How to Spot the Tech Trends That Actually Matter to Your Sales Team

It can be difficult to know which emerging technologies are worth your time and dollars. But the right kinds of innovation simply help your sales teams connect with their customers more efficiently. While salesmen once traveled door to door in search of customers, subsequent generations of salespeople have embraced innovations such as telephones, computers, and cell phones to build stronger customer connections.

By keeping an eye on emerging tech trends that apply specifically to the day-to-day operations and long-term goals of sales teams, companies can build a more effective sales force and see business grow at the pace of change.

The Pace of Change

In a 2015 survey, Robert Half Management Resources asked the CFOs of companies of all sizes in more than 20 of the largest US metropolitan markets: “In general, what would you say is the single greatest pressure facing your accounting and finance function?”

Given the choice of five answers, 41% of the CFOs cited “keeping pace with changing technology.”

The financial concern of implementing new technologies is a real one, and bouncing from one new technology to the next for the sake of staying on trend is expensive. Don’t give your business operations team fits, and instead stay on target with solutions that drive to business objectives. Understand the daily pain points of your sales team, and investigate a solution that keeps quarterly, annual, and overall company goals in mind.

How Are People Using Technology Now?

“The Internet of Me” is changing the way people interact through technology, and your sales team is no different. Contextualized content allows the user to be the center of the digital experience, only exposing information that is relevant to that individual at that time.

The portal for this user-centric experience is the mobile device or tablet, leading to the growing trend of the BYOD (bring your own device) workplace. Prominent benefits of BYOD is a workforce that’s more agile, and a business that’s more mobile (in all sense of that word). Providing tools for field reference gives access to mission-critical information on the go. A solid MDM (mobile device management) strategy utilizes BYOD to move your sales team away from fixed use of organizational technology towards more flexibility to work remotely creatively, quickly and effectively.

I Learned It From the Internet

Adapting sales training to the way people learn today is a key reason for bringing on new technologies. Online training courses for anything from LinkedIn advertising to seed germination to Javascript coding clinics have become the accessible and easy method for picking up new skills. Google says searches for “how to” on YouTube have grown 70 percent year over year. North America has watched over 100 million hours of “how to” content so far in 2015.

What’s the takeaway here? Why take a two-day course on a topic when you can learn it in a two-hour online tutorial? Your sales team wants to get out on the road to hit their sales targets. Instead of subjecting them to time-consuming and ineffective training seminars, empower them to learn the necessary material in a cloud-based, mobile-first format from home or on the road, which allows them to instantly search for the information they need at any time.

Knowledge, Optimized

With the rise of data analytics, companies have more access to internal information than ever. Now they are better able to connect that data to actionable items that improve processes and grow business–and that includes improving sales training techniques based on data insights. Cloud-based content allows us to pull and analyze data from sales training materials in the following ways:

1. How is your team looking for information? Where are they getting stuck?
2. How are salespeople using the available materials? What are they using in the field? What are they using in between meetings?
3. What resources are they using most? What resources are they skipping all together?

By using a custom content delivery platform to house and deliver training and sales materials, data is readily available to answer these questions and adjust the content to better serve each individual sales team member, as well as the organization as a whole. Content can be customized to provide just-in-time training in the field, putting the most valuable and applicable information in the forefront.

A “Workforce Reimagined”

Salespeople have traditionally been an industry of innovators, driven to use the best available technology to reach their target demographics, make the sale, and set new goals. Companies that can effectively blend what humans are best at with what technology is best at will be better able to establish a strong competitive position in the quarters and years ahead.

Keeping up with tech trends and implementing the ones that really matter to your sales team is the challenge. Looking for solutions that improve your team’s mobility and connectivity will give them access to just-in-time training that fosters confidence and saves time and resources. Customizable, cloud-based content allows your sales team to know that they are working with the most up-to-date, accurate and secure information, available in a format optimized for their personal user experience.

As new tech trends emerge, sales forces in particular must constantly and creatively adopt and adapt new technologies to improve sales processes and, in the end, better serve customers.