“Sales reps care about selling, customer pain points, and product differentiators. They don’t care about learning how to use lots of different systems with unique processes.” - Rocco Seyboth
RevOps people plan to spend about 10% of their time on process adoption and retraining reps on new software. In reality, they spend 30-40% of their time on process adoption. That’s because process adoption profoundly affects everyone, including Ops, sales reps, and your executive team.
Sales reps are naturally ambivalent adopters. They’re fearful of change and new technology and want to stay in their comfort zone. RevOps needs a mind shift about how to best enable sales. Here are 4 real time enablement tips to increase process adoption in a way that resonates with your reps.
“We’ve been setting our reps up for failure.” - Rocco Seyboth
It’s time to challenge existing best practices about how to train sales reps on new software. It’s not about training reps when it’s convenient for Ops, making them sit through long meetings and videos, or expecting them to memorize dozens of procedures.
Follow these 4 real time enablement tips to improve sales adoption and productivity:
Do away with long meetings and asking reps to memorize dozens of procedures. Instead, avoid process training sessions entirely so reps can focus their mental energy on selling. Keep your meetings short and focused on why you’ve rolled out a new process, not just the steps needed.
Your organization needs a knowledge base to track processes, rules, and more. But your sales reps aren't going to waste time searching through endless docs for the answers they need. Instead of relying on the knowledge base, give them the steps they need to follow directly within Salesforce.
“The more you can get out of the way and let sales people do their job, the more you’re going to see the results across the board.” - Demar Amacker
There’s a time and a place for context and there’s a time and a place for just telling them what to do. RevOps usually wants reps to understand the benefit and theory behind process changes, but when a rep is trying to close a deal in Salesforce, they won’t watch your long training videos. They just want the steps.
How do you know if enablement is working? Perhaps you did the training and have heard no complaints. Maybe you can see that people are logging into the software and using the product. But the only way to really know, is to track whether people are completing specific processes. Process adoption is the best leading indicator for business outcomes.
Real time enablement can help the whole team. Ops will have more time to do impactful, strategic work, reps will spend more time developing customer and product expertise, and your executive team will have more clarity on pipeline, forecasting, and software ROI.
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