Increasing Seller Performance to Outperform in 2021

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year where the holidays are upon us and sales leaders are planning their revenue attainment strategies and the enablement tools to help sales hit their 2021 goals.

There are literally thousands of sales enablement tools designed to help salespeople be more effective. With the impact of the Pandemic, priorities have shifted on many fronts. Communications and sales team training continues to be a major part of enablement strategies. There are many ways to deliver training; the traditional class room setting where it is hard to get adoption and measure outcomes. Microlearning is quickly becoming the number one choice for company’s because it is deemed the most effective form of training and retention rates are 17% more effective than other training approaches.1 This coupled with real-time communications will help sales teams achieve best-in-class in 2021 and beyond.

The Gig Economy Group has applied AI to translate microlearning that delivers short 5-10-minute practice sessions in bite-sized modules via mobile devices. It includes real-time recommendations for what’s next. It’s designed for quick, just-in-time learning. If a rep needs to learn their company’s best practices for competing against a competitor, microlearning can help develop the skills that top-tier performers use to convert, so they are armed and prepared before a call.

These rapid sales team trainings come with the added benefit of greatly reduced development costs and greatly increased speed of development and deployment. Those companies whose microlearning platforms allow for an easy way to create, update, and deploy microlearning modules without IT are the ones that will win big in microlearning.

If your sales organization is looking to achieve top-tier performance in 2021, the Gig Economy Group is pleased to introduce its AI guided team coaching platform where you can choose from a library of preconfigured microlearning modules called PlayStreams™ or you can create your own sales training modules with our powerful PlayStream™ Configurator App. No longer do you need to spend weeks to develop a “Playbook.” There is no need for IT involvement as the Configurator App is simple and it’s easy to create, update, and deploy targeted, custom PlayStreams™.

It would be our pleasure to demonstrate the capabilities of our microlearning platform so you can see the power of PlayStreams™ and the ease with which you can quickly create targeted, just-in-time performance modules to help your sales teams to not only hit the road running, but to exceed their revenue goals in 2021.

Our experienced team is comprised of leaders who have delivered sales transformation projects that delivers best-in-class performance. The Gig Economy Group’s Digital Engagement Frameworks starts with an assessment with small steps to big impact.

We would love to learn more about your efforts and share some experiences that have delivered adoption of new practices that lifted sales teams to top-tier performance. From the entire Gig Economy Group, we wish you the very best this holiday season.

Best regards,

Dave Toole, CEO
The Gig Economy Group

dave@gigeconomygroup.com

408-482-9854

1EdApp.com

The Value of PlayStreams™ – Targeted Sales Training Apps

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The value of these PlayStreams™ are seen in the substantial lift in sales performance* that sellers gain once they have practiced how to message and engage with buyers.

For those of us in sales leadership roles, we know the minefields where new or inexperienced sellers get caught—or blown out of the water on a deal. For this, we are offering three of our best-performing PlayStreams™ to select sales leaders on a limited basis. They are Cross-sell/Up-sell, Win/Win, and Defining Your Perfect Prospect Profile. Download Now!

Here are use cases for each of the PlayStreams™.

Cross-sell/Up-sell. Sr. management mandates that salespeople cross-sell and up-sell; they want sellers to penetrate new accounts with their latest products. However, reps are comfortable selling existing products to existing customers—the easiest sale.

This PlayStream™ describes how AI-enabled technologies can help sellers become confident and competent at this aspect of selling. It provides real-world examples, such as how AI-opportunity scoring can help sellers focus on the best opportunities in their pipeline; rather than those they want to pursue.

Win/Win. Win/win is the basis of long-term relationships where repeat business and referrals from the buyer can be the norm.

This PlayStream™ shows how to create win/win relationships in today’s sales environment that is heavily buyer focused. It describes the implications of lose/lose, I win/you lose, I lose/you win.

Defining Your Perfect Prospect Profile. Sellers who work deals through the entire sales process only to find they have lost the deal often times have not defined, understood, or used their perfect prospect profile.

