You’ve recently welcomed a new sales rep to your team. They’re buzzing with energy, sharp as a tack, and ready to make their mark. But have you given them the tools to succeed? Do they understand the intricacies of your product and processes? Do they know their way around the tools that are essential to their role? Enter the magic of sales enablement – bridging the gap between a new sales rep’s potential and their success.
Melanie Fellay, Spekit CEO, recently sat down with Keegan Otter, Head of Sales at Warmly, enablement extraordinaire, and avid swing dancer, to discuss a fresh perspective on sales enablement, touching upon the power of video content, the importance of tailoring content to different audiences, and leveraging the right tools to maximize sales team performance.
With a wealth of experience between them, their insights paint a promising picture of how a creative, agile approach to sales enablement can redefine the growth trajectory of any business.
Let’s dive in.
The Generation Gap: Keys to Understanding Your Audience
Personalization starts with a deep understanding of your audience. Not everyone engages with content in the same way. Each generation, for instance, comes with its own set of preferences and learning styles. Understanding these differences is crucial to connecting with and engaging your audience.
For example, Baby Boomers and Generation X are comfortable with longer, more in-depth content. They appreciate detailed, comprehensive material and are often willing to devote more time to consuming it.
Millennials and Generation Z, on the other hand, are digital natives who have grown up in a world of YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, where rapid information consumption is key. These generations often find short video content more engaging and digestible.
Introducing the idea of tailoring content according to generational needs isn’t about stereotyping or putting people in boxes. Instead, it’s about acknowledging diverse learning preferences and meeting your audience where they are, facilitating their success and your own.
When you consider these generational differences, you can start to tailor your content and your approach, crafting content that speaks to these preferences and ensuring your messaging truly resonates with your audience.
The Power of Visual Learning: How Video is Redefining Training
In today’s fast-paced, digital world, effective training methods have had to evolve to meet the demands of different learning styles. One method that’s seen an immense surge in popularity is video training. This shift is not without reason. Video training offers diverse audiences an engaging, efficient, and tailored learning experience. As Keegan explained:
“The power of video is really catching on because you get so much more data and information out.”
This isn’t just because video offers visual learning but also because it provides an audible explanation that can be consumed in a shorter period. The brain processes more information when it’s delivered visually and audibly, making video an impactful medium for instruction and learning.
Beyond being engaging, video plays a critical role in reinforcing learning. As Spekit CEO, Melanie Fellay, revealed, repetition plays an essential role in learning and retention:
“It takes repetition for your short-term memory to transfer that information to your long-term memory.”
The importance of repetition in learning is further underscored by the ‘forgetting curve,’ which states that learners retain only about 30% of information after they hear it the first time, and they only remember 10% of that information after six days. Without repeated exposure and reinforcement, a staggering 70% of information is lost after the initial encounter.
Videos lend themselves well to this repetition, providing a platform for learners to revisit lessons at their leisure, fostering repetition and reinforcement crucial to long-term memory formation.
Video content also empowers us to adhere to the philosophy of ‘work to live, not live to work.’ Rather than spending hours sifting through documents for information, we can watch a quick, readily available, engaging, and efficient video, allowing us to achieve a balance at work that flows into other areas of our lives.
Furthermore, Keegan stressed the importance of tailoring content to the needs of individuals. Video content allows for this personalization, helping individuals find specific information quickly and efficiently. Instead of fast-forwarding through an hour-long training video to find what they’re looking for, they can find a 30-second bite-sized, engaging video, save it, and access it when and where they need it.
Creating a Culture of Enforcement Learning
However, it’s not only about creating and delivering video content but also about creating an enforcement learning culture. Keegan emphasized:
“You have to build this philosophy or this culture of enforcement learning.”
By building an ‘enforcement learning’ culture, where people are encouraged to revisit videos and practice what they’ve learned, you can ensure that the training is absorbed and applied. Keegan’s practice of giving out assignments post-training sessions where the participants follow along with a video at their own pace and do a practice run has shown promising results.
Moreover, embedding videos across platforms makes them more accessible. Integrating videos and other resources into the tools reps use daily, like Slack, Notion, and Spekit, enhances accessibility, ensuring they’re available right in their flow of work. This integration encourages successful self-reliance without the need for repetitive questions or endless document digging.
This multi-pronged approach – creating engaging video content, encouraging repetition, tailoring to individual needs, and establishing an enforcement learning culture – is the secret sauce for effective training and enablement.
Video isn’t just the future of training; it’s an evolution in how we engage, learn, and retain information. Its ability to offer personalized, repeatable content significantly influences learning outcomes and adoption rates in the modern workplace.
Practice and Reinforcement: The Path to Lasting Knowledge
Hands-on experience is not just a vital part of learning; it’s also the key to retention.
Research shows that people remember only about 30% of what they’re taught in a single session.
That’s why learning shouldn’t end after the training session. Assigning “homework” as practical assignments that your team can complete at their own pace, such as following along with videos or using specific tools, enables them to apply knowledge in a practical context and reinforces the learning process, ensuring that the material sticks.
Spekit’s knowledge checks are also an ideal way to ensure learning retention.
Knowledge checks are bite-sized assessments that test your team’s understanding of the material they’ve just learned.
For Keegan’s team, failing a knowledge check required the sales rep to review the material again. This feature is particularly useful for knowledge reinforcement.
