Secrets to Amplifying Sales Engagement Adoption

The first installment of a new series written by RevShoppe Director of Enablement Rich Adams

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Before joining the RevShoppe team to build out our customer-facing enablement programs, I spent five years attempting to crack the code on boosting the adoption of sales tools like Outreach, Salesloft, LinkedIn, and Zoominfo to fuel pipeline and revenue growth at hyper-growth companies like Zoom.

I’m not going to lie: Sometimes, it felt like learning to count cards (and still owing the house, anyways).

After much troubleshooting and lesson-learning, I had the chance to lead a session sharing my findings at Outreach Unleash. “How to Combat Sales Tools Nausea" was designed to help sales enablement leaders energize their sales teams about effectively leveraging (adopting) their tech stack. The positive response I received from enablement leaders cemented my passion for helping sales organizations unlock the value of their tech stack.

Now, I'm excited to bring these strategies to a larger audience, and at a critical time when leaders and enablement pros are desperate to boost their teams’ productivity in today's turbulent economic environment.

There’s a lot I can say on the subject (and you’ll bet I will), but I wanted to start with some key basics: my top three proven strategies to help boost the adoption of your sales engagement platform, beginning with the importance of blended learning.

Use a blended learning strategy

If you’re struggling with sales engagement adoption across your organization, and your enablement strategy is exclusively "single live training" delivered over platforms like Zoom, guess what? That’s most likely your biggest bottleneck.

Sales teams (and most adults) don't learn that way; in most cases, people only retain 15% of what they learn one week following a single live training session. The issue is no reinforcement.

"Without on-the-job reinforcement, reps will lose 87% of training within the first month" - CEB study

A blended learning strategy is a combination of two types of training: micro training and macro training.

Micro training consists of things like videos and tutorials that are easily accessible by reps within their workstream; let’s refer to this kind of training as “just-in-time.” Macro training refers to the more conventional live training sessions or eLearning courses designed to reinforce the learnings. See the table below for a quick guide.

Imagine you just built a new outbound sales motion including new Outreach sequences. You spend 60 minutes with your team instructing them on how to use the new sequences and ensuring they understand the workflow; once the training is done, you send them on their way, under the fair assumption they’ll "just get it".

But what’s actually going to happen?

Most likely, the rep will attempt to use the new sequences, but without even realizing it, they’ll get stuck on a step. Without any reinforcement training videos or tutorials easily accessible, the rep will feel discouraged and frustrated; they’ll either be held up waiting for hands-on assistance, or they’ll return to their previous behaviors. (The behaviors you know aren’t getting the right results!)

Sound familiar?

Had a blended learning strategy been in place, the rep would have had access to resources like tutorials, guides, or videos to empower them to complete the action in real-time (say it with me: “just-in-time” learning), without having to wait for their manager or peer to assist them or abandoning the step altogether.

To get started building a blended learning strategy for your sales engagement platform, follow these steps:

• Build your library of just-in-time enablement content within your CMS/digital adoption platforms. This can include short video walkthroughs, interactive tutorials using tools like Iorad, and helpful resources like FAQs to enable reps to self-serve when questions arise. Basically, you want to provide contextual learning resources for when and where the reps need them.
• Ensure the live instructor-led training sessions are "interactive" and full of activities and knowledge checks. Keeping the sessions capped at 20-30 participants will help maximize individual engagement; it’s much easier to incorporate practice activities in smaller settings versus a large webinar format. Similarly, limit each training session to 2-3 key workflows. Don't try to jam everything into one training! It just won’t stick.
• Consider building an eLearning "crash course" within your LMS for future new hires and refresher training. As you bring new people onto your teams, having a library of on-demand eLearning courses will become invaluable to scaling.

I hope you’ve found all of this helpful! There’s so much more to delve into, but I’m sticking to my own rules and attempting to break everything down into bite-sized, retainable chunks.

Stay tuned for Part 2 in the coming weeks, where I’ll discuss my second strategy for adoption and enablement success. And if you’re curious about other things I'm working on, or what the rest of RevShoppe is working on, I recommend checking out our programs at www.revshoppe.com/workflows - You can also DM me directly here on LI to setup a chat over Zoom.

Thank you so much for tuning in!

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