In the modern business landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept t’s an accessible, transformative capability with the potential to reshape industries. However, for business leaders, navigating the AI landscape can seem overwhelming. From the sheer variety of use cases to the need for responsible AI usage, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. This guide is designed to offer clarity, outlining essential steps to identify impactful AI use cases, areas to focus on a AI strategy, and create a roadmap to implement AI in your organization responsibly.

 1. Understanding the AI Landscape for Business

Before jumping into AI technology and tools, business leaders need to develop a foundational understanding of what AI can achieve and the outcomes it can provide their organization. Start with these key points:

• Scope of AI Applications: AI can enhance customer service, automate processes, improve decision-making, enhance innovation, optimize your markeitng and sales, and many other areas of your business. However, every business is unique; identifying relevant AI applications requires analyzing your business’s challenges and opportunities.
• Levels of AI: AI encompasses a range of applications from basic automation to machine learning and deep learning. Leaders should familiarize themselves with their business AI maturity and potential impact on employee productivity, customer experience, business innovation, and driving growth. The maturity levels are central to understanding where AI can provide initial value to your business and your employees’ competency level with AI and incorporate this into your IA roadmap.
• AI and Human Intelligence: Successful AI initiatives do not replace human intelligence; they augment it. Leaders should focus on how AI can support employees, enhance their productivity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, and alleviate specific tasks.
• AI and your Customers: When evaluating AI use cases, always start with internal “employees” and external customers. You identify Jobs as Done and valuable outcomes that will improve their work environment. You want to start with a customer-centered approach for an AI initiative.
• Identify Strong Use Cases: Clarifying well-defined AI use cases is central to developing an AI strategy and roadmap. Your use cases should align with your business, employees, and customers’ most pressing priorities, challenges, and opportunities.
• Responsibly Using AI and Your Policy: The responsible use of AI in your organization is central to protecting IP, data, and other proprietary information. You must also know how you effectively use AI to create content and communicate with customers. It needs to be produced by combining AI and humans to develop a level of authenticity and value. You should have an AI Policy and procedures to execute this effectively.

Next Steps: Gather your team for an exploratory brainstorming session. Invite managers from various departments to share insights on their daily operations and how they interact with customers, asking them to highlight repetitive or data-intensive tasks that could benefit from AI. Use these meetings to identify core challenges and opportunities for initial AI use cases.

2. Developing Clarity on AI’s Role in Your Business

For AI to deliver real value, it needs a clear role within your strategy:

• Define Clear Business Objectives: Are you aiming to cut costs, increase customer satisfaction, streamline operations, grow revenue, or all of the above? Specifying short-term and long-term goals creates an environment where AI initiatives can better align with measurable business outcomes.
• Prioritize Use Cases: Not every objective will benefit equally from AI. Conduct a value-impact assessment for each potential use case to prioritize areas where AI can bring immediate, tangible benefits.
• Start Small to Go Big: With the allure of AI, it can be tempting to implement in many facets of your business. Instead, stay focused and prioritize areas where AI can solve meaningful problems quickly.
• Identifying Employees for Your AI Team: You want to identify and build an AI team of naturally curious individuals willing to learn. Your AI team should have the authority to work in an experimental environment where they can use AI responsibly, consistently test, and discover new capabilities.
• Communicate the Value to Your Team: AI should not be viewed as a threat but as a partner in helping your employees become better and more specialized in what they do. You should create a communication strategy that conveys the value of AI, where technology and data intersect with human creativity,  intuition, and curiosity to discover new possibilities.

Next Steps: Draft a list of prioritized AI use cases based on business priorities and valuable outcomes. Refine this list by evaluating feasibility, implementation costs, and expected outcomes.

3. Building an AI Strategy and Roadmap

Creating an AI strategy involves more than just technology adoption; it requires an organization-wide commitment to support long-term success. Your strategy should provide a clear vision and purpose for where you want to go and how you plan to get there.

• Formulate a Vision and Mission for AI: A strong mission, such as “Empowering teams with data-driven insights” or “Improving customer experience through intelligent automation,” can guide your AI decisions. Your vision should focus on valuable outcomes with a coherent strategy and clear logic as to why it will work.
• Set Short- and Long-Term Goals: Start with small, manageable AI projects that yield quick wins, boost confidence, demonstrate value, and upskill your team. As you gain traction, gradually scale up to larger, transformative projects.
• Establish an AI Roadmap: An effective roadmap outlines key milestones and timelines, mapping each AI project’s phases from planning through implementation and evaluation. This blueprint ensures that AI initiatives are well-structured, enabling smooth progress toward your long-term goals. Your roadmap should be continually refined and updated as needed.
• Make Your Strategy Actionable:  Select short-term goals and actionable tasks your team can immediately act on. You should consistently update your strategy with input and feedback and challenge your assumptions as you act on them daily.
• Selecting AI Technology: After defining your use case and stargey, select your AI technology. The technology and its functionality should align with your stargey objectives to create the best outcome. Too often, businesses start with selecting technology, and it doesn’t have the capacity to achieve your business objectives.

