What is Sales Readiness
The term “sales readiness” covers a range of strategies and practices that are all concerned with ensuring salespeople are “sales-ready”. That means making sure they have all the skills and knowledge they need to do their work effectively.
In order to ensure sales readiness, sales teams and staff must first be assessed to evaluate their level of readiness. Is it at a high enough level? Or are there gaps in salespeople’s knowledge? If so, you need to identify them.
Sales readiness assessment
When conducting a sales readiness assessment, you need to evaluate a wide range of factors that have an impact on your salespeople’s ability to make sales. Here is a small list of some of the basics. It isn’t exhaustive but it’s a good starting point.
Does the salesperson have sufficient insight into:
- The products or services they’re selling?
- Functionality, requirements, limitations, and features?
- Sales prospects’ needs, challenges, roles, and industries?
Once you’ve found the answers to these questions, you can start developing a sales readiness strategy and sales enablement training programs dedicated to bringing your salespeople’s knowledge and skills up to the desired level.
Sales readiness vs sales enablement
Sales readiness isn’t the same as sales enablement, although the two are related. When thinking about sales readiness vs sales enablement, it’s helpful to think of it like this: sales readiness is a matter of ensuring salespeople are prepared to engage with their next prospect and make their next sale. But sales enablement is about your organization empowering salespeople to be as effective as they can be in every way possible.
While sales readiness may manifest itself in acts such as delivering training to salespeople, sales empowerment is far broader. It involves optimizing your organization and its processes to facilitate sales team productivity, efficiency, and performance. This includes the tools and technology that are provided to salespeople – and these are particularly vital in certain areas of sales.
Why is sales readiness important?
Sales readiness is an important part of any successful business. It ensures that sales teams have the resources, knowledge, and skills they need to be successful in their roles. Sales teams need to be prepared to respond to customer inquiries and needs, which requires a deep understanding of products and services, customer needs, and the competitive landscape. Sales readiness also helps sales teams to build relationships with customers, gain their trust, and close deals.
Sales readiness helps sales teams to operate efficiently, as they are armed with the resources and knowledge necessary to successfully close deals. By understanding customer needs and the competitive landscape, sales teams can create tailored solutions that meet customer needs and are competitively priced. This helps to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and can result in repeat business.
Sales readiness also helps to increase employee engagement and morale. When sales teams are equipped with the necessary tools and resources to do their jobs well, they are more likely to be motivated and engaged. This can lead to better sales performance, as well as improved customer relationships.
Sales readiness also helps to ensure that sales teams are not wasting their time and resources on deals that are unlikely to close. By understanding customer needs and the competitive landscape, sales teams can identify deals that are worth pursuing, and those that
Considerations for software sales readiness
In the world of software sales, prospects will want to test out a product or service, verify that it meets their needs and that it will work in their own technology infrastructure. It’s vital for all their concerns to be met, and much of a software salesperson’s work hinges on doing that.
Demonstrating software and providing this kind of validation wasn’t always easy in the pre-cloud era, because in order to gain full confidence, prospects needed to try the software on their own systems – which made demonstrations more time-consuming and difficult to arrange.
But today, sophisticated cloud-based sales demo environments can be provided remotely, to prospects wherever they are, accessed via their web browsers. The most advanced and powerful tools for providing these environments have become dedicated sales readiness software – and we’re proud to say that our own solution, CloudShare’s software experiences platform, functions as a valuable sales readiness platform, enabling greater sales effectiveness for organizations everywhere and readying their teams to make every interaction count.
