Business reviews are especially critical at the moment in aligning sales and management teams to adjusted targets, current quarter forecasts as well as a unified and standardized message. With no options to meet face-to-face, it is imperative that your virtual replanning and review strategy be one that is inclusive and prescriptive, including collaboration with internal departments that have a stake in ensuring messaging and sales execution is done correctly. Getting the same level of involvement and team participation from collaborators (now in different zipcodes and timezones) can be impossible if you rely on a multi-hour or multi-day live streaming session or default to passing documents back and forth over content channels. 

Luckily sales readiness technology such as Mindtickle can assist with soliciting feedback from the field team and managers, account planning and pre-meeting territory reviews. By enabling video or screen share submissions, auto- and manager-driven, 1:1 reviews, sellers benefit from  proper preparation and are impactful. Activities such as pre-work and video role play are great tools to include to increase participation, while gamification drives engagement that’s fun and effective. In my experience there are two key elements common to every successful QBR or business review I have been part of that I believe are critical in today’s environment.

Consideration #1

Business reviews should not be an anxiety-inducing exercise for sellers…far from it.  Sellers should look forward to receiving feedback from leaders and cross-departmental stakeholders to increase their skills and tactics. 

Tip:

• Sessions need to be upbeat, positive, and encouraging for sellers, and more importantly, this keeps them engaged and involved. 
• Sales enablement leaders should ensure that the content being presented at business reviews correlate back to competencies and skills that have been identified as key to an individual seller’s success. For sales leaders, this can help in better evaluating skills gaps and learning opportunities that either hindered or helped in driving sellers to get their prospects converted through each stage of the sales process.

Consideration #2

Business reviews shouldn’t be an overwhelming experience in the amount of information that’s presented.  Consider the requirements and venue of your remote workforce since the business review will be done via video conference.

Tip: 

• Enablement leaders will have to reinforce a lot of the messaging, so keep it to just the essentials. If there is content that would be better delivered post business review as a follow-up, don’t include it in the core content. To encourage further engagement, include as much content from the field as possible. No one understands better what is happening in the field than the sellers so learning from each other is key to a seller’s success. 
• Keep content as applicable as possible. Sales theories and methodologies are important to any sales strategy, but business reviews are a time to put those theories into practical application that lead to closing more business for the sellers. 

I hope you enjoyed my thoughts and that you can benefit from the strategies and tactics I mentioned above. Learn more by downloading our Complete Guide and watch our demo video for running a virtual business review that inspires your organization.