While sales enablement is rarely part of a RevOps pro’s job description, we all know that a great deal of time is spent answering questions about how to use their systems. Whether they’re pinging you on Slack, calling you the old-fashioned way, or trying to set up video calls, walking people through what to click when is a time suck!
Revenue operations also often advocate for time on regional sales calls, at sales kick-off, or during onboarding training to review how the CRM is set up – and rarely get the time they ask for.
As frustrating as it can be, sales systems training rarely sticks after group training. People learn by doing, and if there are no reasons for them to use what they’ve learned in the next few hours, the chances of them retaining the information drop significantly.
What’s even more frustrating is that training is often critical at the most inopportune time, like quarter end. The following recommendations have helped us avoid the quarter-end crunch and saved us hours of playing Help Desk every week.
No matter what kind of training you’re giving–live, on-demand video, job aides, or long-form–it is always a best practice to lead with why learning what you’re presenting helps the salesperson.
If you can’t think of why they’ll benefit from learning what you want to teach them, they probably won’t use it. However, the reason they benefit doesn’t have to be particularly compelling. If it saves them time and effort, it’s a win.
Here are two examples of how to pitch the benefits of learning something new:
CPQ System: Easier quoting, a better experience for the prospect, and automated approvals.
Call tracking and analytics: Helps sales identify what resonates with their prospects and what doesn’t–information that can be passed on to marketing. Plus, less data entry.
Never lead with how it benefits the company as a whole unless you can tie it to how sales earns their income. Talking about how changing systems will help save money or tracking data will help another department never works.
Spend an extra minute or two to determine how a benefit links back to the sales team, such as improving the quality of leads they receive.
People learn differently. Instead of relying only on step-by-step written instructions, create screenshots with markups and record a video. Most videos are fine, but if you can edit them to zoom in on the relevant area, highlight your mouse, and overlay text–even better. Don’t assume people see what you do. The more obvious you can make it, the better.
TikTok caught on for a reason. People have extremely short attention spans, and no one wants to watch a long, boring video anymore.
Instead of putting all of your documentation and steps into a single document or recording one long video, figure out where people might get stuck or break up a workflow while working on other things.
For example, teaching people about CPQ may include different videos or job aides for:
When you first send out training, these help documents may all be packaged together, or you can link them as needed to answer questions as they come in.
Not all of us are lucky enough to have enablement software that integrates with our CRM or an easily searchable content storage system. However, even Google Docs, Notion, and SharePoint can make do in a pinch.
When you label or name a document, use the words your sales team uses to describe things. They’ll have a better chance of finding the document.
If you are lucky enough to have embedded enablement software, congrats! Keep your videos and prompts short and to the point.
If you have an internal messaging system and can create a channel, create one for #sales-crm-questions. Why? If one person asks the question, multiple people probably wonder the same thing. Plus, it’s a great place to pin a list of FAQs with links to the answer.
Added bonus? You can keep adding to that pinned post and remind people monthly to check the pinned post before asking a question.
Salespeople will not use the channel if they’re embarrassed that the question makes them look dumb (as we like to say, the only stupid question is to ask the IRS to audit you). They’ll also need to be reminded many times to use the channel. As long as the question is appropriate and they aren’t embarrassed, always funnel them to the channel.
Some people will still need handholding, but others prefer on-demand service–even when it isn’t necessary. It is fair to push the folks who don’t need handholding to use the systems you put in place.
But always take note if they still have questions. You may need to clarify something in your help documentation.
