Best practices for internal sales training materials such as objection handling mini conversations

[Jon_HomePoint]

What has anyone seen be the best ways to provide easily accessable sales training materials to reps for viewing both on their own as well as quickly accessable when on a call. Between Documents and snippets and the delination between for internal use vs to be sent out to prospects how have you best used them, labeled them, configured them?

[ScottPennwood]

Hi @Jon_HomePoint,

Have you used Playbooks? Invaluable while on calls, gives a useful prompt based on best-practice for your industry/product/team experience. And your reps can log the responses on the playbook too. 

I find that companies who provide Template emails find a fair amount of success with these too - again using high-converting material that results in conversations that your company has seen success with before. 

Of course Documents as you've mentioned. I would always advise slapping a HUGE "For internal use only" across every single page, with big red bars top and bottom, reducing the sends that happen by mistake when the materials look quite similar. 

Consistent naming schemes as well, with the date range in the title of the doc of when it will be valid. Price list for Q4? Call it "2024-Q1-Price List". Same price list going to roll over a quarter? Do your sales team a favour, spend a couple of minutes a year to remove all doubt and rename it "2024-Q2-Price List".

Fair, you might have 20-30 docs to rename - or even 100 docs! But it only takes about 3 seconds to change Q1 to Q2 and that's 5 minutes of admin to save your sales teams maybe 1-2 seconds per interaction. If you've got 100 docs, I've got to assume you're measuring your interactions in the hundreds per week, per sales rep, spread across a quarter... (quick makes, 2 sales reps, 2 seconds saved, 100 interactions each per week... 2,400/60 is 40 minutes saved!)

[Jaycee_Lewis]

You are welcome @Jon_HomePoint 😊 And shoutout to @ScottPennwood for taking the time to craft such a thoughtful reply 🙌 — Jaycee

[Jon_HomePoint]

Thanks @ScottPennwood and we have used Playbooks. As you state, they are great for providing the talking tracks and outlines alone with questions to get answered that seemlessly update the Call Notes! I'm thinking more putting key Objection words with links in the Playbook so when the prospect says "sounds expensive" or "how do differ from x competitor" its super easy to click that link to get a good example of handling that objection. Snippets seems good but they also seem more like things to include for external use, or making very sure their are naming conventions for Internal Use Objection Handing Mini Conversation vs for External Use insert Snippet in follow up email on How We Are Different from X. Just wondering how folks have handled this in real world use cases. Pros and Cons or any best practices for configuration and structure from day 1. Also, thanks @Jaycee_Lewis for the call out.!

[Jaycee_Lewis]

Hi, @Jon_HomePoint 👋 Thanks for the great question. I'd like to invite some of our community champions to the conversation. Hey @Phil_Vallender @HFisher7 @elizheleva, can you share any insight here? Either on how you've set this up for clients or hard-earned best practices based on your experience.

Thank you very much! — Jaycee