8 Tips for Crowdsourcing Sales Enablement Content

Benefits of Crowdsourcing Sales Enablement Content

Your sales teams are a treasure trove of knowledge, skills, and experience. But do you harness this properly?

During onboarding new hires you might ask one or two of them to walk the newbies through a few areas and you may even occasionally take one of your reps and ask them to run a bit of a session on a topic. But it's time and resource-intensive, inconsistent, and hard to scale.

When we speak to sales leaders about how they can centralize knowledge and learning around a sales competency framework, the first question is often about the time and resources needed to build the content.

The answer is that you don't have to build this from the center out, you can #crowdsource the knowledge from your teams and those around them.

Of course, this can be blended with centralized resources but approaching it in this way serves two purposes:

• It creates a fantastic repository of content for others to consume and learn from without the 'big bang' creation project.
• By drawing the knowledge from within the sales teams, you get a massive lift in buy-in and engagement.

8 Tips for Crowdsourcing Sales Enablement Content

So, here are our top tips for crowdsourcing knowledge:

• Win Story Blogs - have your sales reps blog about their wins while they are fresh on their minds. Ditch the structure, enable them to write it in their own words, and importantly, tag the skills, processes, or behaviors they used to get the deal done.
• Deal Reviews - Rather than having a deal review locked in a room 1-2-1 that nobody learns from, have your sales rep deliver their deal overview to a video covering your sales methodology. The best ones get brought together for others to learn from.
• Pitch Videos - Every sales team has a rep who nails their pitch. Run a competition for the best pitch each time you release a new product.
• Call Recordings - Take the best call recordings and build them into a library for new starters to learn from. Ask them to summarise what they discover from each one to assess listening and discovery skills.
• Centralized Q&A - Do you know all those emails that fly around the team? “Anyone got a template for…” “What customers have we got in the finance space…” etc. Create a central knowledge bank for this Q&A and over time, it becomes a fantastic repository and wealth of information that is searchable and not lost in email hell.
• Customer Demos - How many customer demos and meetings are done via Zoom (or similar)? Record them and any that have a positive outcome, and collect them into a central library for others to learn from.
• The WWW - There are millions of resources out there on the web. Encourage your sales teams to share anything they find useful centrally so others can benefit from it.
• Book Club - Create a space where sales reps can suggest and review books they’ve read. What an amazing resource for others to learn from!

Avoiding Common Traps in Crowdsourcing Enablement Content

The above could quickly become chaotic with information in all sorts of formats and stored all over the place which defeats the object. To avoid this, make sure that everything is aligned back to your sales competency framework and stored in an easy-to-search central platform.

This allows any resource I need to help me improve in a particular sales competency to be found easily whether it’s a video, blog, or Q&A.

To find out more about how you can crowdsource your knowledge, build it around and competency framework, and measure its impact, click here.