Arming the Sales Force with a Digital Toolkit

Selling well has never been easy. And it isn’t getting any easier. To succeed, you need to arm your team with the necessary mindset, skill sets, and toolkits. Here is a list of three digital tools that you need to support your sales team.

• Digital Playbook: Your digital playbook might include your sales process, buyer personas, competitive analysis, product knowledge, and anything else you need to provide your sales force with to support their efforts. Many companies are developing this content in a digital format so that they can provide it to their sales force on an iPad or tablet. The digital format allows for images, videos, and other interactive content, making the content as engaging as it is relevant.
• Learning Management System: It isn’t easy to bring a sales force together for training. Learning Management Systems can also provide digital content, but more importantly, it can deliver it where it is needed, and exactly when it is needed. Since you can now stream video, it’s easy to have a subject matter expert speak straight into a camera. It’s also easy to use screencasts to provide walkthroughs and tutorials. You no longer have to wait to provide the sales force the content it needs when you can deliver it digitally.
• Resources and Nurture Tools: I am big on nurture tools. If you want your sales force to develop the relationships that they need, providing them with the tools they need is mandatory. White papers, case studies, videos, testimonials, and demos can all be created and stored as digital files that the salesperson can provide their dream clients at the push of a button. The important idea here is to be known and to create value before claiming any. You can’t do that if you don’t have the valuable ideas in a format that makes sharing easy for the sales force.

If I were arming a sales force with a digital toolkit, these are the three big pieces on which I would build it.

This post is sponsored by my friends at TechSmith. All opinions are mine.