As a sales manager, my number one priority is making sure each and every person is continuously improving across the board so that we can blow our goals out of the water. On my plate, I manage our systems, processes, tools, and people. It’s a lot. And with a growing team and growing set of responsibilities, it becomes more difficult to delve in and uncover real world coachable moments in the field.
Then one day, I realized we have an ion feature that we created in our platform to help sales people, but it’s incredibly helpful for me to uncover coachable moments as well. Enter ion’s new Sell-Side functionality.
With Sell-Side, our entire sales team has insight into how our prospects are interacting with our content, and this insight can be used to construct targeted conversations and solutions for our buyers. A sales person just clicks a link in our CRM on a lead record and they can see things like:
- Exactly which interactive content experiences the buyer engaged with and what percentage of the content they consumed.
- What potential solutions they configured in our solution finder.
- What problems they identified in our self-assessment tool.
- What kind of product or service pricing they calculated in our calculator.
Is our team using that on their calls? You better believe it, because sales reps that personalize conversations are more likely to close a sale every time.
But my big ah-hah moment was that Sell-Side doesn’t just offer our sales reps insight. It gives me, as a sales manager, an opportunity to see how my team can improve as well. Recently, I went into our CRM and pulled all of our conversation notes and paired them up with the corresponding Sell-Side insights. What I uncovered were several opportunities for one-on-one coaching with each of the team members. I could see where the buyer had surfaced specific information in their digital content interactions, but we missed the mark in using that information to be targeted and relevant.
For example, one buyer who interacted with our pricing calculator requesting customized pricing. In the calculator itself, the buyer had configured pricing based on inputs that would put them in a middle tier version of our product with some custom solutions. But I could see that the sales rep had sent base, entry-level pricing. Arg! A missed opportunity to meet the buyer at their point of interest & need.
Having the Sell-Side visibility, this rep could have molded their entire conversation around forming that custom solution that the buyer needed. Without that molding, several more back and forth discover-type interactions had to happen to get to the point that the custom solution could be discussed. But with Sell-Side, we had the information in our hand to start there and not force the buyer to go backwards.
Sell-Side has changed my ability as a manager to find coachable moments and helps me focus the team on the value of having sales interactions that are contextually relevant.
Sophisticated buyers expect (really, they demand) relevant and targeted conversations. If they don’t get that, they move on. I know a buyer doesn’t want to start over when they reach out to sales and answer a bunch of our self-serving questions. By having insight into a buyer’s interaction with our interactive content experiences, a sales person can be highly specific in their conversations, and I can see where gaps may exist to coach for improvement. I am able to quickly find a critical coaching opportunity without having to shadow calls for hours on end.
Everyone on our sales team has a deep hunger for winning. We love to beat the competition. With Sell-Side, we are able to have those winning conversations, and I am more easily able to help our sales reps do so.
Every day, I become more amazed at the sales enablement opportunities for interactive content and the insights it provides. If you haven’t checked out the benefits that interactive content can provide your sales team or ion’s Sell-Side functionality, you should. Believe me! Your sales team will thank you, and then you can thank me.
