Danielle is a journalist turned content marketer who’s spent the greater part of her career building marketing and content strategies at early-stage B2B tech companies. Based in New Orleans, you can find her at a concert, Take Paws animal shelter, or eating her weight in crawfish!
Good morning to everyone except the RevOps and enablement teams still asking their sales reps to:
Traditional software training isn’t cutting it. Especially when it pulls sales reps away from conversations that drive company revenue and growth. 🚀
Many RevOps and enablement teams forget to think about opportunity cost. Every minute that sales reps have to spend learning how to use Salesforce, Outreach, Gong, LinkedIn, etc. is a minute they can’t spend learning how to:
Learning how to use software is a distraction from all of those things—and countless others.
But software is, admittedly, the gateway to selling. And when sales reps don’t know how to use all the tools in their tech stack to the fullest or successfully complete core processes, everyone (including RevOps) loses.
We’ve tried to solve the headache of software process adoption in various ways over the years.
While there’s a place for each of the methods below, none have successfully eliminated the biggest sources of friction…or done much to improve the status quo.
⚠️ Sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training
🫠 87% will forget what RevOps and Enablement showed them within a month
☔ 66% of sellers say they’re drowning in solutions designed to make them more productive
Let’s take a closer look at what hasn’t worked to date.
First there was classroom training. Before we realized that pulling reps away from core selling activities to absorb (often extraneous) training wasn’t the best move, we used to:
What goes without saying? They weren’t paying attention, and they didn’t remember.
The rise of the Knowledge Base solved five challenges of in-person software training:
But creating a supposed “single source of truth” for people to reference previously documented processes created a new set of problems.
If you asked Sales, they’d tell you knowledge base content was hard to find, digest, and/or trust. If you asked Operations and Enablement, they’d tell you it didn’t matter how helpful or accurate their SOPs were—sellers simply didn’t want to go looking for it. 🤷
Microlearning, an approach delivered by Learning Management Systems, took enablement by storm after it became clear that sellers had 1) a very short window of tolerance for software training, and 2) even less patience for searching for answers in folders of resources.
By chunking key information into 10-15 minute videos and sending sellers an email a day, microtraining made incremental improvements. But in the end? The engagement stats still weren’t there.
Even the most motivated sellers quickly lost interest in context switching to watch long videos about questionably relevant topics and reading daily emails with how-to instructions that could rarely be applied in the moment.
So if none of the three most popular examples of traditional software training really work—what repeatedly does? Something else entirely.
If you truly want to help more sales reps master their craft and get on the plane to Cabo, you need a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP).
DAPs work in stark opposition to the traditional approach to software training—which expects sales reps to memorize processes or break flow to find answers. Instead, DAPs take an employee-first approach by helping sellers learn software while they use it.
This concept is called Real-Time Enablement (RTE).
By enabling sellers asynchronously and in real-time with a DAP, RevOps and enablement teams can:
👉 Stop pulling reps out of the flow of work for mandatory training
😍 Tell them they don’t have to read about, watch, or remember software processes
🙏🏾 Embed instructions at sellers’ fingertips so they can use essential tools without switching tabs, searching for knowledge, or asking for help
💪🏻 Empower reps to adopt processes perfectly every time
🏆 Flip the data entry script to “gold in, gold out”
And most importantly? RevOps and enablement teams can help sellers free up more time to focus on developing what matters most: sales expertise. 🌟
