Jaroslav Bělehrad, Global Head of HR
3 min read
- The company educates the sales force through marketing and provides the messaging and materials to sell its products or services effectively.
- Even as it represents the product to potential buyers, the sales force also shares best practices among its own members.
- Salespeople share what they’ve learned in the marketplace with the company’s development and marketing teams to fuel product growth and message refinement.
- Development teams consult with sales to validate the features and functionality of new products.
- Of course, salespeople need to know everything about pricing, discounting, and deal creation—everything it takes to close a solid deal.
Sales enablement software allows sales teams to consolidate and manage all materials and information from a central web location. These solutions enable your sales force to access and share resources with ease and on the go.
If a company has an endless supply of dedicated salespeople and an equally big stable of brilliant, hard-working product developers– plus a great marketing department and all the time in the world for them all to kick back and compare notes—cool!
But that’s often not the case. Even in those peak scenarios when companies have big budgets and big meetings, everyone hangs out, new products get introduced, and training takes place along with eating, drinking, and catching up, it still doesn't guarantee that the entire force is aligned on the product messaging or is well-armed to sell the product when it hits the marketplace.
LEARNING ON YOUR LAPTOP OR IN YOUR POCKET
A solution that helps teams across departments and a sales force spanning across continents get aligned on how to sell a product best is sales enablement software.
We developed Clerbo as a tool to help HR departments streamline hiring and employee onboarding practices. When Clerbo fulfilled its role as an onboarding tool with ease, we realized that there were (and are) many more ways the technology could be used.
On the HR side, the use cases have multiplied fast to provide a way to re-board employees after parental leave, facilitate employee training across a company, or track employee development milestones.
After some playing around, we discovered that Clerbo is an excellent tool for delivering microlearning courses and snackable learning modules via smartphone or on your laptop. It also provides a reliable review and testing process to make sure that lessons stick.
With Clerbo, there’s a built-in learning cadence that presents new material, reviews it, and tests for mastery in a learning loop that can be repeated until proficiency happens.
Because you’re the only person taking the training, the lesson progresses at a speed you’re comfortable with. Lessons can be revisited until the material presented is firmly stored in your memory and installed in your mental toolbox.
There’s no racing to keep up with other course-takers and no boredom waiting for your fellows to catch up. You, the student, can pick the best time and place to study and the right time to take the final quiz. The sales enablement software is working to make your product learning easier, and your sales call more effective.
The goal of sales enablement is to make sure that everyone whose job it is to sell a product understands what it is, what it does, the marketplace it lives in, how to use your sales assets, who the competitors are, and how to differentiate your product offering from theirs.
It’s important to speak the same language as your prospect and understand their pain points. A big part of selling successfully is knowing what questions to ask, what objections to address, and what cases to make.
The Clerbo interface and the information it delivers are both your instructor and your ally as you learn what you’re selling, the benefits it delivers, and the nuts and bolts of the transaction after you make the sale. It introduces you to your sales assets and allows your team to track your progress as you master them and introduce the new product into the marketplace.
HOW TO FORMAT AND DELIVER SALES ENABLEMENT ASSETS
Example from Y Soft's Marketing Department.
Ben Fitzwilliams, Former Sales Enablement Manager, Y Soft:
“I am clearly a Clerbo advocate, given that this is my 2nd statement on how this solution has improved my roles within Y Soft. Back in 2019, I was employed as a Coronial into Y Soft. Corona made sure I never made it to the head office in Brno for the 2-week-long customary onboarding meetings. Instead, Clerbo provided courses for me to become a Y Softer. Online meetings with new colleagues were booked, product information was digested, and training courses passed all from the luxury of my kitchen table.
Changing roles to the Sales Enablement Marketing lead in Y Soft, I looked to the Clerbo platform to help expand its use, not just in onboarding new employees but also in helping colleagues with continued education about new products introduced into our portfolio".
In April 2022, Y Soft Marketing introduced its first venture using Clerbo to help launch Dispatcher Paragon Cloud. Learn all about that in part 2.
