As the Rio Summer Olympic games progress, athletes from more than 200 countries compete against the very best in their field for top honors. Although many Olympians possess natural physical advantages, reaching the pinnacle of their sport requires years of intense preparation, including repetitive practice, coaching and individualized training plans to ensure they attain peak performance.

So, what does this have to do with training ‘sales athletes’?

As business becomes more competitive and complex, sellers need to achieve a broad and deep set of capabilities and competencies to win. Essentially, “the learning curve is the earning curve, ” as the saying goes. Just like Olympic competitors, ‘sales athletes’ need meticulous preparation and optimal coaching. Yet, unlike athletes who devote their lives to preparing for Olympic gold, sellers and front-line managers don’t have sufficient time to devote to either.

Built for Sales

According to a recent Forbes article, the lack of coaches and mentors, sales tools, data insights, and playbooks are causing sales reps to burn out faster than the Olympic torch. The sheer volume of information reps must master and retain to be successful with today’s buyers make traditional methods of preparation and training highly inefficient.

Creating a top performing team, and avoiding seller burnout, requires wholly new approaches built for time-constrained sales professionals. Because our best performers tend to move quickly from one task to the next, be sure your sales reinforcement approach is at the same time mobile, fast, effective and engaging. Make technology to work for them, and not the other way around.

Enabling sellers in this way increases their chances of outperforming the competition. And like star athletes, ongoing coaching and support plays a huge role. Providing reps with opportunities to practice comes in many forms, including short scenario-based challenges or brief videos pushed to their mobile devices in minutes a day.

Studies show that investing in reinforcement strategies increases average annual quota attainment by up to 20%. To do this efficiently, today’s time-crunched sales managers need data on their reps’ actual knowledge and skill gaps, not just their percentage of quota. This helps them set specific development goals, and outline a detailed coaching plan to help achieve them.

So why wait until the next Olympics to get your teams ready? Request a demo of Qstream today to see how you can put mobile reinforcement, coaching insights and performance analytics to work for your ‘sales athletes.’