Customers sometimes ask complex questions about the product. If your field sales reps frequently need to say “I will get back to you on this”, this article might help you.

Let’s take the example of a field insurance advisor. The advisor typically gets one onboarding training. After this, she is on her own to generate leads, connect with prospects and explain products which she may not always understand completely. She gets minimal support on the field with the manager not always being accessible. In this scenario, if a customer asks a question about premium and cash-flow calculation, to which the rep does not have an immediate answer, she will most likely ask for more time. This might be a problem.

If the rep is unable to answer the customer questions on the spot, she does not come across as an expert. The customer will most likely not trust the rep if she needs to “get back” on multiple questions from the customer. A bigger drawback of not being able to answer immediately is the risk of turning a lead from warm to cold. If the rep takes a long time to get back to the customer, there is a high probability that the customer would go ahead with another product purchase or may not be interested anymore.

How does Sales Enablement help?

Sales Enablement empowers sales reps with tools to improve their productivity. It equips the reps with product information, sales skills and handy tools to become an expert in customer conversations. This in turn helps the reps to close deals faster. Sales Enablement platforms, like sharpsell, help to execute this at scale.

Here are the 6 reasons why organizations with distributed field sales team benefit from Sales Enablement platforms:‍

1. Makes lives of sales reps easier

• One platform for all needs. Sales Enablement platform caters to all needs of sales reps from onboarding, training, providing ready-to-use sales battle cards, collateral repository, calculation tools and much more.
• Ease of access. The platforms are cloud-based, which can be accessed anywhere, at any time, even on mobile devices. Some even offer offline functionality.

2. Makes sales reps more productive

• Engage with customers effectively. The platforms provide tools to customize infographics, posters etc. and share with customers to educate them
• Create and share presentations on the fly. Product presentations can be created and customized directly from the platform.

3. Can be leveraged for training and coaching

• Onboarding and training. Customized learning journeys can be created for onboarding, product training or sales training. This helps reps ramp up faster.
• One-on-one feedback. With the use of AI-powered practice role plays, reps can get feedback to improve upon presentation, pitch and objection handling.
• Self-help guides. The platforms can also be a repository of reading material and video content for reps to refer on-demand.

4. Provides insights and analytics on sales activities

• Prospecting behaviour insights. Sales Enablement can provide insights on behaviour of top sales reps, activity trends, behaviour trends by region, channel or customers.
• Activity analytics. Managers can track the instances and types of collateral and presentations shared by the reps. 

5. Helps get the best ROI on product content

• Collateral is used at scale. Collateral consistent with brand guidelines is used by all sales reps. Sales Enablement ensures that the latest versions are always updated.
• Use of Dynamic tools. Sales Enablement platforms are capable of hosting calculators which can provide ROI, customer cash flow or similar calculations to make sales conversations more effective.
• Personalization for customers. Help pitch the right product, customized for customer’s use case and needs.

6. Makes organization more effective

• Cross-functional collaboration is easy. With Marketing for new campaigns, Product team for new product launch or feature introduction and HR for training
• Easy knowledge sharing. All updates to the sales reps can be shared on the platform.

Sales Enablement has become increasingly important for field sales teams.

• In contrast to Inside sales, field sales is a black box. It is difficult to track, engage and help sales reps in the field.
• With a distributed team, training and communication take a lot of effort. Sales Enablement platforms make it easy to reach out to the reps. 

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sharpsell equips sales reps with personalized content to engage with customers and customized presentations to share with customers as per their needs. All the content is accessible through a single source - the sharpsell platform. Companies using sharpsell have seen an increase in sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.