Whether you’re in sales, customer success, or any other team in your company’s go-to-market (GTM) engine, you’d be forgiven for thinking the sales training software landscape is a single, overcrowded market.
Chances are your experience with such tools was a blur of bland modules on how to interact appropriately with your coworkers, protect your passwords, spot phishing scams, and recite your company’s values. Maybe you received some professional development training here and there, and you were lucky if any of it was specific to your role or memorable in any way.
If this was your experience, you were likely educated via a learning management system (LMS), a term you’d again be forgiven for thinking is synonymous with sales training software. That’s because almost every company has an LMS, while fewer have what’s called sales readiness software.
Some businesses aren’t clear on the value of sales readiness software, while others try, in vain, to replicate that value using their LMS.
So, what exactly is the difference between an LMS and sales readiness software?
LMSs are less about learning and more about ticking boxes
LMSs were designed more for the needs of HR and legal departments than GTM teams — or any other team, for that matter. An LMS is a one-size-fits-all solution to ensure employees are educated and up-to-speed on all-encompassing company matters, such as culture, mission, values, goals, security, benefits, and other such policies.
The catch-all nature of LMSs is reflected in how their success is measured. Whether an LMS or LMS-driven initiative is working comes down to how many employees opened and completed the learning material they were assigned — and little else.
Sales readiness software is about improving skills and increasing revenue
As opposed to LMSs, sales readiness software is role-specific. GTM professionals require ongoing learning about how to close more deals, and sellers need interactive, bite-sized lessons they can access on their mobile devices anytime, anywhere. They also need the same ubiquitous access to supplementary content, such as pitch decks and marketing assets. Finally, they need opportunities to practice communicating with buyers, honing their presentation and negotiation skills.
This focus on improving job performance means sales readiness software measures success not just in terms of engagement with learning material but also whether that engagement translated to more sales, especially of a specific product or service, and how much those sales added to the company’s bottom line.
Not all sales readiness software is created equal
Despite its name, sales readiness software should serve more than just sellers; sales managers and enablement teams need a solution that can provide deep analytics, which they can then reference to improve their efforts, demonstrate value to company leadership, and gain greater decision-making clout. However, not every sales readiness software solution will do this sufficiently.