Next Steps: Establish your AI roadmap with clear checkpoints. Regularly revisit this roadmap, allowing for adjustments as technology and business priorities evolve.

4. Assembling an AI Team to Drive Initiatives Forward

A successful AI initiative requires a well-rounded team to lead, manage, and execute projects. Consider building a cross-functional AI team that includes the following roles:

• Data Managers: Your internal data and how it is managed is central to your AI initiatives. Whoever manages your data, you want them to be very involved in the process.
• AI and Data Science Experts: In some instances, you may require Skilled data scientists and machine learning engineers, who are essential for developing and fine-tuning AI algorithms.
• Domain Experts: Team members with deep knowledge of your industry and specific business functions can provide crucial insights on high-impact use cases.
• IT and Operations Support: These professionals ensure the technical infrastructure is optimized to support AI initiatives.
• Human Resources, Ethics, and Compliance Officers: AI has ethical implications, and it’s essential to have personnel responsible for overseeing compliance with responsible AI practices.

Next Steps: Appoint an AI lead responsible for coordinating the AI team, aligning projects with company goals, and ensuring the AI roadmap is followed.

5. Creating Policies and Procedures for Responsible AI Use

AI initiatives need to be aligned to policies to ensure employees follow ethical and responsible AI use:

• Data Privacy and Security: AI relies on data, and your businesses managing sensitive information responsibly is critical. Implement clear policies for data usage, IP, and other sensitive information, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations are followed.
• Bias and Fairness: AI has inherited biases from data and can hallucinate the information it outputs. Establish protocols to detect and mitigate bias and ensure regular audits to maintain AI with consistent human involvement.
• Creating Trust: For employees and customers to trust AI, you must align your policies with systems, processes, and workflows to get the best outputs from AI. Employees and customers want the freedom to effectively use AI without barriers to doing their jobs and, simultaneously, have structured processes and systems for the responsible use of AI.

Next Steps: Develop a “Responsible AI” policy document. Regularly review and update it with employees’ input and feedback to reflect evolving legal and ethical standards. This document should be part of your broader compliance framework, providing clear guidelines on the acceptable use of AI in your business.

6. Implementing AI Pilots and Measuring Success

Once your AI strategy is in place, launch pilot projects to demonstrate AI’s potential and gather data, input, and feedback from employees or customers:

• Synchronize Team: Ensure your AI team is well-aligned with your vision, strategy, and goals.
• Choose the Right Pilot Projects: Start with projects that are low-cost, high-impact, and aligned with your business priorities and well-defined outcomes.
• Define Success Metrics and KPIs: Metrics might include process efficiency gains, cost reductions, error rate reductions, or customer satisfaction scores.
• Iterate and Scale: Based on pilot results, adjust your AI approach. Then, scale up successful pilots to maximize impact.
• Agile Working Environment: your team should have the freedom to work in an agile working environment where they can continuously test and explore.

Next Steps: Select a high-impact use case, define your success metrics, and execute a small-scale AI pilot. This pilot learning experience will help you refine your larger AI strategy and roadmap.

7. Building a Culture of AI Across the Organization

AI adoption isn’t just a technological shift; it’s a cultural one. For AI to succeed, employees need to understand, embrace, and feel comfortable with it:

• Provide AI Training: Equip your employees with AI knowledge, covering what it is, how it works, and how it impacts their capabilities and work. Training and coaching reduce fear and upskill them to use AI as a partner to enhance their expertise.
• Encourage Open Communication: Regularly discuss AI progress, sharing successes and learning from setbacks. Involving employees in these conversations can increase AI buy-in and foster a culture of continuous learning.
• Lead by Example: Leadership’s attitude towards AI initiatives will influence how employees perceive them. Demonstrate enthusiasm and commitment to responsible AI to reinforce its importance.

Next Steps: Launch an AI workshop and training program that covers fundamental AI concepts. Encourage employees to share their insights and participate in AI strategy sessions, reinforcing the idea that AI is a collaborative, organization-wide endeavor.

