When the success of your sales organization hinges on every team member having the most up to date knowledge about your products or services, as well as having the right skills to move prospects all the way through the funnel to close sales, your sales training strategies are everything.

For most organizations, sales training relies on a wide arsenal of resources that includes instructor-led skills training workshops, detailed product training manuals, lengthy process documents, full-day seminars, role-play scenarios, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and more.

And while all of these sales training methods are effective at disseminating information and skills to your sales team, they aren’t always helpful when reps are in the field — which is a problem, because that’s when they need them the most.

Simply put, your people can’t remember everything. Studies have shown that just 30 minutes after a training session, people will remember only 58% of the material covered. That figure drops to 35% after a week. And after 6 months, recall of the information covered in a training is only 10%.

So if you’re not providing your reps on-demand access to revisit all of your training content, whether it was a live training event or not, you’re not giving them all of the tools they need to be successful.

It’s a problem that hurts their productivity — and your bottom line.

Just look at these stats if you’re not convinced:

• 1 in 3 sales is lost due to lack of preparation. For a typical $1B company, that can result in $100M in lost sales opportunities.
• Sales reps lose 8 hours a week working inefficiently. That’s an entire day they spend looking for information and grasping at straws to get answers from others in the organization, when they should be able to find it with a simple search.
• With online sales training, your sales team can save up to 35% of the time it normally spends training employees on-site.

But without a better archive of online sales training materials — that’s easily searchable and accessible from anywhere on a mobile device —  your sales force just isn’t as efficient or as effective as it could be.

Building A Mobile, Searchable, Online Sales Training Library

Nearly every organization has a library of documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, and slide decks used to educate and inform their sales organizations. But when it comes to classroom training and in-person seminars, these events are often one-and-done —  sales reps rarely have access to on-demand recordings to review later.

Worse, even when training activities are recorded, specific details and key moments recorded in large video files can often be hard to find after the fact. That’s for two reasons:

• First, because large videos like these end up scattered across locations like your corporate WAN or LMS (or even worse, shared privately on YouTube), where they’re difficult to find in the first place.
• And second, because even if a rep can find a video, they’ll still have to hunt and peck through the video’s timeline to try and stumble into the relevant information they needed.

But there’s an easier way.

From ensuring you have a digital record of all your sales trainings to making all of your sales training materials searchable and accessible from one centralized location, building an online sales training library can help ensure your reps are as productive and informed as possible.

Here are 3 steps to building a centralized online sales training library for your organization:

1.  Bolster e-learning by recording live training events.

Not only is e-learning more convenient for most sales reps, but also it can help significantly reduce training costs for your company. But that doesn’t mean that in-person training events and seminars aren’t valuable — in fact, they’re likely some of your best resources. So put them to work!

Prioritize recording instructor-led training so you can make it possible for sales reps to access on-demand when it fits their schedules, or to review when they need the information the most. That just what Ernst & Young did, for example — their Learning & Development team took the 2,900 hours of in-class training they were delivering and used it to create 700 hours of web-based learning, 200 hours of distance learning and 500 hours of classroom instruction. By shifting to e-learning, they cut training time by 52% and costs by 35%.

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2. Centralize online sales training materials in a searchable library.

With digital sales training resources now available in virtually every format from text-based documents to streaming video files, you need a knowledge base that can handle any type of file. Of course, by now managing and searching text documents has become so easy we usually don’t even think about it. But most solutions for learning and content management, such as Cornerstone, Sharepoint, or even Salesforce, just aren’t built for making video searchable.

Related Reading: The 5 Biggest Challenges To Training With Video

 

The simplest way to build a searchable online video library for all of your sales training content is to integrate a video content management system, or video CMS, with your preferred platform for sharing other knowledge documents. With an integrated video CMS, you make it possible to search and stream your video-based sales knowledge from directly inside Salesforce, Sharepoint, Cornerstore, or any other system you’re using to share information as a team or company.

 

 

A video CMS, such as Panopto, enables your reps to search every word spoken and shown within your videos, so they can jump to the exact moment when a relevant topic comes up inside the video. It makes it possible to stream a video just like you would on YouTube, without tying up network bandwidth downloading the entire file first. And most importantly, a video CMS works with your existing user authentication solution to keep all of your sensitive training content secure.

Related Reading: The Secret To Building Your Own Video Training Library

 

3. Ensure sales reps can access everything from their mobile devices.

It’s a step that’s easy to overlook as today we simply expect to be able to access everything from our smartphones or tablets. But it couldn’t be more important to check and make sure that all of your online sales training materials, whether it’s a PDF or a video, are viewable on a mobile device.

Be sure to select a knowledge and document sharing platform that makes content accessible from mobile devices, and also choose a video CMS that automatically transcodes and optimizes videos so they can be streamed with just a click from any device. This ensures that your sales reps can get instant answers to their questions or find quick advice on selling techniques as they are preparing for meetings out in the field.

Panopto Can Help Your Sales Organization Improve Productivity

From recording and capturing training events to searching and sharing on-demand sales training videos on any device, Panopto is an all-in-one video platform that can help sales teams spread knowledge and work more efficiently.

If you’re ready to try video for sales enablement at your company, contact our team for a free, full-featured trial of our video platform.

Or download our white paper, 18 Ways To Improve Sales Enablement With Video, to start learning more about how video can support sales training and sales enablement in your organization.

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