Sales teams need to stay one step ahead of the competition to prove that their organisation is at the forefront of knowledge and skills. Sharing properly curated content within teams helps them to continually update their learning base. Organisations need to demonstrate they are constantly learning and are drivers of innovation.
A McKinsey report found that the “key to companies’ future success will be in providing continuous learning options and instilling a culture of lifelong learning throughout the organization”. It’s vital to ensure that sales teams, as the representatives of a company, are critical thinkers, continually learning, and up to date with the most relevant information available.
To ensure that the content shared within channels is what your sales team needs and wants to see, you’ll need to ask the right questions. Setting it up correctly to start with will be key to early adoption. These are the 15 questions you should ask your target audience to discover how they currently seek, sense, and share external content. And how you can improve their experience and knowledge.
- Trends: How important is it to actively monitor industry and/or sector trends? Which trends and/or sectors? Are there any other important trends to watch?
- Sources: How do you currently stay on top of this information? Which sources do you use? Are there other sources you would like to monitor but don’t have time?
- Subscriptions: Do you subscribe to industry newsletters? Do you follow any blogs? Are there any key sites and publications you monitor? What are they?
- Competitors: How important is it to actively monitor competitors? Which ones are important? What do you want to know about them?
- Influencers: Do you follow industry influencers on LinkedIn or Twitter? Who do you follow and why?
- Groups: Are you a member of any industry groups? Which ones?
- Time: How much time do you currently spend searching and reading this type of content? How much of it is relevant?
- Quantity: Do you feel you get too much, too little, or the right amount of information currently?
- Sharing: Do colleagues share links? Who shares them?
- Researching: Does the team share the research responsibility, or do some members typically lead it? Who leads?
- Examples: Can you give me some examples of the types of content that you’ve acted on, learned from, or used to help achieve a goal?
- Information: What type of information would help you the most when prospecting, pitching, negotiating, account managing, or so on?
- Keywords: What keywords would you use if you were doing a Google search on this topic?
- Keyword Phrases: Can you give me some longer keyword phrases? For example, ‘SaaS pricing for app’, rather than ‘pricing’.
- Benefits: Would your team benefit from regular updates on best practices in, for example, pricing, social selling, pitching, or presenting, and so on?
Once you have the answers to your questions, you’ll be in a much better position to source the information that will make a difference to your sales team. Getting it right initially will go a long way to ensuring team members buy into the process.
Make sure the people in your organisation stay ahead of the competition. Get in touch now to find out how Anders Pink can help you with content sharing and curation.