Creating a Sales Technology Road Map to Enable Your Sellers
Digitally Enabling Sellers by Creating a Sales Technology Road Map
7 Proven Strategies to Help Your Sellers Sell
Digitally enabling your sellers can have a significant positive impact on your revenue, but you need to strategically think through your selection, integration, and adoption processes to see those results. That’s where a sales technology road map is invaluable.
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What Is a Sales Technology Road Map?
A sales technology road map is a strategic approach to the selection, implementation, and adoption of your sales technology stack. It’s a step-by-step framework for having success throughout this process.
Getting it right can provide your sales team with the tools they need to be maximally efficient, effective, and productive. It can, therefore, mean seeing a tremendous return on your sales technology investment.
Getting it wrong often means spending a lot of money on technology licenses that sit unused, underused, or misused.
Given the potential financial ramifications of digitally enabling your sellers, here are some tips to put you on the right path.
"Getting it right can provide your sales team with the tools they need to be maximally efficient, effective, and productive. It can, therefore, mean seeing a tremendous return on your sales technology investment."
7 Considerations When Digitally Enabling Your Sellers
Establish Goals
Goals are an essential first step in the creation of your sales technology road map. They serve as your North Star and impose a framework and direction on all your initiatives. When considering a piece of sales technology, identify what you want to get out of that solution, as well as how it helps you work toward your more overarching company goals.
"When you digitally enable salespeople, you make their lives easier and you free up precious time that can be redirected to actual selling."
Consider Stakeholders
Whether you’re implementing a new piece of sales technology or changing the way your company thinks about selling, the biggest hurdle you’re going to come up against is adoption. If the stakeholders don’t buy in and implement the change, then you’ll see no discernible impact.
Don’t decide on a sales solution and then hand it down from on high. Identify your relevant stakeholders, and then interview them to gather their biggest challenges, concerns, and pain points. Receive input from the people most affected, and then implement what they want to see. This makes stakeholders feel included and heard, and it’s the easiest and most effective way to bolster adoption.
Make Information Accessible
Salespeople are notoriously busy, and only about a third of that time is actually spent on selling (i.e., driving revenue). Needless to say, any initiative that can alleviate some of that burden is going to be time and money well spent.
When you’re creating content management systems or implementing any new piece of sales technology, keep time in the forefront of your strategy. Make sure salespeople can quickly and easily access the content, information, and training they need.
When you digitally enable salespeople, you make their lives easier and you free up precious time that can be redirected to actual selling.
Whatever system you put in place—whether it’s related to content, CRM, or sales tools—make sure it doesn’t actually cost your salespeople time by taking them out of their workflow. Everything must be quick, intuitive, integrated, and easy to access.
Give Your Salespeople What They Need
Enabling your sellers is all about arming them with whatever they need to be maximally efficient, productive, and effective. When creating your strategy, always reference back to those established goals. Ask yourself what you’re looking to do, and make sure any change is done with the mission of working toward that aim.
Some possibilities include the following:
- Just-in-time learning for easily digestible, retainable training information. It’s quickly and easily available whenever and wherever the sales rep needs it.
- Digital playbooks for a centralized repository of strategies, tactics, and approaches for success online.
- Content created through the joint efforts and input of marketing, sales, and customer success.
Think Outside the Box with Sales Presentations
When it comes to engaging sales presentations, keep the following in mind:
- Sales presentations can happen on any relevant platform. Maybe it’s PowerPoint. Maybe it’s not. Research your sales presentation tool options.
- Develop your storyline on the front end. Bake in opportunities to have an engaging, free-flowing conversation.
- Don’t overcrowd the slides you do cover with too many words. Keep it visual in nature.
- People who are having success with sales presentations today aren’t necessarily the business school grads. It’s people with backgrounds in art or storytelling because they know how to craft engaging, resonant messaging.
Training Is Not a One-Off Event
Training sales reps is not something you can do once and then check off your list. For one, you should be harnessing the power of data to continually monitor and improve your strategies. Ongoing training can help ensure everyone is up to date on the latest approaches and initiatives.
Two, hearing something once and retaining every piece of it is not how most people’s brains work. Sitting in a lecture hall for an all-day training is not the ideal way to captivate attention or to retain information.
Instead, implement ongoing just-in-time learning, development, coaching, and training. These are quicker, more digestible snippets of training that sales reps can access at any time—even while on a sales call.
Just as with your content management system, ensure all training documents are easy and quick to find. If reps have to spend time looking for it, your training material will sit unused.
Work Backward
When you’re trying to speak effectively to a prospect, you work backward from that customer. You think about key demographic differentiators. You think about challenges, needs, and desired outcomes. You then tailor your content, messaging, and approaches to what you’ve identified.
Similarly, your sales technology road map strategy should work backward from your overarching sales strategy. These two must be in alignment, or you’re setting yourself up for the dreaded “shelfware.”
Focus On Integration
There’s never going to be one piece of sales technology that’s all things to all people. What does that mean? You’re going to have to consider integration.
Whatever your foundational sales technology and sales enablement tools—CRM, playbooks, training material, data and reporting, and more—you need those solutions to integrate together.
If they don’t, you’re stuck with either bad data or lots of time-consuming manual work to translate information from one system into another. Both scenarios hurt your bottom line.
Ready to get started on your sales technology road map journey? Use this free sales technology selector tool to match solutions to your pressing needs and top priorities.
Have questions about the results? Reach out. We’re happy to walk through your business and discuss what optimizing your sales technology stack would entail.