How to Upskill Your Marketing & Sales Teams

Organizations struggle when it comes to digital transformation, and this is happening because they focus on the technology and tools required. Digital transformation is about a lot more than that. In order to truly transform your organization, you first need to establish a digital mindset and have the key digital skills required to accelerate your transformation journey. Below we will have a look at 3 simple and effective ways you can upskill you’re marketing and sales teams.

First, let’s determine what is transformation.

Digital transformation is when you use digital technologies to create new or modify existing business processes, cultures, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market needs. According to a study by Statista: Digitally transformed enterprises will account for over 53 trillion dollars in 2023, up from 13.5 trillion dollars in 2018. Brian Corish the Managing director at Accenture Interactive states that the mistake that many organizations make in their digital transformation is that they make too many changes at once. “If you think about digital transformation, the companies that are the best artists are those that pick a point in the customer journey and transform that. They pick one part that they know they can create competitive differentiation and double down and over-invest.”

For your company, you need to think about the most areas you want to focus on. To begin with, you need to set realistic milestones that will help you reach organizational objectives. This can happen by improving the customer purchase experience, sales, and marketing alignment.

3 simple and effective ways you to upskill you’re marketing and sales teams:

Identify your mindset and skills gap

Digital is now a requisite and that thinking needs to feed from the top down. Your business needs leaders that understand the importance and impact of digital to create and cultivate a digital culture. In order to achieve this, you need to understand what is your current mindset and ask yourself a few questions including:

• Are your employees worried about or scared to use digital technologies?
• Do teams collaborate and share information using digital channels?
• Do employees understand and know the business targets and goals – KPIs, revenue, etc.? 

You need to take time and figure out where your employees are in terms of their understanding of the business can help you put processes in place that enable transparency and information sharing so everyone is on the right page.

Cultivate cross-functional teams

All your teams have to work together in order to ensure that your company’s message is clear and consistent to engage prospects and convert leads. Encouraging cross-collaboration takes all knowledge and skills into account. Moreover, it allows you to share your ideas and maximize the activities in your organization by enabling your employees to work with and experience new technologies.

It also encourages teams to think outside the areas they work in and offers ways for recruits to get to grips with the company.

Develop a rewards scheme to incentivize learning

You need to also consider, that it can be difficult for your staff to fit in learning all of their other responsibilities. In order to encourage learning in your workspace, a good idea is to create a system of incentives to motivate and reward them.

These can take many forms for example:

• Offer dedicated time for training – this gives employees dedicated time to switch off work and focus on learning. It can be done once a week or 2-3 times per month.
• Credit learners publicly – shout about employees that take the time to learn through your internal networks.
• Do awards – this rewards a ‘learner of the month’ for example with a voucher or company day off.
• Monetary bonus – a cash bonus or extra money in a paycheck on a quarterly or annual basis.

Another way to incentivize learning is to develop a peer-to-peer scheme in which employees come together to share knowledge and skills. This can be done at all levels to ensure team leaders and members get the benefit of each other’s know-how.

Provide relevant training and functional learning

This may look obvious but a lot of organizations are still not doing it. You may have a learning management system in place, but is it up-to-date; In fact, when you look at the skills required in your business, map that to the training you offer. For instance, if you need a new social media specialist, offer training in that area so other team members can do it. Likewise, it is crucial to offer training that lends itself to functional learning and ensure your staff is ‘job ready’. In essence, you need your workforce to have skills that are instantly applicable and relevant across business areas so they can carry out specific digital functions.

There are many ways to get your digital skills up to speed and keep up with digitization. The main scope here is to fully understand your company and employees in order to create personalized and valuable experiences that cultivate careers. To sum up, your marketing and sales teams are valuable assets and need to be nurtured to ensure performance and retention. It’s a competitive employee market out there so is much easier to train the staff you already have in the skills they need than to continuously hire new ones.

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