon, and tracking the critical information they need every day.

Likewise, customers and prospects don’t want a barrage of emails, tweets, texts and other content thrown at them when trying to evaluate a product or service. Communications need to be information-rich, while also engaging, easy to understand and actionable. Your sales team needs to be able to understand how effective their information sharing efforts are — with each other and with prospects. Knowing how individuals engage with different types of content provides you and your team with useful insights into how best to share particular content to generate the greatest level of understanding and participation.

In today’s always-connected world of information overload, are these goals realistic and possible? Super Hero Sally thinks so!

Let’s start by looking at the old ways of sharing information with sales prospects. First there was direct mail and cold calling, which was mostly considered intrusive and unwelcome. Then came the flood of email messages, online ads, retargeting, and other digital content. Lack of knowledge and engagement became the result of a fire hose of uninvited information.

Sharing information with sales team members also has various levels of complications. In-person and phone meetings used to be the primary way of communicating information, along with memos and reports. Electronic communication began to replace in-person conversations, and eventually cloud-based sales management tools became the primary mode of tracking and reporting.

Today, a salesperson has a number of tools for communicating and sharing information — video, spreadsheets, surveys, documents, images, and more. But how do they know what the most effective tool, or combination of tools, is for delivering content and information to any customer? How can sales managers determine how engaged their sales team members are and how much they understand, when critical information is conveyed?

Super Hero Sally comes to the rescue with a solution that enables the effortless creation of “digital packets” of information, using the media elements you see as most effective (video, audio, text, images, surveys), and that offers a real-time analytics dashboard to show you how each viewer engages and complies with each piece of information shared. This type of feedback can enable individuals on your team to continuously improve the way in which they share information and get better results for their prospecting efforts. Creating optimized information sharing templates which in turn, make you - a Sales Manager Superhero - like me.

Here’s what your world can look like with a platform like Ving at your disposal:

1. Sharing effective and motivating information: Part of your job is frequently delivering interactions to keep your team motivated and accountable for hitting their numbers. Finding the time for face-to-face “pep talks” is nearly impossible and can take your team out of the field during valuable selling time. Being able to share information and communicate in an effective on-demand manner — with video for example — is crucial to the sales team’s success.
2. Engaging with sales teams about tools and training needs: Do you often find there is a disconnect between your expectations and your team’s accomplishments, based on the training they’ve received and the tools available to them? With more flexible information sharing delivered via your normal mode of communications, you can create snippet surveys and elicit feedback from your team about various sales challenges. For example, if you find that understanding how to advance prospects through the funnel to a close is a problem — you can create and share the content you need to address this problem.

3. Seeing more deals close: An effective strategy for turning a prospect into a loyal customer is keeping them informed with company developments, product updates and new features, price breaks, and reviews. Having access to real-time information – for each individual customer – gives your sales reps the kind of data they need to truly understand who is engaged and ready to buy and who is not. It then becomes clear what type of information leads to a more eager buyer.

4. Addressing salespeople’s short attention spans: Salespeople are notoriously busy and pre-occupied, so a creative approach to team communication and collaboration is important. By being able to engage and share information through track-able and on-demand media, you can foster a stronger certainty of follow-through and feedback for every sales rep. Mutual understanding and responsibility is key.

Ineffective communications and lack of information sharing among sales teams creates an environment of frustration, unmet expectations, poor performance and low morale. When the right information is shared in a timely and engaging manner – it contributes to a mutual understanding of goals and expectations, along with a sense of ownership and responsibility. What was once a team with a communications engagement gap can be transformed into an informed, high performing organization that can’t be stopped. And better performance = higher revenues.

For more information on Ving and how we can help you become a Sales Superhero, please visit Ving!