Paving the Path to AI-Driven Success

Integrating AI into your business can seem complex, but with a structured approach and system, it’s possible to transform this challenge into a competitive advantage. Start by identifying meaningful use cases, building a clear AI strategy and roadmap, formalizing your AI policies, having a collaborative team, integrating AI technology, and investing in your culture to ensure sustainable, responsible AI adoption. As leaders, the goal should be to foster a culture of learning and adaptability, empower employees to stay relevant and leverage AI to augment their skills while enhancing and growing your business.

For sales enablement to be a strategic discipline within your organization, to drive cross-functional alignment, to increase sales productivity, and to drive change and growth, you will require a sales enablement strategy and framework that incorporate the different pillars of sales enablement. In too many cases today, the different pillars of sales enablement are overlooked and are not effectively integrated into a sales enablement strategy. When this happens, you can’t create unity between sales, marketing, service, product, learning and development (L&D), the C-suite, and other departments.

Too often, organizations take a tactical approach to enablement and create one-off programs that are not aligned strategically and don’t enhance the sales organization. In CSO Insights’s recent study “Sales Enablement Grows Up: 4th Annual Sales Enablement Report,” they discovered only 4 percent of organizations had a formal approach with defined roles and responsibilities tied to the production process. Another 34.9 percent had a formal process with defined roles and responsibilities, while the other 61 percent had just a general understanding of how to work together or no collaborative approach at all.

This really gets at the heart of the matter. Most organizations are siloed, and to effectively drive change through sales enablement services, you must have a unified vision that drives collaboration across departments.   

This is where a sales enablement strategy aligned to the different pillars of sales enablement can be a path to create defined roles, cross-functional alignment, and collaboration.

What are the Different Pillars of Sales Enablement?

1. A Clearly Defined Sales Process and Methodology

A strong sales process and methodology is imperative to your sales enablement program. Foundationally, your sales process should provide great clarity to the stages of your sale cycle, from prospect to closed deal. Your methodology should provide discipline through a unified selling system, and for sales reps to take the appropriate action, it must also include the necessary steps and best practices for each stage of the sales cycle.

Your sales enablement strategy must align with your sale process and methodology by effectively mapping out your internal (training and coaching) content, external (customer-facing) connect, sales messaging, and KPIs. This will provide your reps with a structured road map to easily access information, just-in-time learning, and customer-facing content based on set criteria in the sales stages.

This sale system is extremely beneficial for creating cross-functional collaboration between different departments, and it provides stakeholders with the ability to collaborate based on the stages in order to create a defined content strategy. Marketing, product, sales, and service should all be involved in this endeavor.

2. Sales Training and Coaching Strategy

Consistent sales training and coaching is fundamental to a sales enablement program, and there are three core areas you want to focus on: onboarding new reps, everboarding existing reps, and enabling sales managers.

Onboarding new reps today should incorporate a mixture of live training and on-demand training (where they can quickly access and retain information). Incorporating onboarding playbooks to your digital training strategy can be extremely beneficial for getting reps up to speed quicker.

Everboarding programs consist of training and coaching for ongoing learning and development. These programs provide reps with structured content, tools, templates, and technology that they can quickly access, digest, and retain the information required for different selling scenarios. Just-in-time learning through microcontent is extremely valuable here.

The third area of focus is enabling your sales managers in order to consistently enhance their sales coaching capabilities. You want to build a sales manager enablement program through playbooks where they’re coached on new training and coaching initiatives before rolling out a full program to sales reps. The benefit? Sales managers have time to become extremely knowledgeable about the program, which provides more value when clarifying that program for sales reps. This approach can be extremely impactful for enhancing sales effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity of both managers and reps.

By providing structured training through internal content initiatives, sales messaging, sales process and methodology, and sales technology, your training and coaching program will incorporate an integrated system. This aligns multiple stakeholders (in marketing, sales, and product) to support sales trainers through a unified content strategy.

3. Internal and External Content Strategy

A sales enablement program should consist of two forms of content: internal sales training content and external customer-facing content.

Building a content strategy for your sales enablement program is crucial to your training program, and it provides reps with the content required to share valuable insights, knowledge, and information that buyers care about. Your content strategy should align with your sales enablement strategy, sellers’ skill gaps, sales messaging program, ongoing coaching initiatives through supporting materials, and value propositions through core product or service offerings.

You should also focus on microcontent for just-in-time learning for sale reps. This provides sales reps with information they can quickly access, digest, and retain immediately before any buyer interaction. This will drive sales rep adoption, as well as stronger opportunities to close deals.

Your content strategy should map to your sales process and playbooks, provide reps with easy access to specific required information (based on stages of the sales cycle), and incorporate into specific categories of your playbooks.

