Secrets to Amplifying Sales Engagement Adoption - Part 2

Written by RevShoppe Director of Enablement, Rich Adams.

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Welcome to Part 2 of my three-part series on boosting sales engagement (SEP) adoption.

As a quick refresh, Part 1 focused on:

• Without on-the-job reinforcement, sales reps only retain 15% of what’s taught during live training. If you want, for example, for your reps to master a new outbound Outreach sequence, it's going to take more than a single training to get the job done.
• To increase retention from live training sessions, transform sessions into hands-on workshops with practice activities allowing reps to practice learnings in real-time.
• Just-in-time learning is key to reinforcing learnings around using sales engagement platforms.  Provide learning resources (micro and macro training) where and when your reps need them.

Too often, top-performing sales reps get promoted into sales management roles with little to no training or enablement resources. The reason? Most enablement efforts focus on individual contributors, not managers. If a newly promoted sales manager is lucky, they might attend a generic sales management training once a quarter; unfortunately, such training often needs more focus on coaching teams and effectively using all available tools.

And the impact? Highly skilled managers are left shorthanded and ill-equipped to coach their teams effectively, leading to poor sales behaviors and potentially low adoption of key sales tools.

I've discussed the importance of using a blended learning strategy when designing an enablement strategy to boost sales engagement adoption. A vital component of a blended learning strategy is coaching reinforcement.

Coaching is the secret to adoption.

I've written about the importance of reinforcement using just-in-time learning as a successful adoption strategy. Having built global enablement programs for rapidly scaling organizations like Zoom, I know that sales managers are the force multiplier for driving change and adoption, but only when management enablement is prioritized. The best form of support comes from front-line manager coaching.

To drive the adoption of sales engagement tools across your team, sales managers must be bought into any changes first. They must fully comprehend how new tools will help them as managers and coaches and enable their teams to perform at higher levels.

Knowing that front-line managers often get left out of the mix, the question becomes: How can managers be empowered to help drive the adoption of sales engagement tools?

Try these steps to get started:

• Ensure your sales managers are "bought-in" and understand firsthand the value of how the tool will help them and their team. Nothing else matters if your managers aren’t bought in and evangelizing the change.
• Create a list of "coaching plays" you want your managers to run with their teams during 1:1s, leveraging the new sales engagement platform. For example, how to use Outreach reporting to uncover how prospects respond (sentiment analysis) to reps' messaging.

• Once you have created this list of "coaching plays," create the video walkthrough or tutorials that show how a manager can perform these plays and add them into an organized folder in your CMS or sales enablement platform (just in time).
• Plan a live workshop-style training session focused on executing the coaching plays you created. (Helpful hint from the first article in the series: Using smaller cohorts is more effective than large group formats!) Use breakout rooms to facilitate coaching simulations so your managers can practice the plays you just trained them on. Ensure the managers know how to access the just-in-time training content you've created for them AND the reps so they can reinforce the adoption of the resources with their team when questions arise.

Empowered managers lead to empowered teams, but as evident from the first two parts of this series, there are no shortcuts to driving the right behaviors, and ultimately the adoption, of sales engagement platforms.

Getting your front-line sales managers bought in on change and empowered to use your sales tools is a critical lever for success, but there’s more to do to achieve the desired state.

In the last part of this series, I’ll reveal the final component of building a successful learning journey to help inspire the right behaviors and get your team firing on all cylinders for the final stretch of 2022.

Stay tuned for Part 3, dropping next week.

Can’t wait? Drop me (Rich!) a message, and I’ll be more than happy to give you a sneak peek over a personal meeting and what we have brewing at RevShoppe.

P.S - Jason Vargas is a far better graffiti artist than me as you can tell by the coaching he's giving me in the picture above :)

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