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Picture this scenario: your company has successfully raised its next round of funding. With plans to massively fuel growth, you begin investing in your sales team by implementing a highly customized CRM and grow your sales team from 15 to 150.
Fast forward one year into a million-dollar CRM investment and there’s just one problem—virtually no one is using it! And of those who are, few seem to be using it properly. As frustration grows from burning money and resources, your CEO suggests pulling the plug on the whole program—and you seriously consider it.
The harrowing thing about this story is that it’s actually pretty common in today’s world of hyper-growth and urgency to fill a sales team with rockstar reps and perfectly tailored, streamlined tools. Companies often spend huge amounts of time and money trying to enable their sales teams with the best platform, just to have their efforts meet lackluster results.
While some place blame on the technology not being the right fit for their team, failed digital adoption typically occurs when a team doesn’t fully understand how to use the digital adoption platform to benefit their organization.
The challenge: outdated processes make transformation hard
While there are many challenges around sales platform implementation, one of the biggest is making sure everyone on your sales team uses it to its fullest potential—second only to getting people to actually use it. It isn’t that platform X has better features than platform Y or vice versa; rather, it’s about how the tools are used in a way to maximize their effectiveness and make them worth the investment.
The challenge is simply that digital transformation is hard , especially around sales platform enablement. The nature of these challenges often doesn’t reveal itself until after implementation. Thankfully, there is a solution, and it runs contrary to the way businesses have operated training programs for the past several decades. But before you can supercharge your enablement programs and boost your sales platform adoption, it’s important to first understand what’s really at stake.
The stakes: more than what meets the eye
In our scenario earlier, the ""on-paper"" stakes are about one year of the team’s time and a million-dollar investment. And that’s not even mentioning the opportunity cost of those resources or the potential revenue that your company may never realize. If they were to pull the plug and cut their losses, they’d have to factor in the time and money involved in finding and implementing a new sales platform.
What’s really at stake is the future growth of your employees and ultimately, your company. Without properly enabling a sales team to use their CRM and other platforms, there’s no way that you’ll be able to grow as you should. This spells disaster in the form of lost revenue opportunities and potential decline.
In short, the sales platform you choose will be the backbone of how your company runs, and making sure your team knows how to properly use it is incredibly important.
The solution: learning in the flow of work
If you’ve experienced a failed digital adoption with your sales enablement platform , you’re not alone. The biggest problem with implementing a new sales platform is getting people to use it in a way that benefits your business, which makes training the biggest blocker to success. Traditional corporate training usually occurs in classrooms, webinars, and PowerPoint presentations, but this tired method leads to the dreaded forgetting curve .
Rather than set employees up for failure from the start with ineffective training, look for a sales enablement platform that offers training content within the application or tool itself. Users don’t have to rely on memory to answer questions and can learn by doing rather than listening or watching a tired presentation.
The winning strategy for sales platform enablement
Choosing and implementing a sales platform is a high-stakes decision that can have a lasting impact on your company. The main challenge to overcome is achieving effective adoption, which is often ineffective with traditional corporate training. Instead, the solution should enable teams through learning that takes place in the flow of work and in the context of their day-to-day, which allows them to see how the things they’re learning actually apply and support broader company processes and strategies.
As for the earlier scenario, that’s actually the situation Spekit CEO Melanie Fellay found herself in a few years ago, as she recounts in our new eBook, The Future of Digital Adoption is Digital Enablement . After experiencing a failed Salesforce implementation, she found the inspiration for Spekit. With her co-founder, Zari Zahra, they began their journey of creating the most successful digital enablement platform.
Today, Spekit empowers people and companies to unlock the power of their sales platforms and truly enable their teams to do their best work. To see Spekit in action, sign up for a demo today!