This PlayStream™ describes the concepts around defining your perfect prospect, why it’s important, and includes a workshop for the team to define their perfect prospect profile.

2021 is upon us! Now is the time to plan and begin executing to hit our revenue targets next year.

Click here to download our PlayStreams™ and start realizing the benefits now!

Contact Dave Toole, CEO of The Gig Economy Group to learn more about our PlayStreams™ and how we can help your sales organization in 2021.

 

* A Gig Economy Group customer with 70,000 reps improved the 1st dollar sold by new sellers by 250k% using PlayStreams™.

Jump Start 2021 with Actionable, Targeted Sales Training Apps

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In the last couple of emails from the Gig Economy Group, we introduced our PlayStreams™ for sales professionals.

PlayStreams™ are apps designed for the iPhone and Android to help sellers learn new sales training concepts, practice these concepts with prospects and customers, and ultimately have these practices ingrained as new selling behaviors. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Managers communicate the new learning – sellers will need to practice the training to become proficient.

Step 2: Managers engage the entire sales team in practicing the new selling behaviors.

Step 3: Practicing will result in new behaviors that will become second nature to sellers.

Step 4: Measuring results are an integral part of the PlayStreams™ app.

Step 5: The PlayStreams™ Recommendation Engine will recommend the very best next steps a seller can take to not only learn the concept but to close more business quickly.

Click here to download our PlayStreams™ to see how these apps can benefit your sales team.

Best regards,

Dave Toole, CEO
The Gig Economy Group

dave@gigeconomygroup.com

408-482-9854

2021 Is Here! Is Your Sales Team Ready?

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Now is the time for senior management to plan new strategic initiatives to hit their 2021 revenue goals. The tactics are clear. Provide sellers with the messaging, content, and training needed to hit the company’s revenue targets. However, this is simply not enough. Sellers must attain the competencies and confidence to execute upon these new initiatives.

Upsell Example. Management knows that to hit their targets, sales needs to sell the newer, more expensive widget. It’s not negotiable. Sales must sell it. But sellers aren’t comfortable selling the new widget and they are certain they can hit their quota selling the older, less expensive widget.

So, how do sales leaders go about helping their sales teams to not only be proficient in selling the new widget, but to be so competent selling it that the old widget becomes a product of the past?

Answer: PlayStreams™ from the Gig Economy Group. PlayStreams™ are AI-driven, mobile-enabled apps designed to deliver salient messaging, content, and targeted micro-training to sellers so they can successfully execute their company’s initiatives. Salespeople can practice how to message and engage with buyers so they gain the proficiencies needed to confidently sell the company’s strategic initiatives.

The Gig Economy Group’s Up-sell/Cross-Sell PlayStream™ is the solution to management’s upsell problem. It shows sellers exactly how to engage buyers so they purchase their new, more expensive widget. The app delivers easy-to-use, relevant, mobile messaging and content with micro-training to ensure salespeople are fully equipped to execute on the new strategy and ultimately close deals.

The Gig Economy Group has worked with 1000s of sales teams to improve sales performance. Most notably is where they improved the 1st dollar sold by new sellers by 250k% using its AI-driven, mobile-enabled Adaptive Sales as a Service Platform. The results speak for themselves.

 

Now is the time.

Today.

Not tomorrow.

Click here for an engaging presentation on how the Gig Economy Group can make a significant impact on your company’s bottom line. At the end, download our mobile PlayStreams™ on Cross-sell/Up-sell, Win/Win, and Defining Your Perfect Prospect Profile.

Contact:

Kim Cameron

Sales Enablement Analyst

The Gig Economy Group

775-772-8688

Artificial Intelligence to Accelerate Team Innovation

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Coming from Silicon Valley and being able to observe the contribution of those that have passed through the valley I have learned so much about the notion of problem solving and how tech can be applied to accelerate innovation and transformation. I’m not going to review what so many already have. Technology in support of our human needs. My hope is to share some basic principles that you can consider and hopefully apply in what you do in your lives today. With the Pandemic they say that digital transformation has accelerated. In order for so many to survive the choppy waters we are all trying to navigate we must learn to be adaptive to the rapid changes of the day. It is not easy, but there are some simples considerations to help lead us to the other side.

