Increasing Sales Effectiveness: A COVID Opportunity?
Apr 9, 2020
By David Gordon
A potential outcome of COVID-19 is a rethinking of sales organizations. You’ve now had an opportunity to consider their effectiveness in a different sales environment and hopefully are starting to think about your sales organization post COVID.
Consider… prior to the pandemic outside salespeople believed that they needed to spend time behind a windshield and needed “face-to-face” to communicate with a customer. Now that they are remote, they are leaning on relationships that they have built to express concern, bringing valuable ideas and continuing to promote your value proposition (and those of your suppliers if you are a manufacturer rep or a distributor salesperson). What would happen if their future time was allocated differently?
This new sales environment creates the opportunity to reconsider the sales process as the goal is improving sales effectiveness. Many consider this “sales enablement.”
Sales enablement embraces the concept that there is a need to deconstruct the sales process into its pieces and then reconstruct it with better tools to support the customer buying process through the support of a sales organization. In essence it is providing your sales organization the toolkit to improve their effectiveness.
Sales effectiveness through enablement
Element of the sales enablement process can include:
• sales training
• prospect identification and qualification support (if account acquisition is key to the sales process)
• sales coaching/mentoring
• sales analytics/reporting and setting metrics
• compensation models
• an information communication process (which could be CRM or something less formal)
• a sales and marketing content aggregation system
The sales and marketing content aggregation system is critical to put all of the materials that a salesperson needs to support the customer buying process is at their fingertips/available at a click. This is a compilation of materials that each salesperson creates for themselves, could consolidate tools from all salespeople, includes materials that marketing has created, could include material from suppliers (PPTs, videos, spec sheets, testimonials, case studies, brochures/pdfs, training materials, etc.) from suppliers, and more. It’s a one-stop shop.
Some of these elements you may handle in house; others can be obtained from sales enablement specialists. The key is having a vision for sales enablement for your company, whether you are a manufacturer going to market through a direct salesforce or a rep network, a rep agency seeking to have a “centre of truth” to support your sales organization, or a distributor for your own salesforce.
Klyck is a leader in the sales enablement space. In CMG’s definition of sales enablement, Klyck has a unique offering to fill the sales and marketing content aggregation role for manufacturers, distributors and agents… and it’s affordable as it is an SaaS model, and easy to use. In today’s new sales environment, it can be a very beneficial tool.
According to Dave Karr, Klyck’s Vice President of Marketing, who used to work for GE Industrial and Mayer Supply:
Klyck is a sales enablement platform specifically built the industrial and construction industry. It easily allows companies to transform content into conversations, data into direction, and sales reps into sales experts.
How does it work? It uses intelligent filtering to provide sales users access to marketing and sales content when and where they need it, on any device. Sales reps can use this content to conduct presentations for their prospects, customers and influencers (both in person and remotely using the co-browsing feature) and send content by email using the sharing portal.
Ultimately, this allows Klyck to help turn any sales rep, either a seasoned veteran or a new hire, into a qualified sales expert armed with the information they need to deliver complex customer solutions.
And the system has other features that include analytics, the ability to integrate with training platforms and CRM systems and a unique feature called co-browsing (consider it a controlled Zoom or Microsoft Teams experience) and more.
Klyck also provides embedded data analytics that enable sales and marketing teams to gather valuable customer engagement information, such as what content was opened by a customer, how long they viewed it, and even how they rated its usefulness. This allows sales teams to gauge customer interest and develop better sales strategies that address the needs of their customers.
Combining the functionality of co-browsing with the ability to collect data on customer engagement allows sales reps to conduct more productive remote sales calls.
COVID-19 creates a unique opportunity to reinvent, re-support and empower your sales organization in a new way. Arming them with more information will enable them to better address customer needs. Sales leaders owe it to themselves to take a look at Klyck. Thirty minutes of time may give you a competitive edge in your market.
David Gordon is President of Channel Marketing Group. Channel Marketing Group develops market share and growth strategies for manufacturers and distributors and develops market research. CMG’s specialty is the electrical industry. He also authors an electrical industry blog, www.electricaltrends.com. He can be reached at 919-488-8635 or dgordon@channelmkt.com.
