The pandemic has forced businesses to shift to a new working style, where a lot of sales-related activities have to be carried out remotely. Bring the pressure directly on the managers as they have to now make sure that this transition doesn’t affect the sales performance drastically. However, almost everybody is new to this remote working model, which has also arrived so suddenly that it is bound to affect productivity. But businesses that are restructuring their sales readiness strategies are observing good results with their team’s productivity.
So How Readiness Can Help You Tackle This Pandemic?
Most people understand that sales training and readiness are the same, and that’s exactly why they fail to understand the importance of readiness in the sales structure. Sales training is just a small part of readiness, whereas readiness deals with the entire process of making the reps sales-ready and productive.
Training, sales readiness software tools, content development, onboarding, and a lot of other processes, are included within the readiness program. And that’s why it is such a big deciding factor in the current pandemic situations. The traditional readiness settings are not as effective with the new regulations in place. It’s like your reps are fighting a battle of laser weapons with sticks and stones. The tools offered to them do not suit the new remote working style and so, the productivity factor is bound to go down.
Strategic modifications in the readiness program can help your team transition more smoothly into the remote working culture without affecting their productivity as much. As the reps are provided with more advanced readiness tools and professional solutions, they will in fact find it easier to close in on the deals now than before.
Here are a few strategies that will help you optimize your readiness program to tackle the pandemic regulations in 2021.
1) Start by Upgrading Your Onboarding Set Up
Onboarding is the process that helps your newly hired sales reps to adapt quickly to the working culture. So, when the working culture itself has changed, the onboarding program has to change first for better sales-readiness. As there are fewer in-person meeting now, the onboarding process has to be upgraded into a virtual onboarding system that allows you to get reps ready for sales virtually. Right content development, enablement of digital learning, and other engaging educational content can improve the effectiveness of your onboarding programs during these pandemic situations.
2) Improve Your Performance Tracking Systems
To continuously improve sales productivity, the managers need to precisely track the performance of the sales reps. This was quite easy earlier, but with the new restrictions in place, you need to invest in advanced software solutions to track reps’ performances. This will allow your managers to track performance from anywhere with any device, giving them the ability to plan the readiness strategies remotely and more actively.
3) Development of Remote Learning
Training and coaching are the two most integral parts of any readiness strategy. While earlier training programs were conducted in training rooms, the new changes call for a remote model of learning and coaching. Elearning is a great way of providing education remotely. In fact, it can be more cost-effective than the traditional training system, if developed by professionals. Professionally developed elearning content can allow your sales reps to learn from highly engaging digital lessons. With elearning, your reps can comprehend a much larger volume of information in a lesser amount of time, compared to the traditional training system. Various interesting methods like gamification, videos, challenges, quizzes and quests will make the learning experience enjoyable and fun for your reps.
Similarly, professional elearning content development can also greatly improve the effectiveness of your reps coaching. You can now create small-sized personalized coaching modules to tackle the challenges faced by individual reps. These learning modules can be provided remotely, and the reps can access them at any time and complete their coaching sessions.
4) Improve Internal Communication
The remote working model presents this great opportunity to improve your internal communication. You must encourage your reps to frequently use an online centralized platform to communicate with the reps and managers about the challenges and situations they are facing while handling the prospects. Sales reps can also share videos recounting their sales interactions and experiences. Such productive and informative communication can greatly improve team performance, and it can also help the newly hired reps to understand how the on-site work progresses.
5) Partner with Professionals.
Digitalization, elearning content developments, readiness software solutions, may all sound a little too much for you if you haven’t tried out any of this till now. However, you can take the easier and better path and partner with reliable professional service providers to improve your readiness program. A professional service provider is already aware of all these modern changes and the solutions that businesses require to tackle the pandemic issues. So when you partner with them you save a lot of time and money, while ensuring top-quality services and products for your sales teams. Professionally developed content and software tools are totally glitch-free and the quality it offers ensure guaranteed results.
So, instead of adding pressure on your development team, you can simply partner with experienced professionals and get top-quality readiness solutions faster and at reasonable prices.
Conclusion
So, these are the 5 tips that you can utilize to optimize your readiness program to tackle the new pandemic conditions in 2021. Sales readiness is the most crucial part of the sales structure because it directly impacts productivity and performance. So, when you improve your readiness program with sales readiness software and content solutions, it will help you keep progressing while your sales team transitions into the new remote working model. Proper implementation of readiness strategies will accelerate your ROI and also keep your expenses in control.
All you need to do is make a plan, contact a professional service provider and discuss the solutions you need.
So, what are you waiting for? Get your readiness program optimized for 2021 before it gets too late and safeguard your business from this pandemic.
