Taking on Technology

Technology is offering pretty convincing answers to some of the challenges for today’s salespeople. In the first of two articles, Dave Stein explains why.

New and evolving technology has an important role to play in enhancing sales performance in two particular ways. First of all, it can be very effective in enabling sales learning, which I firmly believe should not be seen as a one-off event, but more as an ongoing process that never stops. In terms of day-to-day selling, meanwhile, technology can certainly help salespeople do their jobs both more effectively and more efficiently, whether it’s used before sales meetings, for phone calls, or when they’re planning a sales campaign.

Focusing first on the learning side, there’s no doubt that traditional classroom-based sales training – or event-based sales training – is on the way out. It was going away from September and October of last year when the recession started to bite, and now it’s going away even more quickly. It was declining for a number of reasons before last autumn, but now it’s mainly about tremendous restriction of travel.

For businesses in Ireland, there wasn’t a huge amount of sales training going on to begin with, but those who do understand its importance are no longer going to be using the same model that’s been around for more than 100 years, where you have a roomful of salespeople – or in the case of some smaller companies maybe three or four salespeople – you give them a facilitator for three days and out they come at the other end.

That’s no longer effective or efficient. Classroom-based training is mainly going to go because of the expense involved, but its days are also numbered because there can be such diversity amongst sales teams. You can have people in their 20s and people in their 60s receiving the same training. As well as generational differences, you can have differences of experience – people who’ve been selling for 20 years and people who’ve literally never sold before. You may also have different cultures – people from vastly different backgrounds who see things in very different ways.

Perhaps the most important factor is the difference in the way people learn. Young people now learn through technology – that’s the way they learn in school and that’s how they get most of their information. The majority of their learning is done either on a laptop, on a desktop or some kind of iPhone or personal productivity device. Many of the older generation, on the other hand – and this can be people from their 40s upwards – are still very uncomfortable with computers. They want a book in their hands.

If you take all of the issues around diversity and add to that restrictions on travel, you wind up with a situation where most of the learning going forward is going to take place on a technology platform and not face-to-face.

There will always be a face-to-face component, but I think that’s going to be reserved more for role playing and for workshops. And that would probably be just half a day every six months rather than a stint of three or five days.

So what does all this mean? Essentially it means that sales learning, selling skills, planning skills, learning how to understand your customer and learning how to articulate the business value of your products and services will increasingly be available to salespeople on a technology-enabled platform.

Salespeople are going to be able to go online and take courses anytime, anywhere. They won’t have to commit to a particular day or a given location. It can be whenever and wherever they need to. And they can repeat the learning as many times as they need. They’ll have videos, narrated PowerPoints, case studies, individual exercises, documents to read, podcasts and audio that they can put on their iPod.

The learning will take place in a much more penetrating and available way. It’ll be more penetrating because they can listen to it as many times as they want in order to get the point.

Technology-enabled learning is already taking place and some of the major global sales-training companies – including The TAS Group, Richardson and Miller Heiman – already have some or all of their sales-learning content up on one or other kind of technology platform. This trend is not going to go back – it’s going to continue to accelerate.

The role of the typical sales trainer will therefore change. They’ll be narrating the PowerPoints and recording podcasts and videos once and they’ll then be redeployed as coach. They’ll be doing live coaching sessions with sales teams and individual sales reps, the benefits of which will be absolutely terrific. There has been a real void here in the sales training arena for decades. The standard procedure has been to put a sales team into an event and, after a few days, send them off to sell something. There hasn’t been any reinforcement and there hasn’t been anyone coaching them.

This new model, where the facilitators will now be available to coach sales teams or individuals out in the field, will help them to be more efficient and more efficient. Hopefully companies will avail themselves of the services of coaches like that.

This is a very positive development for sales learning, and it’s not before its time. Other functions and disciplines have been doing this for a long time – it’s not new to customer service, call centres and many other functions. A lot of time and money has been wasted in sales because classroom training is just not as efficient and effective as individualised training.

It’s also worth looking at where this kind of learning is headed. At the moment, a couple of companies are leading the charge, pulling their customers into this arena of technology-enabled learning. Some clients are resistant, however, because they want to do things the old-fashioned way. As with everything, some companies adapt more quickly and they’re actually seeing the benefits.

In the future, salespeople will be given individualised assessments. The sales-training company or a trainer within a larger company will have the means to assess a group of sellers for the way they learn, the way they think and their current skill set. Individualised and customised curricula will then be developed for each individual salesperson.

Because the learning will be available on a technology platform, as opposed to lots of diverse people being crammed into a classroom at the same time, each curriculum will only include the learning that’s required for the particular individual. The 25-year sales veteran won’t be sitting in the same class as the person who’s never sold before. Their individualised, customised curriculum will be different. The salesperson who learns in one way but not the other and who has certain cultural propensities and a certain level of experience, will have a course of study with exams and tracking, but their coursework will look and be very, very different from the person in the next cubicle, and the person in the cubicle next to that.

Companies are already providing this kind of service and it’s not that complicated to do. There is an expense involved for the sales-training company to actually go through the transition, but the model has been proven to really work and this is where I believe the future is. And when I say future, I don’t mean 20 years from now – I mean it’s already being done and more and more companies will follow that model. Training companies will go that way, and the leading-edge companies will want their people to be more productive.

The buyers of sales learning should be looking at significantly reduced costs because now they’ll be licensing content that can be duplicated and is available on the individuals’ computers. They won’t have the added cost of having to pay facilitators’ travel, living expenses, daily fees and so on. And they won’t have the expense of sending their own people from remote national and even international offices for a couple of days of sales training.

The bottom line is that technology-enabled learning offers a lower investment cost and a higher return, much more post-learning reinforcement, and personalised and customised learning for each individual. This new facility is turning out to be just the right answer for the challenges that companies have these days.

Dave Stein is founder and CEO of ES Research.

This article first appeared in Marketing Age magazine.