3 Ways Businesses Can Get More Out of Their Road Warriors
Your sales force are the road warriors of your company. You depend on them. They bring you money. But they could be doing more for you. No, you don't have to grind them into the ground, or send them on more sales calls. You just have to use their time more efficiently.
Videos While Flying
Most salespeople could benefit from more training. The only problem is that they can only spend so much time in the office and in meetings. Don't rely on your salespeople to read books either. Most people don't or won't. What will they do? Watch videos.
Video presentations are all the rage right now, but they're also an incredibly effective way to keep your salespeople up-to-date on their training. Videos are easy to watch - your salespeople can sit back and relax while learning. It's also something that they can do while flying. No, they can't use electronics while the plane is taking off or landing, but they can watch videos while in-flight.
To do this, you'll have to either provide the videos yourself (i.e. transfer them to a company tablet or mobile device) or have the salesperson download the appropriate video from a site like YouTube using
downloading software from YouTubeDownload or some other site that specialises in video downloading software. Once that's done, your sales force can watch videos wherever they are, regardless of whether they have Internet access.
Podcasts For The Car Trip
When your salespeople can't watch videos (and they can't reasonably do this all day long), they can listen to podcasts. The perfect time and place for this is when they're on the road - on their way to a client's home or business.
Podcasts are sort of like Internet radio stations. On iOS devices (i.e. Apple devices), there's even a podcast application dedicated to organising all podcasts. So, it could be a simple matter of just downloading the necessary 'casts, and giving them to your employee to listen to.
Offline Videos For Demoing
When your salespeople are out on the road, there's not much time to prepare for a sales presentation. They had better have their act together. For new salespeople, this can be downright tough. To curb turnover, and make even the most seasoned veteran's job a little easier, use offline video.
That same video downloading software you use for in-flight training videos can also be used to download sales presentations from sites like YouTube. Why download a site that's hosted "in the cloud?" Because clients' Internet connections aren't always secure and stable. The last thing you want is the presentation to break down because a video won't load due to buffering or other server-side problems. It not only kills the presentation, it could kill the sale. Demo videos also allow the salesperson to show the client something that might be difficult or otherwise impossible to demonstrate. For example, say you sell high-tech gas valve equipment. You could show clients a prototype valve. But they can't really see the inner workings or see how it works. With a video demo, you can show them some new inner component that makes your product better than anyone else's. You can also them an animation of what it would look like "in action."
Make sure you remember to respect IP when downloading Paul Moss is a road warrior salesman. He loves writing about how to do better in this demanding position for small business blogs.
