Is Your Sales Team Getting the Most out of Sales 2.0 Technology?

This is post is written by Brent Holloway, sales manager at Verint Systems and coauthor of Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology.

I realized during a weekly review with one of my team members last month that I needed to do a better job of practicing internally something we preach to our customers: to get the most out of technology such as Sales 2.0 tools, we need to help our sales teams use it more effectively.  How many of our salespeople have not had formal training on the technology they use, and even if they have, are they using it to its full potential?  End user training is an obvious first step, but real world application usage testing is an often missed but important step that closes the gap between potential and results.

At Verint Systems (a leading provider for Workforce Optimization software and services), most of our professional service packages for our software systems include standard product training as well as a brief follow-on engagement with an application consultant which can be performed onsite or remotely.  This follow-on training is intentionally scheduled several weeks after the installation and product training are completed.  This allows the end users to have a little experience and some knowledge about how the product works, but they inevitably have some questions about how to effectively use the product to meet their specific needs.  Our application consultant helps our customers’ users work through a couple of their personal, real world examples.  We have received positive feedback from our customers with this implementation approach and it directly impacts customer success, satisfaction, and revenue.

Similarly, in our roles as sales managers and leaders we can act as an application consultant  to our salespeople (or we can assign a team specialist), giving specific examples or best practices of how to use Sales 2.0 applications and other technologies that support the sales process.  We can also ask our salespeople to give specific examples of how they use each product and share their experiences at team meetings.
Here are a few very basic examples of technologies and practices that are commonly used in sales organizations worldwide. Is your sales team using and applying them as effectively as possible?

1. CRM Systems
Can your salespeople quickly look up contact information for a specific prospect or  list of prospects/customers, research previous orders or quotes to get an historical view of previous discounts offered, confirm who signed the previous orders and on what dates, research the status of a technical support ticket, or get renewal dates and amounts?  Are your salespeople forced to wait on other people internally in your organization to get this type of information?  The productivity potential of CRM systems is very real, assuming the users know how to use it efficiently.

2. Account Research
Many sales organizations offer a tool like Hoovers, Jigsaw or InsideView to enable their salespeople to research a customer or prospect before their next sales call.  At Verint, we use InsideView, a web based system that allows us to identify key contacts and get other important company information about our customers and prospects.  I recently helped one of our field reps build a filter that helped her identify a target list of companies and key contacts with specific titles using a feature that was not covered thoroughly in the basic product training.

3. Spreadsheets
My experience – from starting my career in a startup with 12 people to today, working for a company with 3,000 employees – has been even leading technology companies that use CRM and other sales applications also use spreadsheets for a wide range of sales-related needs. According to Lee Levitt, Program Director of IDC’s Sales Advisory Service, spreadsheets are still the #1 tool used in sales, in spite of the recent proliferation of advanced, Sales 2.0 applications designed to increase sales productivity and engage prospects. Salespeople who know how to perform at least basic spreadsheet functions like sorting, filtering, or inserting basic calculations and formulas enable themselves to be more productive, such as when they need to analyze a customer list for accounts that fall within a given territory, vertical market, or account size, or to identify a subset that has purchased specific products for an upselling campaign, etc. Pricing and ROI exercises also frequently require spreadsheets.

Performing formal and informal skill assessments of team members is an important part of any sales manager’s role.  My hunch is that most sales managers (myself included) focus more on assessing selling skills and have not yet given enough attention to the assessment of technology usage, which is a relatively easy skill to measure and improve.

Do you assess and train your sales team on technology usage on an ongoing basis?  What programs have you found effective? Have you seen a correlation between technology training and increased sales productivity? Share your experiences!

Tags: Sales 2.0, technology adoption, training

5 Comments to Is Your Sales Team Getting the Most out of Sales 2.0 Technology?

1. 

   What exactly is 2.0 about spreadsheets? CRMs have been around for almost ten years and sales people still refuse to use them correctly. It’s not that they can’t but that they won’t. I keep hearing and reading about Sales 2.0 but so far all I see is either big brother technology (like I need to create yet another report) or someone telling me I need to have a profile on LinkedIn.
Paul Jonas on September 24th, 2009

2. [...] Is Your Sales Team Getting the Most out of Sales 2.0 Technology? (Brent Halloway) [...]
Weekend Reading Linkfest — Chad Levitt New Sales Economy Blog on September 25th, 2009
3. 

   Response from Brent:
   Thanks for your comment, Paul. Spreadsheets are not a leading Sales 2.0 technology, however they are still a widely used sales tool. Sales 2.0 is about re-thinking sales strategy and evolving the way we sell over time to be more customer-centric, measurable, and efficient. This process does not happen overnight and installing the latest and greatest technology will not instantly make a company Sales 2.0. The point of this posting was not to highlight the newest Sales 2.0 technologies, but rather to suggest that any technology can be used in an optimized sales process, such as when a salesperson analyzes a customer or prospect list in Excel to maximize results in their next sales campaign. Knowing how to use even basic technology better is one critical factor for salespeople to be more efficient and effective in their sales processes. I believe part of the reason that some salespeople refuse to use technology is because they only have the basic product training, and they may not have received enough real world coaching around how to use the technology in ways that will help them increase sales in less time. If you read our book, you’ll see that most of the new technologies we cover would not fall into the “big brother” category. Many are enabling tools for salespeople to identify or collaborate with customers and prospects more effectively. If you are interested in learning more, please let us know your mailing address by sending a note to aseley@phoneworks.com and we will be happy to mail you a free copy of our Sales 2.0 book. Our hope is that you will have a different impression of Sales 2.0 after reading it.
Anneke on September 25th, 2009
4. 

   The things you have mentioned are wonderful and I am glad to be the part of it.
   Tia Smith
knightsbridge business sales on October 6th, 2009
5. 

   Good stuff. Just LinkedIn from Robin Carey’s FB update on Oracle World and Anneke’s report on the conference. I am going through the exact same set of issues getting a group of sales folks to expand their horizons using LinkedIn and ZoomInfo to gather prospect intelligence on targeted F1000 companies. The biggest issue for some is that their LI network is too small to leverage the power of LI for intros and referrals to their target buyers within those companies. My LI network is just under 500 and within hours of pulling contacts out of Zoom and cross checking in LI, I had multiple qualified referrals into those companies.

   These folks clearly have relationship selling skills, but don’t know some of the basics of using social networks and communities to create permission-based connections. Showing them the actual qualified leads I created in a day gave them the motivation to go online and start pounding away though. Once experienced sales people see the richness of the intelligence, they dig in.

   I have not used InsideView, but this is third time in a month I have heard a sales exec endorse it (www.netsea.org panel discussion in September). So i guess it will be next trial and subscription.
Henry Bruce on October 18th, 2009

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