As your sales reps are customer-facing employees, they are essential assets for converting prospects and forging meaningful customer relationships. They are some of your most vital employees.
That’s why it’s critical they prepare thoroughly for sales meetings. Otherwise, they might let many sales opportunities slip through their fingers. Consequently, their failure to hit the necessary sales quotas could cost your business a lot in terms of wasted time and resources and lost revenue.
Are you losing sleep over your sales reps’ constant unpreparedness? Are you tired of looking at your low conversion rates? Are you eager to get your sales and revenue up?
If your sales reps keep showing up unprepared to meetings with prospects, they may be hurting your entire business. But let’s see how they might be doing it and touch on a few notable stats that might shed some light on what to do to springboard your team to success.
Read more about How to Begin Your Sales Presentation →
According to Harvard Business Review, 71% of sales reps say that meetings with prospects are often unproductive and inefficient. That’s primarily because they feel unprepared for sales meetings.
They need to keep downloading and redownloading sales collateral to access the latest content. They need to switch around different file formats or different devices.
Many sales reps even need to keep tabs on various communication platforms to learn about the latest content updates and where to find them. According to Kapost, 65% of sales reps struggle to find relevant marketing content to show or send to prospects.
One reason is having to jump through hoops to locate relevant content because of lack of resources to centralize content. Another reason is being unable to answer prospects’ questions because the content is in dire need of an update.
Either way, their hands are tied, and they can’t provide real value to prospects.
It’s no wonder they feel unprepared - because they are. Would you feel like a professional ready to seize the day and close deals if you worked with scattered sales collateral and outdated content? Didn’t think so.
When sales reps rely on outdated and difficult-to-find content, they lose trust and improvise. Why should they bother sticking to the brand when there doesn’t seem to be any consistency, integrity, and improvement?
As their perception of how much other departments can help decreases, they collaborate less and minimize their use of other tools.
We don’t need to remind you of the consequences. The marriage of sales and marketing is a match made in heaven, so you need to make it work. If they don’t get along, they can’t create value, improve customer experiences, and generate more revenue.
Read more about Improving Sales Readiness By Aligning Your Sales Teams →
When sales reps work with scattered sales collateral, many resort to creating presentations on their own and improvising during meetings. What happens then? They go off-brand and even use different brand messaging and tone. They wing it and hope for the best.
However, that can lead to brand deterioration and poor buyer experiences.
Showell is an intuitive sales enablement platform for empowering and aligning sales and marketing teams. It can help you organize your sales collateral in one centralized place that your sales reps can access anytime and anywhere.
Say goodbye to outdated content because our tool’s intelligent push-update functionality that lets your marketing team send automatic, real-time content updates.
Your sales reps can access them online and offline and always present on-brand content aligned with the overall messaging. They can show up to meetings well-prepared to engage prospects and provide a seamless, personalized buyer experience every time.
Each update replaces the old version across devices, and all users receive instant notifications on the latest changes.
Showell will help your sales team feel prepared for meetings and portray confidence when dealing with prospects. It will increase their motivation, collaboration, and job satisfaction, thus making them better salespeople.
You can track their performance and content usage as well, while your marketing team can track content consumption and prospect interest. Armed with that information, you can make data-based decisions for content improvement, higher engagement, and better employee training.
Learn next:
7 Types of Sales Enablement Content You Need to Close More Deals →
Top Metrics to Measure the Impact of Your Sales Enablement Content →
3D and AR in Sales: 3 Real-World Use Cases That Will Blow Your Buyers’ Minds →