Think about the first time you cold-called a prospect or delivered a demo. Did it go smoothly and without a hitch? Or, were there some bumps along the way?
If you’re like most sellers, it probably didn’t go perfectly as you had hoped. But that’s to be expected for new sellers. Like anything in life, it takes intentionality and plenty of practice to become an expert in your craft. There are plenty of skills, best practices and cutting-edge strategies that sales pros have to stay on top of. And, that can be quite the challenge.
So, how can organisations create a sales-ready workforce? And, how can leaders ensure that sales reps are performing at an expert-level status as early and often as possible? In short, the answer can be boiled down to two words: sales-readiness.
A quick refresher on sales readiness
Sales readiness is an ongoing process that equips sales teams with the right skills and knowledge they need to be an effective seller. Not to be confused with sales enablement, sales readiness includes sales training, intentional practice and personalised coaching that reinforces knowledge and skills for high-performing sales teams. It also includes ongoing assessments to ensure that sellers remain sales-ready over time.
When it comes to sales readiness, there are four critical phases, or pillars, that prepare sales reps for their jobs.
- Foundational
- Continuous
- Transformational
- Reactive
In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how each sales readiness pillar helps organisations create expert sellers.
1. Accelerate ramp time
Experts aren’t born overnight. They must first learn basic information and skills, and then build off of those over time. This is why foundational readiness is extremely important. Foundational readiness focuses on creating an effective onboarding plan for every role within your sales team.
The overall goal is to accelerate a new rep’s time to productivity and improve knowledge retention. To do this effectively, identify the foundational sales competencies and skills they need to know to hit the ground running. Then, create a structured learning path that addresses each area of your sales readiness checklist. It’s also helpful to track training progress to confirm that new sellers comprehend what they’re learning. A sales readiness assessment can help sales leaders and trainers ensure that reps have mastered foundational skills before moving to the next phase of readiness.
2. Equip reps for any sales situation
Learning isn’t over once reps complete foundational readiness. After all, onboarding can’t cover everything that sellers need to know over time. They need to be sales-ready and prepared for any type of interaction they could have with buyers throughout the sales process.
Continuous readiness provides sellers with ongoing training that enables them to stay up-to-date on product releases, best practices, market insights and more. Remember, the objective isn’t to ensure that reps simply complete training. Instead, they need to show they understand newly learned information and can apply it to their roles. That’s why the best sales organisations use sales readiness tools to deliver ongoing training courses and assessments over time. A sales readiness platform also helps leaders understand where each seller stands with various skills and competencies and provide additional learning and coaching opportunities to continuously grow.
3. Empower sellers during change
Expert-level sellers also know how to manage large, and sometimes unexpected, changes. That’s why transformational readiness enables an entire sales force when a substantial change takes place. Transformational readiness is also known as change management because it empowers sellers to understand and navigate changes so they can up-level their skills and knowledge accordingly.
Effective, transformational readiness starts at the sales leadership level. They’re responsible for leading the charge and creating a plan to effectively train an entire team without disrupting performance and productivity. Transformational readiness can take a lot of time and effort to get reps up-to-speed on major changes, so it’s a good idea to update your sales readiness checklist first. This will help you identify key areas where sales enablement and training are needed most. Then, use a sales-readiness platform to quickly deliver training that addresses the changes sellers need to know.
4. Keep reps in the know
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Sales is ever-changing. Reps need to be ready to pivot in a matter of minutes if something big happens. This includes things like a merger, competitor or marketplace change, economic downturn or worldwide pandemic that could change the state of any sales organisation.
That’s why the final stage of sales readiness is reactive readiness. Speed is critical at this stage, and leaders need to build and deliver content in a matter of hours. Ideally, your sales enablement team should have a plan for significant events that would require reactive readiness. This includes an execution plan and tools that will empower your organisation to move quickly. This is also when a sales readiness tool proves to be extremely beneficial since it makes it easy to create and deliver essential communication at scale.
Get reps sales-ready with Seismic
Any organisation can quickly build a team of sales-ready reps through effective sales-readiness. Interested in learning more? Read how one customer ramps new sellers 5x faster than before with the help of our sales readiness tool. Or, get a demo and see Seismic in action today.