FAQs

Good customer service training should teach, reinforce, and refine great customer service skills. The most effective ways to train agents on customer service skills are:

1. Storytelling
2. Shadowing
3. Practice and role play
4. Coaching

There are several steps you can take to ensure your business has a strong service culture. These include:

1. Clearly defining what great customer service means through your mission, vision, and brand promise
2. Hiring the best employees and agents who will live out this mission
3. Setting guidelines for your entire customer service team
4. Delivering customer service training to ensure agents have the skills and knowledge to support customers
5. Setting goals based on your customer service vision and principles

A customer service training manual ensures that your organization’s training program is standardized and consistent across the team. This helps customer service teams avoid discrepancies between support levels. A customer service training manual also helps teams:

1. Provide consistent customer service training for employees
2. Identify the most important customer service training topics for agents
3. Train agents quickly and effectively
4. Ensure customers are treated equally

Sales reps spend an average of 440 hours each year trying to find the right sales enablement content to share with prospects and customers. A content management system is a good fit if your organization wants to improve seller productivity by providing quick access to the latest on-brand and compliant content.

Tools are a seller’s best friend. Investing in sales tools that align go-to-market teams, enable ongoing sales training and coaching, and measure performance can help organizations scale best practices and accelerate sales cycles.

Content automation tools allow marketers to create templates for slides or one-sheeters that can be customized using data from external sources such as a CRM or database.

At the most basic level, training ensures that employees have foundational skills and knowledge they need for their roles. On the other hand, development refers to the ongoing education, training, and mentoring that helps them grow in their careers over time.

A good sales coach is not just another trainer or mentor for sellers. The job of a good sales coach is to build relationships with sellers in order to help them improve their performance over time. A good sales coach creates a safe and collaborative environment so there is trust and mutual respect between them and their sellers. Because no two sales reps are the same, it’s also important for sales coaches to mix up their coaching styles depending on the individual.

The best way to develop microlearning is to start with a lesson plan that:

1. Identifies a single learning objective
2. Uses examples from the real world
3. Includes simple text, infographics, and videos so information is easily consumable

Today’s buying process is more complex than ever. It’s important to develop sales collateral that aligns with the buyer’s journey and supports prospects as they move from stage to stage. We also suggest:

1. Assessing your current sales materials to see what’s missing
2. Talking to your sellers to understand what content is the most useful
3. Considering the buyer’s unique needs and situation
4. Looking at data and analytics to see how effective content is

A sales enablement tool such as content management software is a great way to keep sales collateral organized and easily accessible. It also tracks engagement metrics so you can see how sellers are using content, what content may be out of date, and how buyers engage with materials. 

Since 95% of purchasing decisions are directly influenced by sales collateral, it’s an important tool throughout the sales cycle. Sales collateral helps sellers and organizations build credibility, drive engagement, and close deals faster.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies help identify patterns that can lead to more intelligent business decision-making, which can lead to cost savings and increased revenue generation.

Today’s buying process is more complex than ever. It’s important to develop sales collateral that aligns with the buyer’s journey and supports prospects as they move from stage to stage. We also suggest:

1. Assessing your current sales materials to see what’s missing
2. Talking to your sellers to understand what content is the most useful
3. Considering the buyer’s unique needs and situation
4. Looking at data and analytics to see how effective existing content is

Selling your products and working with buyers online can be challenging. So, when it comes to selling virtually, we recommend these best practices in order to best engage with buyers:

1. Be prepared — know who your buyer is and where they are in their journey.
2. Deliver personalized and relevant materials.
3. Use data to see what is working.
4. Test and optimize your content over time.
5. Prepare to add value over the long haul.