The Agile Selling Imperative

Today’s sales teams are overburdened with the information they need in order to be successful. In an ever-evolving marketplace, buyers have evolved – but sales teams haven’t. The result is sales enablement and operations teams create more content and provide more information to sales teams who just don’t have time to sort through it all.

Customers want experts who can continually offer ideas, insights and information to address their biggest problems. They want forward-thinking guidance on how to stay on top of their game. By creating agile selling teams, sales leaders can make their teams faster at learning about new clients, better at meeting their customer needs, and stronger at locking in new business.

But how do sales leaders help new hires quickly gain the depth of knowledge required to be an invaluable resource? How do they shorten sales rep onboarding time so that new hires are up-to-date on the industry trends that could be impacting their customer’s business?

The key is in agile selling.

As Jill Konrath presented at our recent Connect conference, agile selling is learning how to quickly assimilate new information in a selling situation and pick up and adapt new sales skills to execute effectively. To do this, reps need to adapt to a learning sequence where they prioritize new information when presented with a new selling situation.

For example, if there is a new market a company wants to break into, they know to learn the major players first, then read specific publications to get to know major issues, then look for companies with specific characteristics, then the contacts, then determine when to reach out and how. They are learning to master one piece of information at a time, and should continue to do so for a set time every day.

There are sales execution solutions today that help organizations support agile selling. Qvidian’s Sales Playbooks help organizations do just that. They provide information to reps in context of their situation, at just the right time. Not overwhelm them with the volume of information accessible. In doing so, reps consume just what they need when they need it and free up their minds to think about and solve customer problems. Customers are expecting more value to be added in the sales experience. But by burdening reps with too much information, it clutters their mind rendering them unable to think creatively for customers.

If reps aren’t able to add value for customers, they will lose the deal. Reinforcing the agile selling reduces the risk of salespeople being unprepared when they engage a customer. Sales execution solutions can help organizations adapt to this ongoing process so that studying, growing and adjusting becomes a regular part of everyday business.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1iZBJV1