Elay Cohen is the CEO at SalesHood and author of the book Enablement Mastery. Elay is on a mission to develop high-performing sales teams.
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Leaders ask me all the time: "What’s the secret to building a high-performing sales culture?" The short answer is sales enablement. Though not a new concept, it uses relevant learning, coaching and content to align revenue teams' people, process and priorities. Nowadays, it includes all customer-facing professionals gaining the competence, confidence and content to optimize their ongoing impact and maximize every buyer interaction.
However, while sales enablement plays a big part in boosting sales efficiency and sales effectiveness, creating and executing sales enablement programs and tools don't automatically create a substantial impact. For the greatest effect, it's necessary for companies to lean on their talent.
Enter Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Sharing
True high-impact sales enablement is grounded in peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. The power of learning from peers is the foundation in building a winning sales culture. After all, salespeople always share their winning plays and losses, even though it's mostly informal.
Developing competence and confidence faster with peer-to-peer coaching and knowledge sharing is the secret sauce of sales enablement excellence. According to Forrester’s Sales And Customer-Facing Roles Survey, peer-to-peer interactions are critical for maximizing knowledge sharing. They rank as the third preferred training delivery mode among high-performing reps.
Revenue teams succeed when they learn from each other and share best practices with each other. This is a development approach that can overcome common barriers to employees' skill building. As such, you can make peer-to-peer a go-to-market differentiator for you and your teams.
Suggest to your team members that they watch each other’s videos. Then, motivate them to practice and get feedback from each other and reward them for coaching each other. In doing so, your team members will see how they're selling and what content they’re sharing. Additionally, they will be able to use each other’s content and sales plays to close deals.
Structure Is Vital For Peer-To-Peer Learning
Some of you may be thinking that you’re already promoting peer-to-peer in your business. But your approach may be too unstructured. While unstructured knowledge sharing is good and easy to set up, it's not repeatable and measurable. Examples of unstructured peer-to-peer knowledge sharing include live webinars, group channels and one-off team meetings. Even a kickoff or quarterly business review is unstructured and unmeasurable. This peer-to-peer knowledge sharing can be lost when key people leave a company.
Structured peer-to-peer learning and collaboration is a great way to improve sales performance for both new and experienced salespeople. Salespeople learn in a non-threatening way and are more likely to try something new if it’s recommended by a peer. My company, SalesHood, works in the sales enablement space, and our customers are seeing a strong positive correlation between peer-to-peer enablement activity data and higher sales performance. We’re witnessing that teams who learn together and share knowledge regularly will ramp faster, build higher-quality pipelines and win more deals.
Further, peer-to-peer learning allows teams to hold each other accountable. This kind of sales training acts almost like a sandbox where employees can learn, share constructive feedback and find shared ways to overcome biases and enhance their critical thinking skills.
6 Strategies For Initiating Peer-To-Peer Learning
If you're ready to implement or improve your peer-to-peer learning structure, here are six proven ways to prioritize structured and repeatable processes to speed up your sales enablement impact.
1. Pitch Practice
Have teams practice your latest sales messaging with video role-plays. Make it easy and fun for your teams to watch and learn from your gold standard presentation. Use a scorecard to drive alignment. Track engagement, score and allow time to team members to provide feedback.
2. Sales Plays Activation
Content sharing existing assets and artifacts from actual deals is a great way to drive peer-to-peer learning. Measuring the effectiveness of content and then replicating what’s working across other sellers with templates and content sharing will boost up win-rates and deal progress.
3. Call Coaching
Listening to customer call recordings is a good strategy for peer-to-peer learning. Institute a practice coaching and feedback process. Create goals where reps are asked to watch and share feedback on a certain number of peer calls every week.
4. Deal Coaching
Create a process where teams conduct deal coaching asynchronously. Have your team record their deal review based on your methodology, then have peers review and provide feedback. The engagement and scores, if tracked, can correlate with pipeline and performance data to gauge impact.
5. Win Stories
Have your teams consistently record video deal wins and customer success stories in a constant, structured manner. These stories become gold for your teams and future new hires. Track consumption of the stories, prescribe the stories in your customer relationship management or sales force automation systems and assess knowledge and retention of this user-generated content.
6. Loss Reviews
Running competitive loss reviews is a proven way to use peer-to-peer learning to improve win rates. Having open, collaborative and constructive conversations will teach teams how to minimize losses and surface new strategies for the sales playbook.
As a business leader in the sales world, prioritizing peer-to-peer learning as a driving force in your programs and initiatives can be vital. Whenever possible, ask your teams, “What can we do to drive more peer-to-peer knowledge sharing that’s repeatable and measurable?” Don’t miss the opportunity to create a winning sales culture by mapping peer-to-peer activities to revenue outcomes.
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