These are trying times for the overall business community. The rise in interest rates has slowed economic activity, with subsequent budget cuts targeting sales and marketing departments in particular.
You've probably already heard how digital adoption platforms (DAPs) like Usetiful can boost sales and marketing for your product. But what about using the software to help your sales and marketing employees?
In this article, we'll show how you can use a digital adoption solution like Usetiful to drive better outcomes for not just your product and your users but also your employees.
 |
| Image by our-team on Freepik |
Sales reps and time to productivity (TTP)
If you're familiar with digital adoption tools like Usetiful, you'll already understand concepts like time to value (TTV). In short, it's a metric that measures how long it takes a user to get value from your product. Another way you can look at this is how long it takes someone to engage with your product and gain a return on investment.
There is a related term in the concept of employee acquisition called time to productivity (TTP). It measures how long an employee takes to make a consistent and meaningful impact within your organization.
The RAIN group is a well-known sales training organization. They estimate that onboarding a new sales professional has the following timelines.
Three months: Ready to interact with new buyers
Nine months: Competent at selling
15 months: A top performer
These figures chime loosely with a Gallup report that suggests it takes a new employee around a year to become productive.
Now, you'll also know that hiring new employees takes time too. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) suggests that in our current business environment, the time to fill a vacancy is an average of 44 days.
Add in the fact that long-standing research suggests that 33% of new hires leave their job within the first three months, and a real problem emerges: How do you ensure your recent sales and marketing hires bed in, stay, and become valuable, productive team members?
There are several different factors involved, such as good management, company culture, communication, and realistic explanations. However, one essential and often overlooked element is ensuring your new hires know how to use their work tools. And that's where your digital adoption solution comes in.
Let’s explore five areas where you can use your digital adoption platform to improve outcomes for your sales and marketing teams.
#1. Onboarding new hires
Starting a new job involves learning many new things, including workflows and software. Typical sales and marketing software stacks include applications like:
Featured-packed Customer relationship management (CRM) software
Scheduling software
Content management systems (CMS)
Lead generation tools
Reporting software
Various communication tools
PPC ad software
That's a lot of individual pieces of software to master. But it’s not just that. Your teams also need to understand how your company fuses these parts together to achieve their unique workflow.
Digital adoption platforms are perfect for employee onboarding. You can use applications like Usetiful to build interactive product tours, tooltips, and checklists for 3rd party software so your sales and marketing team can get up to speed quickly by learning while they use your tools.
Learning by doing helps users retain information. It also boosts employee engagement. However, more crucially, it reduces time to productivity, meaning your sales and marketing teams can get out there generating revenue and making a return on investment.
Another great benefit of using a digital adoption solution is that it reduces employee training time and costs.
Good employee onboarding experiences are vital if you want to retain new hires, particularly in roles with high turnover, like sales and marketing. Some statistics suggest that 69% of employees will stay for at least three years if they have a great onboarding experience. In an era where remote and hybrid work is on the rise, digital adoption tools are an excellent way to ensure your new hires hit the ground running.
Read this article to learn more about what DAPs can do for employee onboarding.
#2. Teaching sales and marketing about your product
We mentioned earlier that it takes new sales reps about three months before they're ready to get out there and interface with prospects. There are several reasons for this, one of the most significant being that they fully understand your product with enough fluidity to explain it to others.
Your sales and marketing team can read about your product. They can memorize all the technical specifications and use cases and even pick up a sense of your target audience and their industry-specific wants, needs, and concerns. But unless they know how all of these factors come together within your product, they will struggle to translate the benefits of your solution.
Again, digital adoption platforms are an excellent way to get your new and existing hires proficient within your product. They can learn how all the features and functions work, which will help them to get into your customers' shoes.
Of course, it's not just new hires that benefit from product training. Your entire sales and marketing team can get more comfortable with your software, meaning they know it inside out and stay up to date on whatever exciting new features you implement.
#3. Boost learning and development for your revenue generation teams
Employee learning and development (L&D) are essential. It's not just that prioritizing in-work training results in a more well-rounded and productive workforce; it's also a key driver in employee engagement and retention.
Teaching your sales and marketing teams new tricks isn't straightforward. A lot of employees find training days a bit of a drag. One of the big reasons for this is that training programs lack the individualized training required to make an impact.
Digital adoption platforms like Usetiufl can solve these issues by offering tailored, cross-platform training that makes learning engaging and even fun. In short, the software is versatile to serve the different ways employees learn.
What's more, you can also use analytics in the form of Usetiful Reports to keep updated on how each employee is doing and who needs extra help. This data helps improve your learning and development materials and maximize their effectiveness.
For further, in-depth reading, read this article about how DAP can help bring your learning and development efforts to the next level.
#4. Pursue sales digitization initiatives
The explosion of MarTech tools and better analytics have helped businesses better understand their customers and make more accurate data-driven decisions.
Data analysis tools, aided by ML and AI, are one of the most significant parts of these advances. Digitizing your sales operations has many advantages, from offering users greater personalization to ensuring your marketing messaging is optimized until it's effective.
More firms are turning to digitization because it helps them with hiring, training, employee management, and resource allocation. However, its true value is assisting teams to develop customer-centric outreach.
Despite digitization's proven track record, businesses fail to implement it correctly for one of three reasons:
A) Slow progress
B) Limited employee buy-in
C) Lack of sustainability
Good employee onboarding, training, and learning and development can all boost your digital transformation. It ensures employees are competent users of your new tools and can quickly get on board with the changes. When you have these elements in place, it makes it far easier for employees to gain the momentum that translates into a sustainable, long-term cultural change.
A digital adoption solution can help achieve these aims.
#5. Drive pre-sales with automated product demos
Another great way to help your sales and marketing teams is to use interactive product demos for your product. There are two huge benefits to automated product demos:
They save your reps time that they can use for high-value prospects
You can use them to generate warm leads for your agents to convert
Interactive product demos allow you to reach potential buyers 24/7. That alone can be enough to get a steady stream of purchases. But when you pair it with your sales team, who can follow up on hot leads, you can have a comprehensive selling machine.
We built Usetiful to help users get the most from their digital products. Instead of needing to watch videos or read documents, they can jump right into the software and benefit from the guidance of a step-by-step tour that shows them how to get value from your software. This solution supports your sales and marketing team by lightening their load.
Final thoughts
Sales and marketing are essential departments for your business. But if you want your revenue teams to run well, they need a little help. Digital adoption platforms like Usetiful can help your sales and marketing teams by onboarding new hires, improving learning and development, and even assisting them with lead generation, sales, and developing high-level product familiarity for your product.
Digital adoption tools can do much more than just onboarding and activating your user base. They can also form a critical part of a culture of learning, development, and support that enhances employee engagement and satisfaction.