Wondering why your healthcare sales consultants aren’t closing more deals? Have that nagging doubt that your sales training program isn’t really helping?
Long gone are the days of 100-page sales training program manuals that sales trainers purchase and send by snail mail to teams across the country, only to be followed by a city-by-city training tour to deliver live training sessions. After an exhausting journey, training program feedback and results are captured in Excel spreadsheets.
All the while hoping on a ‘wing and a prayer’ that the trainer’s efforts pay off in the form of improved close rates, a better customer experience, a consistent message, and ultimately, more revenue.
Sound familiar?
If you’re still doing any part of sales training using ‘old school’ methodologies, it’s time to look at how 24/7/365 connectivity and remarkable technology advancements over the past decade have transformed the sales training process from beginning to end. Ready to break from that rut and start using technology to speed training delivery, optimize results, track outcomes and reduce costs?
It’s time.
Technology is Revolutionizing the Consultative Sales Process
Smartphones, tablets, social media, online courseware, learning management systems (LMS) and sales automation systems have utterly revolutionized the selling process in remarkable ways. So when it comes to the new model of selling through education (‘problem solving’ versus ‘feature hocking’), leveraging the convergence of context-rich systems, data and analytics is empowering both sales teams and buyers to engage with each other in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.
According to Gartner’s list of top 10 strategic technology trends, several shifts are having a significant impact on sales forces and the consultative sales process, and therefore, also impacting the sales training programs that are fueling them.
- Advanced, pervasive, invisible analytics. Today’s technologies are capturing more data on buyer behaviors than ever before, even without them knowing it. From online surfing and shopping habits to product preferences and lifestyle trends, data gives the sales consultant a more holistic view of their prospective customers and what motivates them on multiple levels.That means sales reps now have significantly more intelligence about what makes their prospective customers ‘tick.’ They can see the conditions, indicators and triggers that affect buyer decisions, including – and most importantly – those that indicate buyers are close to making a purchase decision.So, by layering analytics seamlessly on top of linked data about customers, sales activities, and salespeople, healthcare sales consultants can deliver the right decision assistance to the right customer at the right time, through the communication channels they prefer.
- Computing everywhere. Through the proliferation of mobile devices and the wide availability of high speed Internet connectivity, buyers and salespeople can reach each other anywhere, anytime. That also means sales trainers have the ability to communicate, train and coach sales teams by phone, text, chat and even video.Around the clock access to data means sales reps can not only analyze buyer behaviors through the decision journey, they can connect and engage with them through a multitude of channels, from email to social media to text messaging. That makes for a far more dynamic, authentic relationship and bond earlier in the process.
- Video-based Sales Training. Sales trainers may cling to ‘head-trash’ that online video training replaces them, but video learning is highly effective and increasingly leveraged in corporate training programs. It still requires a sales trainer’s expertise and skill to design training programs, sales workflows and funnel processes that are required to make the program effective, measurable and scalable.
Beyond the ability to better engage sales reps who retain more information from video-based programs, there are plenty of other reasons why video is becoming more popular in corporate learning than ever before. Online video training programs offer:
- Increased comprehension and retention of learning content
- Reinforcement of the message
- An experiential process that reduces the gap between theory and practice
- Time and location flexibility
- Self-directed and self-paced learning
With the popularity of YouTube, Vimeo, and other video streaming services, your sales reps are already comfortable using video, so they are far more proficient with video than other learning technologies than you might imagine. Video also allows corporate trainers to deploy training programs faster and far more cost-effectively than other training programs.
Interested in learning more about how online video training can transform your sales process, increase close capture rates and turn your sale team into a closing machine? Check out video training applications that can simplify the job like never before.