When sales messaging is delivered through a video role play platform, salespeople will no longer look at it once and forget it in the heat of a sales call. If they are required to video record themselves delivering the sales message, they will get the practice they need to internalize it, especially when they practice six times before hitting send. But while the video role play delivery platform will ensure that salespeople can deliver the sales message, it cannot ensure that the message will increase sales.
To increase sales, your messaging must help salespeople to articulate value. According to a survey of sales leaders, the number one hindrance to salespeople achieving quota is their inability to articulate value. That’s ahead of both broken sales processes and poor sales skills. Customers agree: Only 34% of the executive buyers surveyed by Gartner felt that salespeople did a good job of communicating business value. And 70% of executive buyers said that the best way to articulate value is for salespeople to share customer stories.
To execute this strategy, management should collect and record the top five stories used by the sales team’s star performers to close common customer value gaps. Because these stories have been proven to work in the field, these best practice videos will be highly credible with sales.
The benefits of this approach are clear: Higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and higher margins.
How To Implement This Strategy
This method should be easy to put into practice. You’re only asking salespeople to share one or more 90-120 second stories in a meeting. That’s less than 3% of a 60-minute meeting.
But how often has sales messaging been created, only to have it never used by the sales team? After you collect the top five stories, you might wonder how you are going to ensure that each member of the team adapts the story to their local market and internalizes it. If you send the stories out to the sales team, won’t most salespeople just look at the story once, and forget to use it during a sales call?
You could require salespeople to deliver the story to their sales manager. But will he or she do the necessary coaching? If a sales manager manages 10 salespeople, these coaching calls could take 5 hours (allowing time for phone tag, interruptions, and chit chat). With the pressure to achieve quota, will the sales managers really dedicate 25 hours to teaching their teams to deliver these stories?
There is no guarantee that salespeople will actually use the sales messaging that’s given to them. This is because we don’t always do what’s best for us. We all know, for instance, that diet and exercise are key to healthy weight maintenance. And yet, two-thirds of Americans are overweight.
Luckily, our frequent unwillingness to do what we should no longer means that salespeople will ignore great value messaging. Management can now send these value stories through a video role play platform. This platform will track which salespeople practice, and which managers teach to these best practice value stories. With practice and coaching, marketing can ensure that the whole sales team is able to articulate value like the top 10%.
Video role play companies include Accelerate HireVue, CommercialTribe, LearnCore, TrainingCloud, Allego, and Rehearsal VRP.
The Five Step Process
Here’s how to implement this sales acceleration strategy in less than three months:
- Marketing, sales leaders, and Insight Demand will meet to determine the top five customer value gaps, and who the best people are to deliver these stories on video.
- Insight Demand will help capture the stories, train salespeople to adapt the stories to their market, and train managers to coach their salespeople to deliver their stories effectively.
- One of the five best practice value story videos will be sent to sales on a bi-monthly basis through one of the video role play platforms.
- Sales will then be asked to adapt the story to their local market. Once completed, the software will ask the salespeople to press “record” on their iPhone, tablet, or computer. They will then video capture the story so that their manager can provide coaching.
- Once the salesperson hits “send,” the manager will receive the recorded story in his or her dashboard. He or she can then provide written comments below the video as they come in, or send comments all at once. So a sales manager could watch, for instance, 10 of her salespeople’s stories in fewer than 20 minutes. In a further 10 to 20 minutes, she could provide comments from her iPhone.
Because salespeople record themselves an average of six times before they hit “send,” they will get the practice they need to internalize the stories. That way, they can use them in the heat of a sales call and win more business.