Salespeople use less than half their time actually selling – the rest is spent on generating leads, administrative tasks, service calls, meetings, training and other activities. Whether they’re working in-house or out on the road, salespeople are working in their own way, according to their own style, and it can be disorienting when they come in from the cold and interact with the office environment again. Digital signage can be used to make them feel like they are part of a team, motivating and engaging them.
Multiple studies have shown that engaged and motivated employees are more productive, stay with their companies longer and have more original ideas that benefit the organization. Digital signage creates a sense of unity in the company culture – the screens are everywhere your employees are, and they quickly get used to looking at them for information they need. Though there is usually text in a digital signage message, the main way the brain processes it is visually. A good picture with a little supporting text can do wonders to motivate and inspire. In this way, digital signage supplements and extends one of the key roles management has when overseeing sales teams.
Digital signage can also help build better relations with staff. A positive environment means happy workers. A sale person needs to feel valued and confident, so they can build trust with potential clients. Digital signage can help foster these feelings.
Recognition and achievement are the two most motivating factors in office workers, and that goes double for sales teams. Use your screens to recognize top sellers, or someone who just landed a big client, or leveraged a small order into a larger one. Show progress towards goals, like sales quotas, using performance data updated in realtime, displayed as easy to comprehend graphic charts. This also shows a level of transparency that modern workers find motivating and expect from the companies they devote their time to. For teams that aren’t performing so well, this data can allow you to refocus objectives quickly, getting the best out of all your teams.
A little friendly competition can add a sense of fun to the serious business of selling. Using gamification techniques to get individuals and teams to try and out-do one another increases both productivity and employee satisfaction.
Happy employees also have a good work-life balance. Health tips, current information on traffic and public transportation, weather forecasts – these are all value-added items that are easy to include on your screens, making your signage more relevant to your audience. Your digital signage can include information on in-house events, like team-building, but also things happening away from work – a good concert in the area, the opening of a new restaurant, a family day in the city park. Tickets and coupons to venues and events outside the workplace can be prizes in gamified contests.
Using RSS feeds to keep track of the industry as a whole lets your sales teams see what they do as being part of something larger than just their day-to-day tasks. Relevant news items can be displayed as separate messages or in a scrolling ticker.
Your digital signage can even allow your team to communicate with each other. Employee-generated content lets them share stories of their successes, showing people that, while everyone has the same goals, there are many methods and styles available to get that sale.
Employees can even communicate back with management, making suggestions for streamlining the sales process and improving the sales materials used in the field. Together, sales and management can create a system of continuous assessment and improvement, communicating via digital signs.
Finally, do a quick in-house study or poll as to what your salespeople use their time doing when they aren’t actively selling. Then, think of ways to use your digital signage to make that a faster, more efficient process. Saving them time doing small tasks gives them more time to contact potential clients.
Your sales team are thoroughbreds, and you want them to enjoy where they work and feel they have a say in what happens around them. Your digital signage system is a fantastic tool for doing just that.