We live in a fast-paced, highly connected world and as such, sales teams are often running in various directions and are even more often geographically diverse. Your team might consist of three people all located at your small office in Vancouver or you might have twelve team members spread from Calgary to Washington to Rotterdam. In either case, it can be rough to get everyone together at once with consistency.
Today’s sales managers and team leads are able to get training tools to their salespeople quickly and in a timely fashion without need of scheduling or time-wasting meetings. Those ahead of the curve are utilizing the technologies and instant communications tools at their disposal to keep everyone abreast, no matter how far apart they might be physically.
Sales tools, whether they are basic training to keep skills sharp or new product demos to showcase something coming soon, need to be accessible and easy to digest. Once thought the bleeding edge and only the purview of the high-tech world, mobile apps are now becoming more mundane and straight-forward. Businesses use them internally as well as for marketing to the public. Most importantly, those apps can be used to deliver training materials quickly and to a variety of platforms, accommodating everyone in your organization, no matter their technophobia.
Mobile presentations are often done in video form (many mobile apps are video-based, after all). Video can be quickly sized to fit the screen being used, paused, rewound, and otherwise controlled and can allow a lot of flexibility for the presentation style needed to get the information across. Apps can further augment this video delivery by automatically including access to documents or materials associated with the presentation to further enhance it. This could mean that a product brochure mentioned in the video can be attached as a PDF for perusal and printing, a referenced internal document could be linked for reference from the closed intranet, etc.
To be specific, though, the most successful sales training tools in this format use all of the above plus a few other other elements to push them over the top.
*Ease of use, including being in-line with current sales processes – as well as small size for fast delivery and digestion are important.
*Introductions from key players in the management team, including the CEO or other executives keep the viewers feeling included and stress the importance of the information.
*Make it collaborative and interactive so that the salespeople using the system can interact with one another to trade pitches, techniques, or ask questions of one another or management.
Finally, schedule meeting agendas to include information shared via this app. Regular meetings, which are still a must, should include overviews of what was sent in small parts since the last meet. If done right, a well-made internal-use app can be a serious business builder.