Today’s post is by Mark Magnacca, president and co-founder of Allego.
These days, almost every professional sports team uses a tablet as their official playbook. This is because sports teams recognize the way we learn: We need to practice and re-learn on multiple occasions before we fully comprehend.
Having a great sales playbook, filled with the collective wisdom of your all-star reps, can be the difference between winning and losing in today’s highly competitive markets – as long as you can get your team to properly leverage it.
Al Saunders, the celebrated NFL coach, achieved staggering results throughout his career by doing anything and everything he could to get his teams to study, internalize, and fall back on the team’s playbook. There were even famous stories of him going around and secretly leaving $100 bills in the middle of each player’s copy so he could later check which ones were missing the money to know who was studying it!
Thankfully, in the world of enterprise sales, there is already the built-in mechanism of performance-based compensation to get sales reps to want to study and practice. The challenge lies in consistently generating and delivering relevant content to them in a format that will allow them to do so effectively.
YouTube Meets TED Talks
Best-in-class sales organizations are already finding that the key to being able to consistently generate and share the most relevant content – in a timely and cost-effective way – is to leverage the one technology that allows you to review your pitches, receive point-in-time coaching and feedback from managers, and even meet face-to-face with someone even if they’re a thousand miles away: video.
This has been true in the world of professional sports teams for decades as well. In fact, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady watches 17 hours of video each week – reviewing plays, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and coming up with strategies for improvement for the next big game. This process of study and review, of watching and critiquing our own performance – and that of our peers – is crucial for all of us to understand, whether we are professional athletes or salespeople.
In sales, who wouldn’t want a best practice library of up-to-date, highly relevant, and peer-generated content? Using short, bite-sized videos created by an organization’s own reps has allowed best-in-class sales teams to flourish in a way that has never been possible before. When you collaborate with the right people at the right time, you improve the odds that you will win.
Reps record a video on their phone or tablet of their best pitch for a specific product and upload it so their managers can review. Then, managers highlight the “top gun” videos the entire team will be tasked with emulating. Today’s technology makes this simple, easy, secure, and amazingly fast.
This has the effect of creating a sort of “corporate YouTube” of best practices and procedures for all the most common challenges specific to an individual company’s sales team – essentially, a self-updating, YouTube-style sales playbook filled with the kind of distilled, high-relevance content you would get with a TED Talk.
Video is the New Document
Jim Lundy, founder and CEO of Aragon Research, has said “video is the new document.” His research centers around cases similar to the one described above, as well as the overall rise of video in all facets of sales. This has led him to the hypothesis that video content growth will overtake regular content by mid-year 2018.
Sales teams are not only accelerating top-line growth by using video content platforms to better train and coach; they are using those very same tools to massively save time and T&E expenses associated with onboarding new reps and certifying reps for new product rollouts. All of this – in combination with the fact that mobile devices have made video creation easier than ever before – is contributing to widespread adoption of video technologies across sales organizations in all industries.
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