Most companies want to improve their sales figures, but once you’ve implemented all the standard incentives, it can be tricky to know how to take it to the next level. This is where improving your sales team’s use of your LMS can pay big dividends!
Face-to-face training sessions can prove expensive and time-consuming. This is especially so if your team is dispersed across many locations and you need to cover travel and accommodation costs. That’s why many companies are turning to eLearning – and a learning management system – to support their salespeople.
7 Reasons Your Sales Team Should Use an LMS
In this post, we’re going to share 7 reasons why your sales teams should use your LMS – and how it will help them thrive.
1. Setting goals
Firstly, salespeople can work with their managers to create goals for their sales, which can then be entered into the LMS.
In an LMS, managers can then assign courses and competencies to help the salesperson achieve their sales target. By tying the goals to an end goal, the learner will be more likely to stay motivated and on track, as well as obtaining the skills they need to boost their sales in the long run.
2. Encouraging friendly competition
Gamification is becoming an increasingly popular component of blended learning programmes, and this can be a particularly effective tool for salespeople.
Introducing friendly competition in the form of leaderboards, badges, point systems or small prizes can help appeal to salespeople’s competitive streaks. Improving engagement in this way helps make them want to complete more learning activities in order to beat their colleagues and improve performance.
If you want to get your sales team to use your LMS, gamification is a great place to start!
3. Keeping track of learning activity
For salespeople, who spend a lot of time outside the office, it may be tricky to track the learning they do once they leave their desk. With an LMS, it’s possible to know exactly what everyone is doing and when.
Using xAPI enables an even wider range of learning activities to be reported back to the LMS, ensuring a comprehensive overview of a salesperson’s learning can be accessed at any time.
4. Facilitating learning on the move
Following on from the idea that salespeople are often more “mobile” than other employees is the benefit to the salespeople themselves. If they’re about to go into an important meeting, they can quickly brush up on their skills by accessing a short video/checklist/scenario on their smartphones to refresh their skills.
This refresher-style training prepares them for any situation no matter where they are, which could make the difference between winning a sale or walking away empty-handed.
5. Product knowledge training
One of the most common reasons for sales teams to use an LMS is to help keep on top of product knowledge.
When a new product line launches, salespeople need to get up to speed with the new range immediately. For geographically dispersed teams, making this information available online via the LMS means that they can take as much time as they need to learn about the products.
360 product graphics, videos of the products in use and ‘cheat sheets’ containing the key specifications means that all salespeople can become experts on the new products faster than sitting through a face-to-face session. And it’s also much easier to ensure product information will be consistent across the company.
6. Delivering content for different audiences
Not all salespeople are necessarily direct employees of a company – for instance, medical representatives may be contractors. If this is the case, you may not want non-employees to have access to the same content as employees.
LMS platforms that support multi-tenancy allow you to create separate areas of the system and provide different content for different types of user. As well as this, some companies may choose to allow the general public to explore products on the platform.
Organisations use learning platforms like Ekko to address different audience needs via the same LMS, ensuring a consistent learning experience across the board without compromising security or confidentiality.
7. Providing evidence of success
A good enterprise LMS will integrate seamlessly with sales tracking platforms, such as Salesforce, to facilitate the flow of information between the two platforms. This can help managers and learning administrators understand if a certain learning activity has contributed to a spike in sales, which is useful information for both the salesperson and the L&D department.
For instance, if Alex takes an eLearning course about cultural considerations when selling in new markets, and manages to increase their sales in new markets by 50% for the rest of the quarter, this suggests that this piece of learning has been particularly successful, and can be recommended to more salespeople across the organisation.
An LMS Your Sales Team Actually Want to Use
As a long-standing Totara Partner, we’ve helped countless organizations across the globe implement learning management systems that help meet not just learning objectives, but broader business goals.
Arrange a demo today to speak with an expert and find out what Ekko can do for your business.