5 Ways to Prevent Shelfware for Your Sales Team
We’ve all made poor decisions and bad investments, but almost none compare to the pain of Shelfware.
At the time, the purchase made sense and the promise of ROI was absolutely there.
You may have even gotten off to a strong start, great adoption and initial results.
But then, the drop off. Reps stop using it. There’s no admin owning it. You’ve got Shelfware.
We feel your pain and want to help.
Here are 5 ways to prevent Shelfware:
Go to market planning
A quick refresher of your go to market plan will give direction to items needed and next steps to get your investment turned around. Having clear alignment with the overall goals and targets of the company can make it easy to determine: prospect list needs, sequences and messaging needs and realistic goals for your teams’ usage and productivity levels.
2. Simplified process documentation
How exactly should you and your reps be using this tool? If you can’t explain the process in just a few steps (same for your team) it will likely never get off the ground. If things seem complex and drawn out, look to bundle steps together or find ways to remove them completely and tee things up for your users so they can run with steps 3-4-5 and get going.
3. Re-onboarding and training
Pick the strongest user on your team or the most successful rep and enlist their help in a refresher to re-onboard the broader group. Bring your go to market plan, simplified process docs and have your rockstar demo how it works, their best practices and do Q&A. This is also a good time to present some expectations on usage and how you’ll be tracking it.
4. Tracking usage w/ reporting
Any worthwhile investment has solid reporting and should provide admin views into individual and team engagement, usage etc. Tap into that reporting weekly and let your team know you’ll be looking at it. If you’re reporting dashboard is missing key metrics, hold your reps accountable to those during weekly meetings, highlight emails; whatever it takes.
5. Integrating with KPIs
Hopefully your business already has some KPIs in place that attribute directly to company growth. For many sales organizations, this can include things like: overall # of prospects weekly, # of calls made, # of appointments set, # of leads scored for follow-through etc.
Whatever your leading KPIs are, see if aspects of your shelfware investment can support them and then “foot to pedal” with the tool.
