Mediafly Readiness: Sales Training and Coaching to Continuously Improve Confidence and Credibility

By Meghan Ganzer | January 29, 2019

In today’s competitive marketplace, sales reps need a better way to connect and engage with buyers. With growing sales teams, high employee turnover rates, and expensive, often ineffective onboarding programs, how do you ensure you’re preparing sales reps to lead differentiating and engaging sales conversations that drive positive sales outcomes?

Readiness_img1 The role of a sales rep has changed. Their primary job is no longer to educate buyers on the features and capabilities of their products – information buyers can likely find on their own online. Instead, modern sellers need to create champions within buying organizations to help them sell their solutions to other internal stakeholders. The easiest way to do this is to help first-line buyers build a business case for purchasing your offering. Sellers who take this approach differentiate themselves from the competition by starting a new, more prescriptive conversation. They also create more personalized, impactful sales engagements that effectively communicate their value proposition in the context of what the buyer cares about.

How do you ensure your sellers are able to make the transition from static sales pitch to interactive sales conversation? Equip them with the resources and knowledge they need to be “sales ready” for every interaction. Here’s how:

The words “sales training” elicit thoughts of sitting in a windowless room filled with new hires for a day-long lecture on boring basics (it’s not Thursday, but #tbt to overhead projectors). This antiquated technique merely checks a box for organizations to claim they’ve “trained” their sellers before sending them out into the field, but it misses the mark on many levels.

Enter sales readiness.

Readiness_img2 Sales readiness is defined by Forrester Research as, “digital tools that increase sellers’ and managers’ effectiveness through practice, coaching, and collaboration. Leveraging repetition, gamification, and analytics, these tools help firms increase sellers’ and managers’ skills, improve brand and message consistency, and enable sales leaders to make data-driven decisions to maximize commercial outcomes.”

The shift from sales training to sales readiness is inevitable for one reason: standard sales training just isn’t working. Have you ever heard the quote, “You practice how you play”? A low stimulus training environment results in low rep performance and poor company outcomes. Retaining information is more successful with repetition, focusing on small sections of knowledge or content at a time and changing up the approach or format.

Standard sales training falls short when it takes place during the sales onboarding process and stops altogether once a rep is considered “ramped up”. Product training that occurs only during onboarding is ineffective because of the frequency with which products and offerings change. The most successful sellers look for opportunities to continuously enhance their skill set and keep their minds sharp.

Readiness_img3 Interactive learning methods that are accessible in snackable modules engage sellers with relevant materials they can readily access on-the-go. Powered by partnerships with Lessonly and MindTickle, Mediafly Readiness was created as part of the Mediafly Sales Enablement suite to give sellers one central place to go for training, marketing materials, interactive selling tools, meeting tracking, and sales coaching. Pairing Mediafly’s sales enablement technology with learning management systems (LMS) like Lessonly and MindTickle reinforces our mission to help companies improve win rates. By integrating Mediafly Readiness, sellers are equipped with the tools and information they need to sell efficiently and effectively in real-time, helping more reps to attain their quota.

To improve sales effectiveness and drive growth for your organization, contact Mediafly to get started.

Meghan Ganzer is the Digital Communications Manager at Mediafly. Since making the strategic shift from sales to marketing, Meghan has focused on content writing, external communications, and event collaboration to support the Mediafly sales team through demand generation. Meghan attended Miami University in Ohio and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Communications.

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