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How effectively are you training your sales engineers?
The unfortunate reality is that many sales enablement training programs are fundamentally broken. Onboarding is often cumbersome and outdated, making it difficult for new engineers to develop the necessary product knowledge and skills. To make matters worse, teams are often left with an inconsistent, overly complex toolkit once onboarding is done.
Virtual training labs address these issues, creating a better onboarding experience while also bridging the gap between sales enablement and sales training.
A virtual lab is not only the best way to train your SEs – it’s also the core tool they’ll be using to close deals.
Building a Better Sales Enablement Experience
Virtual training lab environments are cloud-based replicas of real-world production environments. They can range in scope and complexity from simple virtual desktops to ecosystem-wide simulations. Integrating them into your sales enablement training and processes makes life easier for your engineers in various ways.
Realistic, Hands-On Demos
With traditional bespoke demos, your sales engineers have two options: relying on a static presentation that amounts to little more than a video or slideshow, or spending several weeks painstakingly setting up and configuring an on-premise environment, usually with extensive support from DevOps or IT.
A virtual training lab provides a third option, allowing your team to spin up an authentic, realistic, and interactive product demo that accurately mirrors a prospect’s ecosystem. Potential customers can see firsthand how your company’s software integrates with their environment and addresses their pain points.
More importantly, they can create and deliver more effective demo environments. Through integration with the right software, they can even automate the delivery of POCs. That directly translates to reduced costs and a higher win rate.
Seamless, Distributed Virtual Training
With a virtual training lab, it doesn’t matter where your sales engineers are located. They can access the content they require from anywhere in the world. Better yet, with the right virtual lab solution, their onboarding experience can be tailored to their specific knowledge and expertise.
The end result is more successful, consistent onboarding and a more level playing field for your sales engineers.
Best Practices for Employing Virtual Labs in Sales Enablement
To integrate virtual labs into your sales enablement program, there are a few things you should keep in mind:
- Sales enablement requires alignment between sales and marketing. Both teams need to be involved in defining training content and demo scenarios to ensure consistency across the customer journey.
- Sales enablement relies heavily on data. Find a virtual lab solution that’s developed with this in mind.
- Create general demos and training modules tailored to your business’s core verticals and use cases. These can be further customized later.
- Leverage automation and artificial intelligence wherever possible and advisable, to save time and boost sales engineer enablement.
Next Steps: Learn More About Sales Enablement
If you’re interested in expanding your knowledge about sales enablement — specifically what it is and isn’t, check out What’s the Difference Between Sales Readiness vs. Enablement?. We also recommend reading Differences Between Sales Training and Sales Enablement.
Upgrade Your Sales Enablement Training with CloudShare
Finding the right virtual lab software can be a daunting prospect. That’s why CloudShare has gone to great lengths to differentiate our solution.
Here are just a few ways we’ve established ourselves as a leader in sales enablement training:
- Our platform allows your team to spin up interactive demos in minutes without requiring coding or IT assistance.
- You can replicate even the most complex environments with just a few clicks.
- Sales engineers and prospects can learn and explore without risk in a sandbox that’s an exact copy of a real-world ecosystem.
- Advanced analytics provide you with a window into your sales enablement processes.
- Extensive scalability with cost controls ensure you avoid budget overruns.
Contact us to book a demo today.
