I want you to pause for a quick second, look at the phone on your desk at the office and then grab your flashy smartphone. I’m guessing the manufacturers are likely to be companies like Polycom, Cisco, Avaya, Samsung or Apple.
Now, answer these two questions for me, please:
Did these companies train you on how to use their phones for effective cold calling? Or Did you go to a subject matter expert to learn strategies and tactics to help you with this important part of sales outreach?
I’m guessing it’s the latter. And right now you may be wondering what point I’m trying to drive.
Social Selling – The Bare Minimum Training Option
It’s interesting to see some companies who choose to receive Social Selling training from a social software provider. Here are the immediate disadvantages with this approach:
1. The training is biased and one-directional (at best). After all, why would the software provider show you possibly better ways of achieving a goal outside of their platform?
2. Training is limited: Social Selling is a methodology and an ecosystem of different products, practices and processes. The breadth and depth required to generate pipeline & revenue is beyond any single software product.
3. Training that doesn’t encapsulate practices and routines are doomed from the start. This training is called a massive data dump!
Shortchanging Your Sales Team
If you’re a sales, marketing or sales enablment leader reading this, obtaining Social Selling training from a software vendor, then, will barely scratch the surface.
As well-intentioned as you are, the result will be simple: you’ll shortchange your sales team. At the end of the day, you must provide a simple way to learn, contextualize and practice the learnings to produce one thing: adoption. It begins with the right mindset followed by the proper skill-set and then equipping your sales team with the proper toolkit.
Ask yourself, why are you spending your company’s time and financial resources to invest into training that really won’t have any results.
It’s simple; you wouldn’t do this.
Training Is Above & Beyond One Software Platform
As mentioned above, Social Selling is a compilation of different products, practices and processes. The ability to weave these together quickly, with the goal of generating pipeline and revenue, should be your goal.
When receiving training from one software vendor, you severely limit the potential of your sales team. The results of learning in a silo like this are quite obvious.
The Bottom Line
Social Selling training is always a good thing. However, if you’re in for a penny, you may as well be in for the pound.
Investing in training that won’t achieve adoption just isn’t worth your while.
I’m sure you’ll agree that the time we require from sales professionals is sacrosanct. We all owe it to them to provide something valuable and proven that can be applied to generate more pipeline and revenue.
This is why Social Selling software providers can’t provide knowhow and the reason why phone manufacturers don’t provide cold calling training.
So, what are your thoughts? Tweet me @AmarSheth to let me know or connect with me on LinkedIn.
