How do you incorporate customer feedback and insights into sales enablement efforts?
This requires a good amount of cross-functional work, especially with your sales leaders. If you have a forum where there are weekly, monthly, or quarterly business reviews, I would request adding sections with a clear format that guides front-line leads to give you can get key insights gathered from the leads on common trends. What were the pain points/key needs/objections/drive to the next steps? This is the most scalable way of finding these out. These will help you to understand the key skills that need to be supported.
Next - tools, tools, tools. These are a bit more manual. I recommend using a call conversation recording tool, a mass outreach tool, and a content management system.
For call conversation recording, you can ask managers to recommend one "good" call and a "bad" call for your team to listen into. This doesn't give you how to make improvements, but it does give you a direction to create a framework for benchmarks of success.
For outreach and content tools, take a look at the most engaged content and cadences. In these cases, actions speak louder than words, and you can decipher what good framing and messaging look like to create a framework and benchmarks of success.
This is much easier to facilitate if you have a QA team that can create a scoresheet and report on behavioral changes. However, many teams do not have this function yet, so I would start small and focus on 6-10 calls/emails. Reporting these can really jumpstart more support and cross-functional excitement and surface any research work from your product or marketing teams' research.
Without feedback, you're building & delivering learning in a vacuum and not setting yourself up for success. To mitigate this:
- Collect feedback early & often
- Send a 5 question (or less) survey after a learning module
- Host a debrief where learners can provide topical feedback in-person (or remotely)
- Take the feedback & make meaningful changes & tweaks to your training & programs
- Repeat each time there is a significant change - better, better, never best
