Use Your Website To Educate Your Sales Team

Let’s say your website has 10,000 products. You have a sales team of 100 people & 2 product managers. How do you educate your sales team about all of those products with such a tiny resource?

Here are three stategy ideas:

Standard Sales Education Strategy

Send the product managers round all 100 people, focus on your key product ranges. This is slowest, easy to manage, not very time or cost effective, not all that effective at educating.

Average Sales Education Strategy

Get the Product Managers to write a guide to your top products, distribute them on your intranet. This is a little faster, tougher to manage & not so easy to measure (which sales people read what? where are the knowledge gaps?).

Sales Education Strategy Incorporating Your Website

Set up your website so that your sales people & product managers can share information with each other. For example, add a ’sales tips’ comments section to each product page. Set it so that this section is only visible when the site is viewed by your employees (for example, when sales people are logged in, or when the site is accessed from an internal IP). Set it up so that any of your internal employees can add to these comments.

If you don’t trust your salespeople to fill in these ’sales comments’ out of the goodness of their hearts or the love for your company, incentivise them: set up a simple rating system for comments & reward the people with the most ‘highly rated’ comments. Pull a report once a week of the number of comments per salesperson & the average rating of comments per salesperson & you have something an extra ‘qualitative’ measure for your salespeoples’ performance.

This saves time, allows the best people to educate the rest, strengthens internal relations, gives you a picture of where the knowledge lies, protects you from losing knowledge when people leave & educates your salesforce ambiently (while they’re browsing around your website).

Technorati Tags: web strategy, sales, online sales, sales training