One of the pillars that Keegan builds his sales management style on is continuous learning. This starts by creating content for everyone to consume and encouraging everyone on the team, including the top performers, to keep learning. Keegan emphasizes to his team that to be good at what they do, they must stay up to date with the latest information and skills.
To ensure constant learning, Keegan also encourages his team members to take the lead in knowledge sharing. If someone comes up with a new idea or process, they are asked to record themselves using it. This way, other team members can watch the video and learn at their own pace, creating an environment where everyone can contribute to collective learning.
This bottom-up approach to enablement allows the team to learn from each other and apply their knowledge practically.
The Power of Video and Technology in Sales Documentation
The process of sales documentation and enablement is a necessary element for both remote and distributed teams. With the increase in research emphasizing the value of proper documentation, it has become clear that the culture of sales documentation is not just an option but a must-have.
Great documentation enables self-service and enhances productivity across the organization.
However, the process of creating documentation is often seen as a mental burden, despite the technological advancements in AI. A notable aspect to consider is that creating a video, which can be consumed in 30 seconds, also takes the same time to create.
This efficiency provides an immense time-saving advantage for enablement professionals, who often struggle to generate content without an extensive time investment. Video content creation, when supplemented by tools like Loom and Spekit, encourages audience engagement with the content and saves the content creators significant time.
Accelerating Success: The ROI of Efficient Enablement
To exemplify the return on investment (ROI) in time and efficiency from enablement, Keegan shared an example of onboarding 25 new employees, including sellers and operations associates.
A comprehensive virtual enablement guide for this group was created in 3-4 days, allowing them to complete their onboarding and training within two weeks. This required a limited time commitment from leadership, as the new employees could consume and follow up on online content at their own pace.
Following the two weeks, the average score of the new hires’ comfort with the technology and their roles jumped from 3.4 to between 8.5 and 8.8. This rapid adoption of technology and processes led to these new hires hitting their full quota by their second month instead of the third, a notable increase in productivity.
Keegan further explained the significant benefits of efficient enablement and taking the time to build out online enablement content:
“How much time do you save in the long run? A ton. And how much more revenue do you drive as well? A couple million. We drove 1.6 million with just ten people in 6 months.”
This example illustrates the substantial time-saving advantage of investing in the enablement process, not to mention the subsequent boost in revenue.
For startups and smaller companies, in particular, underinvesting in enablement can cause long-term slowdowns in growth. While it does require an initial time commitment, the long-term benefits of time savings, increased productivity, and higher revenues underscore the importance of an efficient enablement process. The concepts shared here apply to teams of any size, emphasizing that enablement is vital to organizational success.
Unleashing Productivity: The Transformative Power of Sales Enablement Tools
Enablement tools play a pivotal role in operational and training processes within organizations. If you’re in a leadership position, particularly in training, process building, operations, or enablement, having a content tool to track progress is non-negotiable. These tools are critical for the team’s success, especially in today’s remote working environment.
One powerful sales enablement tool is Spekit, which has repeatedly proven to be an invaluable resource. Its incorporation within business processes is essential to fostering success in operations. Keegan refers to himself as a “walking billboard” for Spekit’s just-in-time learning platform due to its effectiveness in making knowledge accessible, tracking engagement, and boosting productivity and efficiency.
Connecting your enablement tool to Notion is a powerful approach to leveraging enablement tools. This combination allows organizations to keep their knowledge base up-to-date efficiently. For instance, if you update your enablement content in Spekit, the linked content in Notion will automatically be updated. This methodology eliminates the need to update both platforms, saving substantial time and effort separately.
Keegan offered an example highlighting the significant cost savings associated with using these tools:
“The CEO of a 300-person company found that the integration of enablement and Notion eliminated the need to hire an additional enablement person, saving them the expense of an $80k to $90k role.”
This is a prime example of how the proper use of these tools can truly enable leaders to think outside the box and do more with less.
For organizations that use Notion as their Learning Management System (LMS) for task tracking or enablement, it’s important to consider interlinking these tools to keep your content up-to-date. This not only unlocks the potential of both platforms but also conserves time and money.
Sales Enablement: The Road to Success
Navigating today’s dynamic business landscape demands effective sales enablement strategies. This involves a deep understanding of audience preferences, a keen utilization of video content, and the integration of robust sales enablement tools like Spekit to serve as a hub for knowledge management and distribution.
Tailoring content to meet the distinct needs of your team can significantly enhance performance and productivity.
Instilling a culture of continuous learning also fosters self-reliance, which can lead to a thriving work environment. Tools like Spekit can amplify this, translating to substantial cost savings and increased ROI. Organizations can boost operational efficiency and drive revenue by diminishing the need for additional roles.
However, knowledge acquisition is just the starting point. Only through continuous learning, reinforcement, and repetition can that information be truly understood and retained. This sets the stage for enduring success.
It’s time for a new perspective on sales enablement. Are the team’s unique needs being met? Are the appropriate tools being leveraged to make training more effective and efficient?
With the right blend of strategies and tools, sales enablement processes can significantly drive organizational growth. Embrace the transformation and watch your team’s performance and productivity soar.
Watch the full webinar on-demand for more insights and actionable tips for optimizing your sales enablement strategies.
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