Shamaym Blog

What Can Sales Teams Do to Sell More in the Post-COVID World?

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Keeping sales teams performing at their top is harder than ever. Selling has become almost exclusively a remote activity, raising stakes in a market where both consumers and businesses buy less. A virtual meeting could be a salesperson’s only chance to make a positive impression and pique the buyer’s interest, making it more critical than ever to perform. But teams today are also more isolated than ever, stifling team members’ abilities to share knowledge, ideas, and best practices with one another. How do sales teams thrive under these conditions?

Rather than despairing, sales leaders can view the post-COVID world as an opportunity to cultivate new ways of doing things. They can embed new practices that empower their teams to move fast in the face of uncertainty and pivot quickly when needed. In fact, this isn’t just something teams should do—if they want to stay competitive, it’s something they must do. Let’s explore four main challenges that sales teams today face, and how they can use team-based learning and collaboration to overcome them.

Challenge #1:

Ineffective Meetings

Virtual sales meetings leave little room for error. If the preparation is ineffective, it won’t elicit the sense of urgency and personal rapport from the buyer that salespeople need to move a deal down the pipeline.

What can sales teams do?

The key is to automate meeting preparation with the most relevant information in front. Rather than digging through old emails, notes in the CRM, and sifting through news articles about their prospects, salespeople need a way to view all of the most useful information for their meeting in one place. That way, they can focus their preparation on reviewing the knowledge that will keep them sharp and responsive to objections or surprises.

Challenge #2:

Lack of Opportunities for Learning and Coaching

Teams who get ahead in the post-COVID world will know how to learn constantly and make never-ending adjustments. Many sales teams are ill equipped for that. Traditional learning structures used by sales teams, like QBR that lead to quarterly adjustments, move too slowly for the current market. But who has more time to dedicate to reflection?

Sales teams also lack coaching. One-on-ones between an employee and manager on deal status don’t provide enough insight to the employee—or visibility to the manager—to actually be effective. Managers tend to get more involved only when problems arise.

Finally, despite the overall decline in hiring, many sales teams are expanding to capitalize on new market opportunities. In such a fast moving market, it is more important than ever to get new hires up to speed quickly.

What can sales teams do?

To learn, coach, and get new hires up to speed, sales teams need a simple, digital platform to access each others’ experiences on the job in real-time. Salespeople, especially new hires, need to be able to instantly see their colleagues’ takeaways from meetings when they happen, so that they can pick up new skills or hone existing ones. Managers need greater visibility into their employees’ work to get the most out of discussion time in both team and one-on-one meetings.

[Want to learn more about how sales teams can use collaborative real-time learning to meet the challenges of the moment? Download the eBook: Optimizing Sales in an Uncertain World]

Challenge #3:

Suboptimal Knowledge Sharing

Salespeople are always in competition with their teammates. But competition doesn’t have to cancel collaboration. According to Gong Labs, selling teams are 258% more likely to close a deal. Sales increase when salespeople involve other content experts on their team, leading to a better buying experience for the customer.

What can sales teams do?

Instead of competing with their teammates, salespeople could all benefit from each others’ knowledge—if they had a way to access it. If one salesperson could see what their co-workers learned on the job, right as they learned it, and could immediately use those lessons to improve their own work, everyone would be better prepared to meet quotas.

Challenge #4:

Data Entry at Sales’ Expense

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, and in many cases it certainly does. But with software comes data entry. In the case of salespeople—lots of it. Research by SiriusDecisions estimates that salespeople spend 63% of their time preparing to engage with a customer, with 27% dedicated to data entry and administrative tasks.

What can sales teams do?

Rather than spending time entering data and getting nothing in return, salespeople need a system that will make their data work for them. A way for data to become more actionable, so the time they spend entering it actually serves their quotas. Shamaym’s Salesforce integration connects meeting notes and takeaways directly with Salesforce, saving salespeople time on data entry and retrieval.

By breaking down the daunting task of meeting sales targets in the post-COVID world, sales teams can begin to understand where to focus their attention and efforts. Team learning is powerful, and teams that know how to harness their combined knowledge, and turn it into action quickly, are more likely to overcome the biggest challenges of our time.