If you work in sales, you’ve probably made a point to see The Wolf of Wall Street by now.
Recall that scene at the beginning of the movie when Jordan Belfort begins his new role at Investor Center, the small company that deals in penny stocks? He jumps on the phone and aces his first cold call. Everyone in the office pauses to listen. He seals a deal in just two minutes.
If only it were that easy.
In reality, starting a new sales job is challenging, even for those with years of experience under their belt.
That’s why it’s important to create a sales toolkit for new sales reps – to help them learn the ropes as efficiently and effectively as possible.
What is a Sales Toolkit?
Later in The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan gives a script to each of his staff at his new investment banking firm, Stratton Oakmont. Everyone comes together to see Jordan demonstrate the script to show that it’s effective. And it really is effective. (You can watch the scene here if you want, but be warned about the strong language and crude gestures.)
At a fundamental level, this script acts as Stratton Oakmont’s sales toolkit.
A sales toolkit is designed to get new reps up to speed and make sure everyone on your sales team is on the same page.
Think of it as an NFL team’s playbook. When a player is traded to a new team, they can’t just jump right in; they need to learn the plays, positional assignments, audibles, snap counts, etc. before stepping on the field.
Your sales toolkit has a similar function. It contains everything a new sales rep needs to know about your sales process, buyer personas, sales metrics, and talk tracks before they get on the phones.
What Should Your Sales Toolkit Include?
In The Accidental Sales Manager, there’s a chapter all about Creating a Sales Toolkit. It highlights seven things each sales toolkit should contain:
- Introductions/voicemail scripts
- Templates for e-mail correspondence
- Qualifying questions
- Interview questions
- Common customer objections
- Objection responses
- Sample closes
This is a good starting point, but a thorough sales toolkit should include even more resources for sales reps to use.
Here are 10 additional things that savvy sales teams should include in their toolkits:
Sales Team Structure and Responsibilities
This may seem obvious, but it’s important to be transparent and explain the structure of your sales team and the responsibilities of each position. This will help new reps understand how the team functions as a whole and how they can help the boat go faster.
Buyer Personas
Not all prospects are the same, but most can be bucketed into different segments, or buyer personas. Assuming you have established buyer personas, you should familiarize new reps with each persona so they know how they differ. Once your reps have your buyer personas down pat, they are ready to learn the talk tracks for each.
Sales Process Details
There are two primary aspects of your sales process: standardized scripts and democratized sales metrics. Your reps need to know how they communicate with prospects – not to regurgitate the same exact message repeated, but to strive for consistency. And making sales data available to everyone on your team will increase transparency and reveal actionable insights that might otherwise be missed.
CRM Guidelines and Workflow
New sales reps should learn your CRM workflow inside and out sooner than later, since they will be spending much of their day navigating it. It’s essential for your reps to all use your CRM the same way and enter data consistently, otherwise your data will become muddied and you’ll make life difficult for your admins.
ROI calculator
When pitching to prospects, you need to sell them on the business value of your product or service. This is easier to do if you have an ROI calculator on your site, like Infer’s or HubSpot’s. This shows prospects exactly what type of return they can expect to see, and when they can expect to see it.
Pricing calculator
Once prospects have shown significant interest in your product or service and are ready to talk turkey, a pricing calculator becomes your best friend. This will help you quickly tally up how much a prospect might have to shell out to make the deal happen. Check out VMware’s pricing calculator for a little inspiration.
Marketing collateral (blog posts and eBooks)
If you’re like most companies today, your content marketing team has created countless blog posts and numerous resources for discovery and lead generation purposes. But this content can also help move prospects down the sales funnel, too. Make a Google Sheet of your very best marketing collateral so that your reps know which assets they should be sharing with prospects.
Product gifs
If you’re a sales rep at a SaaS company, it is extremely useful to have access to gifs that show off the best screens of your product. Still images will suffice, but high quality gifs are more likely to impress your prospects and make them curious to learn more. Work with your product marketing team to create a folder of gifs that your reps can send out to prospects via email.
Here’s an example of one that we have on deck for sales reps to use here at InsightSquared:
Competitive comparison
Chances are, your competitors will come up at least once in conversations with a prospect. It’s critical to be well-equipped for these discussions by knowing exactly which advantages (and disadvantages) you have compared to each competitor. Some factors to consider are price, ease-of-use, functionality, time-to-value, and customer support. Preparing for these discussions will help your reps win customers from competitors.
Customer testimonial videos and quotes
It’s much easier to sell something if you have social proof to back it up. Your prospects want to see that other people have experienced real success from your product or service, especially if your company isn’t well-known. Featuring customer case studies and quotes on your website is a good starting point. And getting thorough, positive reviews on sites like G2 crowd is even better. But if you really want your message to resonate with customers, creating a video testimonial can be extremely effective, when done right.
Here’s a recent video testimonial we did with the CEO of BoomTrain:
Now, this may seem like a lot of stuff to compile – and you’re right – it is. But creating a sales toolkit is worth your time. That’s why forward-thinking business leaders like Actifio CMO Michael Troiano argue that you should have one.
Many small- and mid-sized businesses shrug the idea off, thinking that sales toolkits are only for large enterprise companies with big budgets and ample resources. But this is a mistake. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to see the return from a sales toolkit.
Most of the information to be included in your sales toolkit is already known by your sales team, just not written down. Taking the time to document your processes and organize your resources will make life markedly easier for new reps (and even existing members of your team).
Cut down on onboarding time, learning through trial and error, and general inconsistencies by getting started on your sales toolkit today. Your sales team (and your entire company) will thank you later.