I mentioned the valley is founded on problem solving. Engineers are great at finding the root cause of problems and finding innovative solutions. This takes us out of our comfort zone. In the old days it used to take thousands to craft and build solutions to big problems. This made Silicon Valley a very competitive community wanting to prove we could solve more sophisticated problems from what our peers solving. This is great if you can afford it. Most cannot. Having had to innovate with global distributed teams across several generations of Moore’s Law we learned a lot that can be applied to our present circumstance.

While it is great to have vision for where technology can be applied to solve problems, the power of all the sources of information around us provides a new way to take small steps that you can build on. Understanding how data and micro services will grow rapidly going forward. Having your North Star (vision) helps deliver leadership in markets. Now we can innovate in small steps that can build large movements. Whether it is Slack that started with a small team, got feedback and iterated a solution that was valuable to hundreds of thousands, or Google that starts with small steps and builds on them until they have found adoption of new capabilities, one must consider how to do this for business, education and social impact. Participative Innovation. Small steps can be taken to leverage technology is a practice we all must become comfortable with. Artificial Intelligence is surrounding us and we have a very low literacy rate around this technology and yet it is diffusing into our lives everywhere. This is the problem that we should be diving into, to better understand the Future of Work and for that matter life. More to come……

For now if you want more pay a visit to John Hagel

4 Communication Techniques to Create Marketing Qualified Leads

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Lead generation begins with understanding your perfect prospect profile. It starts with identifying the demographics and psychographics of those companies that have the best strategic fit with your organization’s products, services, and values. Knowing your perfect prospect profile is the way for marketing to create targeted campaigns to elicit interest in your company’s solutions and for sellers to prioritize their prospecting calls.

As you know, marketing is the functional group that is tasked with promoting their company’s products and services to an identified audience. They cast a digital net via many outlets like email, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and webinars. They also host events at trade shows, engage with analysts at Gartner, Sales Mastery, or Forrester. They speak at industry events where all this activity has one and only one objective: To create Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) so the sales force can engage with these prospects and ultimately close business.

Communications and messaging are the sole medium and channels that marketing uses in all its promotional events, including each of the above-mentioned tactics and a host of other marketing strategies. The core of marketing is communications and messaging—period.

How they position the company and the value of its products and services is key to the financial viability of any company.

With a company’s financial future depending on marketing’s communications and messaging efforts, what can leaders do to ensure the messaging resonates with their perfect prospect so that these prospects ultimately become marketing qualified leads?

  1. Call to Action (CTA). A compelling, direct call to action is the most important part of every single marketing communications. Whether it’s an email, LinkedIn message, trade show event, or webinar, marketers must let prospects know how they can further engage with your company. The CTA should be strong, clear, and concise. It should provoke emotion and/or enthusiasm, and it should include why your prospect should engage with your company.

 

  1. Sales and Marketing Alignment. Sellers are on the front-line. They are conversing with prospects day in and day out. They know exactly what messaging resonates with buyers and what doesn’t. It’s marketing’s role to discern that their messaging, and supporting communications tools, resonates with the prospects that salespeople are talking with.

 

  1. Success Stories. There is nothing better than showing a prospect how one of your customers in their industry has successfully used your solutions and realized tremendous results. It is documented that success stories have the biggest impact on sales effectiveness and is a key contributor to moving a prospect from “suspect” to a marketing qualified lead. It’s important that marketing identifies successful customers, creates case studies, and messages these successes to their perfect prospect profile.

 

  1. Lead Scoring. The only way to know if a prospect is a marketing qualified lead is by measuring each contact against a lead score. This goes back to identifying and knowing your perfect prospect profile. How close is this person to your perfect prospect? In addition to your perfect prospect score, there are other scores to consider like the prospects interest level in your solutions, overall fit with your business, and their BANT score. Do they have budget, authority, need, and timing? Lead scoring requires precise communications between sales leadership, marketing, and the sales teams.

