The ability to have training materials at their fingertips gives sales reps an instant resource for research and builds confidence in sales meetings. Associating training materials to sales results will give the company insight and help develop better training tools.

 A sales enablement platform combined with on-demand training provides immediate reinforcement for field sales reps.

Most companies have some or most of their sales team working offsite, in geographically distributed locations. Larger enterprises can have global sales teams and many have sales reps who are not even exempt employees. There are many challenges with managing a remote sales team including the onboarding process and the ongoing training of these individuals.

Sales training is more successful when it’s available, when it’s focused, when there is immediate feedback, and when there is interaction between trainer and trainee. Working alone in the field can be very difficult enough and, depending upon the personality, sales reps can easily be derailed when they don’t have confidence in the knowledge of a product or the ability to call upon resources when needed.

Training Dollars Wasted
Most sales training today doesn’t include systematic, ongoing learning and reinforcement. This means that almost 50% of the content isn’t retained within the first five weeks. Eighty percent what was initially learned is then lost within the first 90 days.

If training materials are not dynamic or if they don’t sufficiently train the rep, it can create a disconnection and be counterproductive. With no way to hone their sales skills and no efficient means of sales reinforcement, the onboarding or complete sales process can be slowed significantly.

Technology can bridge the gap between the home office, the remote office (or Starbucks in some cases), and the lone sales rep in the field. The initial solution is typically a CRM, and that’s a great start, but some CRMs can be expensive or frustrating and some of the less expensive solutions may lack the add-ons that are needed for training.

The fact is that these solutions are for customer management and may not really translate well for training. And, what about the user experience? Is that important? Does that matter? Our experience tells us it does and keeping this in mind can add a level of complexity to your solution. We all know the generalization, that most sales people aren’t or don’t want to be focused on administrative tasks and they are usually technologically-challenged.

But how does this apply? It simply means that for your training solution to be quickly and widely adopted on a long term basis, it has to be easy to use, it has to be consistent with your training guidelines, it has to be reliable, it has to be intuitive and it really should look cool. That’s a tall order for a CRM.

Because a sales enablement solution is designed to specifically deliver content to the field, to be able distribute all kinds of content (such as videos and other rich media file types), to customize the user experience, to be updated instantly, to be used when internet is not available, and to actually record the activities of the end user, these solutions translate very well for not only sales, but for sales training.