4. Sales Messaging Strategy

Forrester Research says nine out of ten sales conversations fail to address what’s important to the prospect. To effectively enable sales reps and buyers today, you must incorporate a value-based sales messaging strategy that delivers impactful outcomes. Buyers are more knowledgeable but also more confused than ever before. The wealth of information on the web can simultaneously be a blessing and a curse. There’s so much focus on product and service messaging that true value is being lost in the conversation.

Businesses and sales reps today can only truly be differentiated by the value they provide. This is more than differentiation through a product or service. The value comes from their knowledge as thought leaders and their ability to provide valuable insights and expertise. This needs to be incorporated into sales messaging strategies so reps can have valuable conversations that move away from the status quo bias. Set up your reps to farm unconsidered needs that answer the pivotal “Why change? Why now? Why us?” questions.

Your value-based messaging strategies should be very customer-centric and align with those customers’ pain points, challenges, and needs. You should map out and construct your messages based on industries, solutions, and specific roles you are targeting. You can then incorporate these messages into training material (covering when and how to effectively deliver the message), customer-facing content, specific areas of the sales process, and messaging playbooks.

Based on the messages that need to be created and incorporated into different forms of content, your content strategy would align marketing, product, and sales stakeholders. These groups should collaborate on the content creation and deciding where specifically it should be mapped to. Having a defined messaging matrix with stakeholder involvement effectively unifies departments and works extremely well for this initiative.

Your messaging strategy should integrate seamlessly into all facets of your pillars of enablement.

Whether you plan to create a new sales enablement program or to update an existing one, make sure you start with a sales enablement strategy and framework that incorporate the different pillars of enablement. This will give you a successful foundation. Initially you might be focusing on one sales channel, vertical, solution, or product. That’s OK. Just make sure you map out your strategic sales enablement initiative with the different pillars in mind. In essence, they are your framework to work from, and they will provide you with the guidance necessary to successfully conduct your sales enablement program moving forward.

If your company is thinking about adopting a sales enablement strategy, there are some crucial steps to help ensure the process is a successful companywide transformation—and not just a group of disjointed efforts that ultimately show little or no concrete improvements. While the specifics of every sales enablement campaign are going to differ from company to company, the following four-step outline for success applies across the board.

How to Achieve Transformative, Companywide Sales Enablement Process

Step 1: Build Sales Enablement from the Ground Up

If you aren’t thinking about sales enablement in a holistic, companywide manner, your chances of success are going to be greatly diminished. One of the most common missteps when implementing a sales enablement strategy is jumping into the process without the requisite forethought, planning, and strategizing. Many companies will initiate a series of moves, such as leadership workshops and product trainings, in an effort to start enhancing the productivity of their sales team. While there’s nothing specifically wrong with these individual initiatives, the problem is that they are inherently less effective when done outside of an overarching sales enablement strategy—a strategy that has specific goals that take into account how the entire company can contribute to enhanced sales efficacy.

For sales enablement to be truly transformative, it needs to be integrated throughout the company from day one. When that happens, a company’s leaders have a process that doesn’t just teach sales enablement but helps ensure those lessons are internalized and applied through lasting behavioral changes.

Step 2: Establish Buy-In and Shared Goals throughout the Company

Without buy-in, sales enablement can’t even get off the ground, which is why getting everyone on the same page is essential. Rather than having one particular stakeholder create a sales enablement plan that’s then disseminated throughout the company, the more effective strategy is for all divisions to meet and come to a consensus about the ultimate vision and goals of this new sales enablement program.

Having everyone’s input accomplishes two important goals. One, it increases the chance of buy-in since everyone’s voice is acknowledged and heard, and two, it helps ensure all your bases are covered. When you get the input and perspective of every group, you’re more likely to accurately identify all potential roadblocks, change metrics, and roles and responsibilities necessary to make your sales enablement plan successful.

A service-level agreement (often between marketing and sales) is an effective, easy way to solidify and clarify expectations throughout this process.

Step 3: Design and Create Your Sales Enablement Content and Tools

Once the correct mind-set is established and the strategy is in place, it’s time to actually create the collateral for your sales team.

Sales Enablement Playbooks

Many companies who have had success with sales enablement find that the “playbook” approach is effective. This is a way of easily and effectively packaging content.

While playbooks are becoming more common across sales enablement strategies, it’s imperative that these documents are detailed and specific to both geographic region and persona. Typically, every persona will have a dedicated playbook, and within that playbook will be the following:

• Core messaging for that persona.
• Objectives.
• Potential areas of pushback.
• Common questions from this persona and the relevant answers.

Although a playbook should be specific to a persona, the content is still mapped to the buyer’s journey. That is, a playbook should provide all the necessary detail, guidance, and information for a persona at every stage of the buyer’s journey. This way, the sales rep need only use one playbook for one persona—from that initial awareness stage all the way through to the decision stage.

