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Some numbers to think about before we get going:
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2/3 of all people are visual learners
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Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text
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Well-delivered visual aids aid understanding by up to 400%
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90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual
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People remember 10% of what they hear, 20% of what they read, and 80% of what they see and do.
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All numbers from Revegy.com
Sales leaders and their teams are constantly hounded by numbers – pushing to hit quota, being beaten around the head with targets, reports and projections from directors, accountants and city analysts demanding relentless year-on-year growth. The prominence and dominance of numbers in Sales gives us a simple but far-reaching problem: numbers are boring.
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The stories, patterns and insight in those numbers are extremely interesting – especially if they can be leveraged to help customers and boost bottom lines. But unless your salespeople are data analysts, IoT bods or maths teachers (clue: they’re not), day-to-day number bashing and sacrificing data to your CRM is pretty mind-numbing.
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Don’t get me wrong, unprecedented data availability is a huge win for both sales professionals and customers – processes, products and service offerings can be honed and targeted better than ever before, and at the leading edge sales, extensions and renewals can be automated and built in to new products, software or services.
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This idea of ‘the data as the decision’ that is emerging in operational sales is great. Products and services that can use banked performance data to actively create and develop sales opportunities, spot opportunities, run lifecycle simulations to pre-empt problems and inefficiencies, and create a data-driven business case recommending the most viable route forwards to the client is a game-changer for leaders, reps and the industry.
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But Sales remains an industry that depends largely on people, on interaction and on individuals’ abilities to communicate the value of a product or service, and all those numbers are just white noise to most people. So how can enablement leaders embrace the advantages of big data whilst ensuring that they make that data useful and usable?
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By telling the stories that are in those numbers, and telling them visually.
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In exactly the same way that we leverage the power of the visual to engage a prospect, communicate our value and lead them to an inevitable-feeling decision to buy from us, we can use visual communication to engage and enable sales teams.
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Soulless spreadsheets and tools rolled out blind to salespeople aren’t helping anyone. Products and performances without stories are just spec and data. Enablement teams should be reading and interpreting the data, finding the stories and then communicating them to their salespeople—what markets are your teams nailing? Who has improved, how much, and why? Where are you getting traction and why? How has a new product roll out affected a teams performances across a given region?
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Enablement has to be about engagement – teaching your people how to engage with prospects in the pitch, but also ensuring that they are engaged with your organisation, your objectives and your enablement methodologies and messaging. Unengaged employees are 87% more likely to quit their jobs, and organisations around the world are haemorrhaging good sales people just because they’re failing to engage them.
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Sales enablement could be revolutionised by embracing visual communication – a way of communicating that people are programmed for, that is processed 60,000X faster than text, and that makes information easier to understand and remember than any other way of communicating. A strategic shift towards visual delivery of sales and performance data to global teams could aid talent retention, engage dispersed workforces, improve communication and understanding, boost performance and create a generation of driven, informed and engaged sales people. It’s a visual revolution, don’t get left behind.
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– Tom @WSL
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