Maximizing ROI from a Great Demo! Workshop: Post-Workshop Implementation Strategies

Do you want to know how you can supercharge the success of your Great Demo! and Doing Discovery workshop? You and your team have invested time, energy, and resources into learning the methodology, so it's imperative that reinforce the skills to ensure maximum adoption yields the highest possible return on your investment.

Below is a list of tips and tricks that will help you inspire your team, promote adoption and achieve the best results using and implementing your new methodology.

Step 1: Communicate the Benefits and Gain Support 

Clearly articulating the benefits and value of the new methodology to your senior leaders is crucial. Picture a sales team in a tech company that adopted a new sales methodology a   faced skepticism from senior leaders as they were unsure about its potential benefits. 

By effectively communicating how it transformed the team's sales effectiveness and increased revenue, the senior leaders became convinced. They recognized the tangible impact and embraced the methodology, providing the necessary support and resources for its successful implementation company-wide. This scenario exemplifies the power of clear communication in securing buy-in from senior leaders. 

You can also take it one step further by inviting other leaders to attend a training session or have an overview of the material you learned in class. If they actively participate, have a positive experience, and share it with the rest of the organization, it will create a powerful endorsement that will encourage widespread acceptance and adoption. 

Step 2: Reinforce the Key Takeaways 

After the workshop, identify the key takeaways with your team and encourage them to review their notes and refer to the workshop workbook. Have a team meeting to discuss what they learned and how they plan to apply the new strategies in their work. 

You should have a quick huddle with your team after the workshop while everything is still fresh in their minds. Consider making it a weekly habit or topic in your team meetings where you can discuss strategies, address challenges, and share wins and best practices. Regular practice sessions to refresh their skills and grasp the concepts will also help greatly reinforce takeaways from the skills training. 

Step 3. Customize and Adapt the Methodology 

Your organization is unique in its own way, and we highly encourage taking a holistic look at enhancing the Great Demo! Methodology to fit the specific needs of your target market. Your team's confidence and enthusiasm will increase greatly when you involve them in refining and adapting the methodology to align with customer requirements and your existing sales processes. 

Encouraging them to try the new method, then refine their approach based on customer reactions, empowers them to put their own spin on the Great Demo! tactics. In our experience, this allows for a more natural adoption, and seamless integration into your team’s work routine, and also provides feedback and insights to the management team. 

Building from this baseline, skill refinement, and long-term success is best achieved through a comprehensive plan to integrate the training into the Go to Market motion. Roz Greenfield, Chief Enablement Officer at Level213, notes that this is required to reap the benefits of an investment in a new methodology. As strategic enablement partners, Level213 works diligently to take concepts out of the training room and into the day-to-day motion of the reps and Front-Line Managers. 

Greenfield’s approach to ensuring successful methodology rollouts includes: 

• Customized implementation plans for the organization, with a primary focus on operationalizing the training 

• Creating structures that support the evergreen application of the concepts 

• Real-time application that continually layers training concepts into active deals over time 

• Coaching resources and guidelines that truly enable front-line managers to effectively coach skill refinement, training content application, and execution within customer-facing conversations 

• Monitoring and interpretation of KPIs to identify and deliver reinforcement to ensure long-term adoption 

Step 4: Provide Ongoing Support and Resources 

Coaching is a critical component of ensuring that the strategies learned in the workshop are successfully implemented. Offering continuous support during and after the transition is important. Schedule regular coaching sessions to review progress, provide feedback, and address any challenges your team is facing. A team session will also allow them to learn from each other’s experiences.  (Additional coaching and feedback rubrics are available upon request.) 

Establish an online community or forum where your team can access resources, ask questions, and share best practices. Ensure the availability of subject matter experts, and templates to further support your team's adoption an implementation of the methodology. 

Step 5: Foster Collaboration Through Peer Reviews 

Regular team meetings provide the perfect opportunity for your team to share their progress and give feedback to each other. Peer reviewing the situation slides and illustrations they’ve created for clients provides a diverse set of perspectives and insights on how to make it better. 

It also fosters a better collaborative culture while strengthening their grasp of the best practices. Furthermore, this leverages collective experiences so your team can establish new standards and enhance existing practices.  The best situation slides and illustrations should be aggregated for use in vision generation menu structures and for enablement and onboarding new team members. 

Step 6: Align Incentives and Performance Metrics 

Aligning incentives and performance metrics with the objectives of the new sales methodology reinforces its importance. For example, a revised bonus structure that rewards employees who consistently apply the methodology and achieve specific milestones will encourage the team to use the new methods more. By linking incentives to the new methodology, your company will ensure that employees are motivated to adopt and excel in its implementation. 

Step 7: Monitor Progress and Analyze Results 

Track your team's progress as they implement the new techniques. Setting milestones toward fully implementing the new methods and KPI goals will help you monitor your team’s development and encourage continued growth. Analyzing their performance and results can also help you identify areas for improvement. 

Sumiko Yourtee, Principal Solutions Consultant from Ellucian, started a grassroots effort to conduct monthly check-in calls with her teammates to discuss progress in adopting the techniques learned from the company’s Great Demo! workshops. Here are some of the prompts she used that are worth noting to help you open the discussion about your team’s progress: 

• How have you adjusted your discovery approach to build better situation slides? 

• When it comes to Great Demo practices, which stage of learning would you say you're in? 

• What practice are you currently focusing on getting comfortable with? How are you doing it? 

• Do you feel like any of the demo and discovery practices you've learned have become natural and embedded as a habit? How did you do it? 

Step 8: Measure and Communicate Success 

Establishing clear measurement systems and regularly communicating success stories are essential to maintaining motivation and momentum. Celebrating it and recognizing individuals who embraced and excelled in the methodology will help foster a supportive and collaborative environment that motivates everyone to continuously improve their skills. 

For instance, imagine your sales team implementing a dashboard to track key metrics associated with the new methodology. By sharing progress updates and celebrating milestones, such as significant revenue growth achieved through successful implementations, you reinforce the positive impact of the new methodology and encourage further adoption. 

Step 9: Schedule Refresher Training 

Over time, people naturally start to lose the information from the workshop. It is always good practice to conduct refresher training to enhance the skills your team previously learned. The refresher sessions not only help you and your team brush up on some topics you need to work on, but it also allows you to further refine your adoption of the methodology.  This is also a perfect time to introduce master-level content. 

We, at Great Demo!, commonly advise organizing these refresher training sessions about 2-3 months after the previous workshop. Part of this refresher training is to assess how you’ve implemented the methodology and how you can enhance it for great success.

Conclusion 

Learning a new presales methodology is just the beginning. It's one thing to learn the concepts and methodology; it's another to successfully apply them to their day-to-day tasks. Maximize your ROI by ensuring that your team adopts the strategies they learned and successfully implements them. 

If you want to learn more about creating value for your team and your clients, explore the different workshops offered at Great Demo! You can book a free consultation with me to discuss how Great Demo! can be tailored to your team’s specific needs and your company’s goals.