Every persona’s playbook should be incorporated into the sales enablement software program. This ensures all parties within the company have access to the information, and it’s a quick, easy way for reps to find what they need. Because content is mapped to both personas and the buyer’s journey, reps never have to wade through unwieldly lists of content or search endlessly for relevant documents. Ultimately, this means reps waste less valuable time that they could dedicate to core selling.

Video Content

As more companies take advantage of strategic content within their sales enablement efforts, it’s important to find ways to stand out, which is why every playbook should incorporate client-facing video content. It’s the quickest, easiest way to build credibility and trust with a lead while disseminating information in an engaging, digestible form.

Benefits of a Sales Enablement Platform

Having your entire catalog of content and sales collateral in one platform offers a variety of benefits:

• Content is shareable—internally within the company and externally to potential clients.
• Content is quick and easy to access. This means clients get relevant information quicker, and reps spend less time digging and searching for a particular piece of content. (Remember, content must be intuitively organized according to persona and stage of the buyer’s journey.)
• The platform can integrate with your existing CRM system.

Step 4: Ensure You Have Adequate Sales Enablement Training

Sales enablement is a complex, multifaceted process, and many of the concepts are often new (or, at least, unfamiliar) to the majority of sales representatives. That’s why it’s essential to provide various forms of training. This can come in the form of workshops or in-person meetings, but you can also embed training and coaching videos directly into your sales enablement platform. Compared to in-person methods, video is a quick, easy, cost-effective way for sales reps to receive the information and training they need.

Say, for example, a sales rep has never dealt with a particularly persona. Before making contact, the rep can access the relevant videos outlining core messaging for that persona (including challenges, barriers to success, and so on). This quickly and easily gets the rep up to speed and ready to interact with the potential client in a way that convincingly and effectively speaks to that persona.

Video also allows reps to view the training as many times as necessary and to receive that training anywhere and anytime they have access to the content management system. Remember, training isn’t a one-off process. It’s ongoing, and training material (including videos) should be updated as personas change and any other relevant information shifts over time.

For more information about how to effectively implement a sales enablement process from the ground up, feel free to contact a representative of Brand Fuzion today!

When it comes to new sales enablement technology, one of the biggest barriers to success is getting buy-in from your sales reps. Adoption of new policies and practices can be a struggle—especially if the reps feel as if that technology is only being implemented to “keep tabs” on them or to critique how they’re currently doing their jobs. However, with a few easy tips, you can help ensure you get all the benefits of sales enablement coaching technology by securing that much-needed sales rep adoption.

How to Foster Sales Rep Adoption of New Sales Enablement Coaching Technology

Why Does Sales Enablement Coaching Technology Matter?

Some companies think along these lines: If adoption of this new technology is going to be a battle with our sales team, why bother?

This is a big mistake! Successfully implementing this technology into your coaching arsenal has been shown to increase win rate by up to 28 percent. With those kinds of potential returns, it’s absolutely worth your time to figure out how to implement this technology and to get sales rep buy-in—in order to ensure you fully capitalize on that new technology.

1. Create a Solution for Your Sales Reps

When successfully implemented in the onboarding process, this coaching technology can arm your sales reps with the necessary skills to sell more efficiently and more effectively. However, many reps new to this system (and used to doing things a different way) could be reluctant to engage with the technology.

If you’re looking for your reps to use the technology in a specific way, provide concrete examples and solutions for your request. If you demonstrate the kind of behavior you’re after, your reps are all the more likely to have success interacting with the new technology in the desired manner.

2. When Onboarding New Sales Reps, Introduce Them to the Coaching Technology

When you have new reps, it’s critical to get their buy-in by training them through the new system. Because they don’t have any preconceived notions from former training material, you’re fare more likely to get up-front buy-in from them. Remember, though, you must demonstrate the system’s benefits, including how and where to quickly and easily access information.

New reps are often eager to prove their worth and have success right away, so make sure you make it clear this new tool can get them up to speed quickly.

3. Highlight the Benefits of the System for Reps

The best way to encourage adoption is to prove the system has real, concrete value for your reps. Make it clear not only what the benefits are but how those benefits can help your reps sell more, faster.

In particular, emphasize how easy the system is to use. The less time your reps spend searching for information, the more time they have to actually sell, so convincing them the system won’t talk a lot of time to navigate will be a big step toward adoption.

4. Demonstrate How This System Integrates with Buyer Personas and the Buyer’s Journey

A crucial part of the sales enablement process is mapping your content to your specific buyer personas and having content for each of those personas at every stage of the sales cycle.

