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Sales readiness is certifying whether salespeople possess the skills and knowledge needed to have effective conversations throughout the buyer's journey. Key sales readiness activities such as assessment, training, and coaching help develop more productive, agile, and ready sellers.
Sales readiness is about growing revenue by utilizing tools and processes to increase knowledge, enhance performance, and adapt to change.
It involves assessing and certifying whether salespeople are equipped with the proper skills and knowledge to have the conversations needed throughout a buyer's journey. Training and coaching play a key role in creating a productive, knowledgeable, agile, and ready sales force.
A prime goal of readiness programs is to prepare salespeople to close more and bigger deals. Still, buyers also must leave their interaction, whether face-to-face, on the phone, in a web conference, or via email feeling their time was well-spent.
Any sales teams need foundational, continuous, transformational, and reactive sales-readiness programs. Putting these programs in place isn't a one-and-done process; it should evolve and adapt to support various scenarios and needs of sales teams.
Being "sales-ready" allows salespeople to support clients/customers at any stage of the buying journey by combining diffrent sales tools and sales skills. Put simply, sales readiness works, and it prepares salespeople to address whatever comes their way.
There are four basic pillars of sales readiness that helps to implement a 360-degree approach to preparing sales team. Product marketing and sales-enablement departments should work together to make sure reps are ready to optimize every conversation. You need to have a strategy to execute effectively within each pillar.
It is about creating a ready-to-execute onboarding plan for every role in your sales team. It aims to accelerate new reps' time to full productivity and improve knowledge retention across every sales role in the field.
Continuous-readiness programs aim to make sure reps are ever-ready to maximize every buyer interaction.
This part involves reboarding the entire field force to minimize adverse impact on productivity or revenue. Transformational readiness works when sales organizations need to change the nature of buyer conversations fundamentally or with whom they're having those conversations.
Reactive readiness is about getting your team message-ready almost instantly, whether their business faces a product recall, a hostile takeover attempt, the merging of two competitors, or any other major issue. Any good or bad news about the business or its competitors or geopolitical events could sway sales.
Without sales readiness program in place, the same problems will continue to appear. Sellers won't be prepared for the moments that matter – when money is on the line. Understanding and prioritizing readiness activities helps organizations create the culture of sales excellence that is essential to driving revenue.