Leading the Sales Productivity Revolution with SalesU.io
Why is EdCast launching a sales ramping platform today?
One of the most precious assets a company possesses is its salespeople’s time. Analyze your salespeople’s workday. If they are not spending at least 70% of their time interacting with prospects, then there is a significant probability that your organization will under-perform on its revenue forecast. As we know, your sales team drives the new revenue that helps pays the bills and company payroll. I often say to my company’s employees and companies I meet, “Imagine how all those innovative growth plans and wonderful employee perks will fare if revenue targets are not achieved.”
Since EdCast was founded, we have believed that the learning curve is the earning curve. Some of the smartest thought leaders in learning, including Bersin by Deloitte’s Josh Bersin and Accenture’s Chief Learning & Talent Officer Rahul Varma have been quite articulate in explaining this learning equals performance/earning equation in depth at our Future Learning 2020 Summit last year.
Over the past three years, we have been fortunate to work with some incredibly talented CLOs and Learning & Development (L&D) leaders as we rolled out and implemented our Knowledge Cloud platform at visionary and fast-growing companies. We have worked with various job families, roles, functions and departments with the quest to empower them with better performance via continuous learning. In this quest, we have discovered that although the correlation between learning and earning applies to all functions and to an organization as a whole, there is one function that stands out with the most urgent needs and largest push for mission-critical ROI: the sales team.
Needless to say, making salespeople highly productive is mission critical. Failure to do this can and will lead to catastrophe, regardless of the size of a company and the moat it has in the marketplace.
With this in mind, we have been inspired to solve this hard and important problem of making sales teams productive and making this “learning equals earning” equation work better. We think of the sales team ramping problem across three dimensions, and we are thrilled to make them the three core pillars of our new SalesU.io platform:
- Contextual insights that reduce unproductive time by 30%: Sales teams are drowning in content but starving for precise knowledge and insights that can help them specifically close a deal faster. There is a deluge of collateral, playbooks and content both on the web and inside internal repositories, but why have salespeople waste time searching unproductively or using ineffective and outdated content? Based on our three years of work in perfecting our Knowledge Discovery Engine, we are excited about making content discoverable and pushed based on the context with each opportunity that a salesperson is chasing — and surfacing it right inside the CRM (Salesforce.com in our first release) with daily recent and curated insights.Sales teams can discover content they need much faster. In our experience, this capability helps cut down at least 30% of salespeople’s time and makes each interaction with prospects more meaningful, accelerating the sales cycle as a result.
- Great coaches can make the difference between success and failure: Last year, I took my family to the Himalayas and Nepal to learn what it takes to summit the gorgeous Mount Everest. I learned that no books or reading was comparable in preparing us compared to getting actual real-time insights from a Sherpa. This is not a surprise because we know that behind every winning team, there is a great coach. We know successful leaders have great mentors. Marc Benioff, a great visionary and compassionate leader in the tech-industry, discussed at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2013 how he would look up to Steve Jobs as his mentor and would go to him for advice. In designing the EdCast Knowledge Cloud, one of the first features we had created was SME (Subject Matter Expert)-based learning. With SalesU.io we have built a mobile-first experience for salespeople to perfect their pitch through feedback from coaches and mentors. We are also leveraging some cool machine intelligence technology to act as coaches and provide feedback. We think great performers in sales are not born with all the talent they need to succeed; we believe they work hard and are well-coached
- Becoming a Ninja in Sales Tools: We see salespeople struggle using at least several tools they are required to use at their company, including highly customized CRMs, Quote-to-Cash tools, etc. Just finding information from the tools and reports is becoming increasingly hard to do as these tools gets customized and configured. Last month, we had launched GuideMe.io as an in-app interactive guidance to train any person on any software or online solution in minutes. Every time a configuration changes, it is easy for administrators to create a walkthrough (guided tour) about it in few minutes, and save the frustration and unproductive time of salespeople. GuideMe.io is part of the SalesU package to provide on-demand and real-time in-app training to ramp new and existing sales teams faster.
Although we spent a huge amount of time with the best talent in Silicon Valley building this solution for sales teams, we have a beginner’s mindset, and we look forward to learning from sales leaders and sales enablement experts and their feedback, so we can iterate rapidly. With the launch of SalesU.io today , our goal is to both enhance and accelerate improvements in productivity that will have meaningful impacts on companies’ profits. Please test SalesU today — and let us know your thoughts at km@edcast.com