This is an easy way to prove the value of the system. If reps can find relevant content (either training material for them or actual content for the prospects) in a timely manner, this system can save them hours of sifting through documents to find what they need. By covering every stage of the buyer’s journey, it also assists them throughout the sales cycle—not just in one isolated instance.

As sales reps are keenly aware, one of the biggest problems with content is that there’s often simply too much of it, and this system can help them easily and quickly access exactly what they need.

5. Incorporate Video into the Sales Enablement Coaching Technology

Video is simply a more engaging form of content than plain text, and it promotes better retention as well. You should, therefore, be leveraging it within your system.

Not only should there be video to help quickly and easily guide your sales reps, but you should be ensuring that video content is simple to find and quick to use. For example, mark or tag longer videos so sales reps can easily jump to the exact section that’s relative to them—rather than sitting and scrolling through the whole video.

6. Ensure the Coaching Technology Is Scalable and Modular

Sales is a dynamic industry, and for your technology to be successful with your reps, it must be as flexible as they require. That is, they must be able to adopt it and use it the way they want. For greater buy-in, this system shouldn’t be a totally built system that everyone interacts with in the same way. To some degree, each rep should be able to tailor the system to his or her particular sales-related needs.

7. Make the Technology Mobile Compatible

Tied to scalability and modularity is the need for the system to be mobile compatible. Reps must be able to access this system anywhere, anytime. Via an app, reps should be able to log in and interact with the system however is going to benefit them (accessing a particular piece of content for a prospect, watching a video about how to deal with a certain persona, and so on).

8. Help Sales Reps Become Thought Leaders within the Industry

Today’s sales reps are asked to fulfill so many roles and provide so many services, and one way to help your reps stand apart from the crowd is through an innovative technology-based coaching system.

The information and insight gained through the system will help establish them as thought leaders within the industry, giving them immediate credibility, trust, and clout with their prospects.

9. Get Your Sales Reps Using the Technology!

Perhaps the easiest way to get adoption is to simply get your reps using it. Once they start engaging with the platform, they’ll realize how it gets even faster and easier the more they familiarize themselves with the layout, and most importantly, they’ll see firsthand how it can truly reduce wasted time during the workday.

Integrating technology into your sales enablement efforts is a great way to get more organized, more productive, and more effective, and with these tactics and approaches to implantation, you can help ensure you actually get buy-in and adoption from all your sales reps.

Incorporating video into your sale enablement strategy can benefit your company on two major fronts: one, facilitating onboarding and ongoing training of sales reps and, two, providing valuable, relevant, engaging content for your reps to give to prospects and clients. Video can help you significantly improve both these areas, making your reps more efficient and effective and ultimately improving your bottom line.

Sales Enablement Video Strategy – Top 10 Ways Video Can Help You Train Your Reps, Prospect Better, and Serve Your Customers

1. Video for Onboarding and Ongoing Training of Sales Reps

When people think of the traditional sales training model, they often imagine a trainer coming to a place of business and conducting an in-person session with the sales reps. However, this model is rapidly becoming out of date. Instead, businesses are opting to do their onboarding and training through video content. Here are five important reasons why.

2. On-Demand Video Training Is More Convenient

Conducting training through videos allows reps to fit their training modules into their busy daily schedules. Rather than having to commit to one time and one place, which can be disruptive to their interactions with prospects and clients, video training lets them view and learn whenever and wherever is convenient. The most important thing sales reps do in a day is sell, and training shouldn’t impede their ability to do that.

3. Video Training Is Cheaper Than Traditional Training

The cost of trying to coordinate everyone’s schedule and get them in the same room at the same time to undergo sales training can be quite high. There are travel expenses and the cost of the actual trainer to consider, but that’s not even mentioning the cost of taking your reps out of the field for a day in order to undergo this training.

Video training is faster, allows your reps to get back to selling, and eliminates much of the overhead associated with trainings.

4. Video Promotes Better Retention

Retention is a big issue with in-person training. The training occurs, the trainer leaves, and the reps are then expected to remember everything that was said in that one training session. That’s simply not how people learn effectively.

Training through video means the content is always there for the rep to go back and reference, thereby enhancing retention through multiple views. This is particularly helpful for getting brand-new sales reps up to speed.

People also tend to retain information through visual mediums better than through the written or spoken word, so videos are effective from that perspective as well.

5. A Sales Enablement Training Video Catalog Is Easy to Use

By cataloging and organizing your training videos, sales reps are able to access them quickly and easily—no matter where they are. As long as reps have mobile devices or laptops and an Internet connection, they can receive the insight and training they require before taking their next sales calls. This leads directly to increased productivity in two ways:

By making training content accessible with just a few clicks, reps don’t have to waste a lot of time digging and searching for the exact training video they want.

