The Three Ts of a Winning Sales Team

Allego’s mobile sales learning platform was recently updated to include Flash Drills and Courses features, which help reps retain and demonstrate the knowledge taught during sales lessons through flashcards, video recording options, and quizzes.

“The new Flash Drills and Courses capabilities further empower reps to take learning into their own hands, making sales learning a fun and team-wide initiative that can take place whenever and wherever reps need it most,” Yuchun Lee, Allego’s CEO and cofounder, said in a statement. “Additionally, the analytics provided in these new features give managers confidence that their reps have achieved the level of mastery they need to sell successfully.”

Mark Magnacca, president and cofounder of Allego, notes that video can be used to create a brief assignment that will help members prepare for training sessions so that when reps and coaches are finally in the same room, they can use the time for discussion rather than demonstration. He points out that brief how-to videos can be especially effective as well.

“We built the Allego platform on the premise that traditional sales training processes were outdated and too often reps were left in the dark when it came to cultivating new skills and product knowledge,” he says.

HireVue, a provider of team acceleration software, has taken a similar approach with its technology. The vendor finds that managers “spend just over 30 minutes a week coaching their teams,” according to its website. One reason for this is that they lack the skills and tools that help them plan and execute effective leadership strategies. Video, the company claims, is four times more effective than traditional learning methods in helping reps articulate the value of their products and services.

HireVue’s Coach offering is designed to help managers get their sales reps up to speed, reinforce and certify them on skills they’ve been trained to adopt, and support them with knowledge and objection handling techniques through recorded and live video, or an audio-only option that aims to simulate phone calls. The tool seeks to provide both teacher and pupil flexibility by allowing them to access the lessons, practice and review their performances, and share feedback at their convenience. Sales teams can create libraries of videos, organized by category, to be accessed and shared on demand.

3. Time: Focusing and Not Wasting It

While many salespeople avoid reaching out to contacts too early in the sales cycle, some overextend themselves. “A lot of people say you just have to make a lot of calls, and if you make a lot of calls, you’re bound to sell something,” Osborne points out. But focusing on quantity over quality can be a mistake.

A good rule of thumb is to shoot for, say, 65 calls rather than 120 calls in a day, as Osborne notes that fewer calls can result in more meaningful, in-depth, and exploratory conversations that engage prospects.

Jennifer Stanley, a partner at McKinsey and Company, agrees, noting her opposition to the commonly accepted practice of multitasking. Multitasking in a sales environment, she argues, makes each task take longer since it requires switching contexts, which leads to more errors.

“Customers tell us they are bombarded by too much contact by salespeople,” Stanley told attendees at the Sales 2.0 conference. In research by McKinsey, more than 65 percent of respondents said the contacts are annoying, regardless of whether they come in via telephone, email, chat, in person, or through another channel. “They don’t want it or need it and want more focused time,” she said, and they resent the ways in which they’re being asked to interact with companies.

“We are multitasking. Our customers are multitasking. The world is digitizing and allowing us to multitask and context-switch even more. And we are bombarded with information, and our customers are bombarded with data,” Stanley said. “It is actually not the most effective way to behave. Think about the error rates; think about the time it takes us to get things done.”

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