The primary reason for any (for profit) company to be in business is to earn revenues for themselves and/or their shareholders. It is a company’s marketing organization through their communications and messaging that serves as the primary vehicle to engage prospects and ultimately convert them to marketing qualified leads for sellers to pursue and close business.

 

For More Information Contact:

Dave Toole
CEO
The Gig Economy Group
408-482-9854

Artificial Intelligence – Delivering Results Via Enhanced Communications

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As described in our last email, LifeVantage partnered with the Gig Economy Group to develop and deliver an AI-driven mobile communications application that effectively guides each seller step-by-step through a set of communications and selling processes that helps them to achieve increased sales volumes in less time than before.

In this follow up email, we’ll share some of the successes LifeVantage was able to realize as a direct result of implementing the Gig Economy Group’s AI-driven communications application.

LifeVantage uses a direct distributor model to sell their products. An important, strategic KPI in direct selling is “getting new distributors to first dollar in 30 days.” Getting new sellers to first dollar in 30 days significantly reduces the likelihood they will churn. As a direct result of implementing the Gig Economy Group’s app, LifeVantage found a remarkable decease in churn because the application’s communication and recommendation engine guided sellers in getting to first dollar. After implementing the application, first dollar went from 5% of new distributors to 22% in the first 30 days. This is an extraordinary increase of 400% of independent consultants getting to first dollar in 30 days.

As a result of this, LifeVantage is able to enjoy respectful retention rates as a direct correlation to getting new sellers to first dollar. In measuring this KPI, LifeVantage looked to measure those independent distributors who were active and ordering products consistently after six months. They looked to compare those who were using the application versus those who were not. Again, the results were astonishing. 49.2% of sellers who did not use the app were active after six months. Conversely, 63.7% of distributors who used the app were active after six months. This an impressive retention rate of 13%. These two KPIs: Getting to first dollar and increased retention rates have significantly helped LifeVantage in their battle to manage churn and to ultimately improve their bottom line.

The Gig Economy’s group of communications and AI experts would like to invite you to a brief assessment where we will evaluate your rate of adoption for new communications, training, or adopting new practices. We will ask a set of questions and deliver a report that identifies the 3-4 gaps between an ideal business state and where your organization lies. I invite you to reach out to Dave Toole to schedule a 30-minute assessment.

Artificial Intelligence – Changing How We Communicate

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When thinking of Artificial Intelligence (AI), images of space ships and space men come to mind. While AI is likely part of Elon Musk’s company Space Exploration Technologies where they manufacture space transportation services, AI is actually part of today’s every-day business applications.

A case in point. The Gig Economy Group created an AI-enabled application for LifeVantage, a publicly traded, direct selling, company whose sole purpose was to create a communication’s vehicle designed to improve the messaging and interactions between corporate, their distributors, and their new distributors.

The problem LifeVantage faced was that their independent sellers were typically between the ages of 45 and 60 who are looking to supplement their income and most likely didn’t have the communications acumen required in business to effectively present solutions to customers.

Additionally, LifeVantage had some loosely connected apps to support their business and its communications, but they weren’t intelligent—meaning they weren’t learning over time and weren’t optimizing the distributor’s sales performance. Because of this, LifeVantage didn’t have their finger on the pulse of their business.

They looked to the Gig Economy Group to develop an application from the ground up using AI and machine learning that could recommend the optimal communication practices and methodologies for any situation.

By partnering with the Gig Economy Group, LifeVantage was able to provide to their entire distributor network of 70,000 independent consultants in 19 countries, an AI-driven, mobile app solution that effectively guides each seller step-by-step through a set of communications and selling processes that helps them to achieve increased sales volumes in less time than before. The app, through a series of communication prompts successfully onboards new distributors in a consistent manner, provides coaching and mentoring when it is needed, and delivers best practices to their entire distribution network. All of this, and more, was accomplished through the Gig Economy Group’s AI-powered communications application with its recommendation engine—substantially improving LifeVantage’s bottom line.