By mapping training content to every persona at every point in the sales cycle, no matter who reps are targeting, they can find relevant, insightful training content that will inform and better their call.

Reps need to be ready to interact with prospects at the drop of a hat. That’s just the nature of sales. If they can quickly and easily find the training content they need, they’ll be ready within minutes to make a call to that persona in that stage of the buyer’s journey, and they’ll be armed with the information they need to make that call productive.

6. Increase Sales Rep Productivity by Producing Micro Video Content

These training videos can’t be overly long. Trying to wade through too much content (text or video based) will discourage your reps from interacting with that training material. Make sure the videos are quick and to the point, or, in a longer video, embed helpful markers that allow the rep to jump to the part of the video that’s relevant. Remember, the markers need to be clearly labeled and titled so reps can get to the content they need as quickly as possible.

7. Video for Better Prospecting and Client Interactions

A large part of sales enablement is figuring out how to interact with your prospects and clients more effectively because, when that happens, you see better conversion and better profits. Video can help you get that increased productivity, and the following are five ways how.

8. Offer More Engaging Content and Communication

Video content is simply more engaging for your prospects and clients than plain-text e-mail, and video increases your odds of someone actually engaging with that content. For maximum effect, make sure the video is relevant, insightful, educational, and to the point. Sale reps and prospects alike are simply less likely to interact with overly long video content.

9. Enjoy Better Prospecting with Video

With video, you can easily track and analyze who is watching and how they are engaging with that visual content. This means you have unique insight into what personas you’re dealing with, what stage they are in the buyer’s journey, and what their problems, issues, and barriers to success might be. When reps know those things, they can come to sales calls armed and prepared with relevant, insightful information for those prospects.

When a rep can answer a prospect’s specific question—rather than just providing generic information—that greatly increases the value a prospect sees in that rep, and that increases the chances of the rep closing the deal.

10. Video Can Increase a Rep’s Credibility and Trust

A video doesn’t need to be a huge production to prove effective. Even talking head videos where reps introduce themselves and explain how they can specifically address the concerns, issues, and questions of their prospects can lead to increased credibility and trust.

11. Become an Influencer and Thought Leader through Video

In a market saturated with content, companies are always looking for ways to distinguish themselves, and video is one way to set yourself apart. By positioning the rep as a knowledgeable thought leader within the industry, video enhances the value a prospect sees in that rep—all of which leads to the increased likelihood of closed deals.

12. Video Provides Value to Existing Clientele

Video isn’t just for prospects or the prospecting stage. It can be highly valuable to existing customers as well. Your customers have already chosen to work with you once, so many of those initial barriers to making a sale are eliminated. If you have new product offering or other opportunities to upsell clients, use video to convey that. Just as with prospects, it increases your perceived trustworthiness, credibility, and value, and it makes that sale more likely.

No matter where your prospects currently fall within the sales cycle—even if they are existing customers—video can play a crucial role in enhancing the productivity of your sales team. It can also work internally to make training cheaper, more efficient, and more effective. However you incorporate video into your sales enablement strategy, though, it’s going to help set you apart and increase your chances at success.

Training and onboarding are largely considered integral parts of a successful sales enablement program, but as sales enablement has evolved in recent years, there’s been a shift in the underlying mentality and processes behind that onboarding. Rather than onboarding, a one-time event in the beginning of a sales rep’s career, companies that have seen success with sales enablement have moved to “reboarding.” What exactly is this principle, though, and how can it ultimately save your company money?

Reboarding and Its Benefits to Your Bottom Line for Sales Enablement

What Is Reboarding?

Reboarding is the evolved form of onboarding. Onboarding traditionally happens one time when a sales rep or other employee becomes a member of the team. The idea behind onboarding is that it provides all the information and training necessary to acclimate that new employee into the company’s systems, culture, clients, products, and/or services.

What reboarding does is to take that spirit of learning and carry it through a sales rep’s entire career. It’s an ongoing, continuous process rather than a set, one-off session.

How Is Reboarding More Beneficial Than Onboarding?

Reboarding provides several concrete benefits over the more traditional onboarding model.

• Reps enjoy better retention of material.

When sales reps attend an onboarding session, it’s inevitable that the rep will not learn everything he or she needs to be successful in that position in that one session. Even if the information provided is thorough and comprehensive, people simply don’t retain all that information in one go.

Reboarding, or continuous onboarding, gives these reps the opportunity to learn various skills and information over time. If the training material is always available, reps get more chances to interact with that content and really learn and apply the information.

• Reps evolve with the trainings.

No company is continually static, and neither are sales reps. Throughout their careers, they are always learning and growing. If they are part of a company that embraces continuous training, those reps will always bring new perspectives and insights to these training sessions. This helps push reps to be their best, and it arms them with the tools to actually accomplish that.

• Trainings provide relevant, up-to-date content.

Many facets of sales enablement are relatively recent, and there are new schools of thought and ideas constantly surfacing. In an industry like sales, which is always in flux and always evolving, it makes sense that your training needs to be equally dynamic. A one-time training is only going to provide your reps with that small subset of informat Save & Exit ion. Instead, you should be constantly updating your sales training materials to reflect those new ideas, policies, and best practices. Reboarding keeps your reps up to date on both your company specifically and the larger world of selling as a whole, and it helps ensure your reps aren’t working off outdated, stale ideas.

• Integrating reboarding with technology promotes productivity.

Your goal with reboarding is to provide all this information—with as little intrusion and time requirements as possible. An easy way to make reboarding less intrusive, quicker, and more convenient is by integrating the training material into your existing sales enablement platform, CRM, or other software application. That way, no matter where your reps are in the world, they can receive this training, and it can be on their own schedules. This allows them to learn and then get back to the important business of selling.

• Evolve your reboarding program over time using analytics.

If you have a CRM or other software application, you have a wealth of analytical data at your disposal. Use that data to improve your sales team. Look at the numbers to determine what your sales team does well and what they might need more training on. (This can assessed for the whole team or for individual reps.) Perhaps your sales team is great at pushing prospects through the top of the funnel, but sales get stuck right before purchasing. You can use that information to customize your reboarding efforts and focus on what reps need to do to close deals. Reboarding gives you the time and space to see how these efforts work over time. By continuously providing training and tracking your results, you can see what training efforts are actually resonating and working.

• Give your sales reps a much-needed edge in the new sales environment.

Sales is harder than ever for reps. It’s an increasingly competitive landscape, and with the Internet, much of the buying power has shifted from the rep to the consumer. In this way, prospects often come to sales reps just as informed, if not more informed, than the reps themselves. Generally, consumers do their research—on your company and your competitors—before ever reaching out to any representative, so it’s vitally important that your reps are as knowledgeable as possible. They must provide prospects with genuine insights and helpful information in order to prove their value and secure the sale. Reboarding gives reps that competitive edge. It keeps them sharp, up to date, and at the top of their game.

Best Practices for Success with Reboarding

As with any facet of sales enablement, success does not come from a cookie-cutter formula. Every business is different, and what they need for sales success is also different. That being said, there are some techniques you can use to give yourself the best chance at success with a reboarding program.

First and foremost, include your reboarding material in your sales enablement platform or other application. Sales reps are always short on time, and task switching is a notorious productivity killer. Provide your reps with all the training material they need directly in one system that’s easy and quick to access. That way, in order to learn how to communicate with a particular persona or to determine a prospect’s common pain points, all your reps need to do is look within that platform. This content should be available for every persona at every stage in the sales cycle. That way, no matter who your rep is dealing with or how far he or she is in the buying decision, there will be helpful content to facilitate and progress that sales conversation.

Second, integrate video content into your training material. Video is faster, more convenient, and more engaging than text-based content, and, by virtue of being more interesting, it promotes better retention of the material. Supplement video content with supporting documents as necessary.

Third, make sure you have a team that’s always looking for and creating new content for your reboarding efforts. Say, for example, your company releases a new product. There should be accompanying content that trains your reps how to sell that product. That training could include product benefits, information about personas likely to buy the new product, common barriers or challenges preventing those personas from buying the new product, solutions to those common challenges and barriers, and so on.

How Can Reboarding Provide a Positive Return on Investment?

For companies loath to implement new sales enablement efforts, it’s critical to realize that reboarding can offer a company concrete dollars and cents. It does this in two important ways.

One, reboarding is an excellent way to make your sales enablement efforts more productive, and when you increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales reps, you start to see less prospects getting stuck in the sales cycle, more closed deals, and more revenue for your company.

Two, it’s very difficult to retain sales reps. Missed quotas can be discouraging, and rep turnover is very high in the one- to three-year window. However, if you can support your sales reps and provide them with what they need to be successful in their jobs, you can reduce that turnover rate. And with DePaul University’s study placing the cost of a sales rep replacement at upwards of $115,000, it certainly is in your company’s best financial interest to learn how to keep and maximize your existing reps.

For more information about reboarding specifically or how generally to make your sales team more effective, please feel free to reach out to a representative of Brand Fuzion today!