In our next email, we’ll share with you some of the extraordinary benefits LifeVantage attained by implementing the Gig Economy Group’s AI-driven mobile communications app.

If you are interested in exploring how to bring speed into your sales transformation and seeing how other companies have successfully implemented strategic initiatives, and as a result have increased their bottom line, I invite you to reach out to the contact below to schedule a 30-minute overview.

Sales Enablement’s Top Priorities

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As stated in our last email, communications and messaging are the most critical aspects of any successful sales transformation initiatives. Our experts at the Gig Economy Group are not the only ones to know the significance of this. We reached out to our research partner, Sales Mastery to see what their latest study of over 500 B2B sales professionals said their top sales enablement priorities were.

The following chart from Sales Mastery shows that the number one priority for sales professionals for the remainder of this year and into next is to optimize their value messaging.

 

This is not a surprise because communication and messaging are the cornerstones of any prosperous business. It is how employees and management interact with each other to reach strategic organizational goals.

There are many aspects of communications to look at; however, we’ll focus on two major challenges associated with poor or misaligned communications and messaging.

First are the extraordinary costs. In our last email, we stated the cumulative cost per employee per worker was $26,041 as a direct result of communications barriers. To further illustrate the high cost of communication misalignment, when looking across enterprise B2B companies with approximately 100,000 employees we were astonished to find that $62.4M is lost to the bottom line. 1 This equals $624.00 per employee. A mid-size company with approximately 100 employees will lose about $500K to the bottom line. This equal $5000.00 per employee. All of these numbers are incredibly astonishing!

Second is the missed opportunity when rolling out new strategic sales transformation initiatives. Management has spent an inordinate amount of time and resources to determine which sales transformation projects will put them ahead of the competition or keep their current competitive advantage. Communications and messaging are at the forefront of sales transformation initiatives—whether it’s training the sales force, developing new products and services, or investing in new infrastructure—each aspect of a sales transformation initiative needs an effective communication plan in place where each employee understands their unique role and how to execute upon it.

We look forward to sharing more information with you around communications and messaging.

If you are interested in exploring how to bring speed into your transformation and seeing how other companies have successfully implemented strategic sales transformation initiatives, and as a result have increased their bottom line, I invite you to reach out to me to schedule a 30-minute overview.

 

1 https://redeapp.com/2016/10/27/high-cost-miscommunication/

Communications & Messaging Critical to Sales Transformation

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To remain competitive, organizations must introduce new strategic sales transformation initiatives, whether it’s expanding into emerging markets, acquiring or merging with complementary companies, or introducing new products, these initiatives must be successfully executed for the company to realize the projected revenues tied to the initiative.

Sales transformation investments required to support any new strategic initiative must be identified and prioritized. Whether these investments are increased use of sales intelligence to identify shifts in the marketplace, or delivering AI-enabled sales technologies to deliver precise information, or a concerted effort to expand the organization’s social selling footprint—all these investments will be for naught if communications and messaging are not at the forefront.

Communications and messaging are the most critical aspects of any initiative if it is to be successful. That’s why we are offering a sneak peek into an online briefing we co-created with our strategic partner, Sales Mastery.

Here are a couple of astounding findings from the intense work we have done around communications and messaging:

  • A mere 7% of employees today fully understand their company’s business strategies and what’s expected of them in order to help achieve company goals.
  • $26,041 cumulative cost per worker per year due to productivity losses resulting from communications barriers.

The first finding is especially worrisome when thinking about all that is riding on the organization to successfully implement any new strategic initiative. First and foremost is the competition. Those competitors that get first-to-market advantage could enjoy the benefits of being first to market for a considerable amount of time. Second is lost revenues associated with sales transformation initiatives. This includes all the financial investments the company made.

The second finding simply states that poor and ineffective communications and messaging is very expensive.

Stay tuned! We’ll be sharing our online briefing and analysis around Real-time Communications and Messaging.

If you need support with your digital transformation please contact us. Our last digital transformation was for a public company that benefited with double digital revenue increases.