In today’s fast-paced environment, the key to a successful sales team is collaboration. Members of your sales team must be able to communicate with one another in real time, getting the information they need quickly, staying ahead of business trends, and exchanging best practices.

Blackboard Collaborate is an ideal solution to build a social enterprise by fostering teamwork and enabling knowledge sharing within your sales team. The numerous features of Collaborate can be leveraged to deepen these channels of communication and knowledge exchange, both of which are crucial to winning sales:

Web conferencing takes your online meeting capabilities beyond those of the average customer meeting or training. With the ability to show and share presentations and applications on your desktop, you’ll be able to demonstrate the value of your product quickly and easily.

Blackboard has been selected as a finalist in the 2012 Institute for Excellence in Sales & Business Development (IES&BD) annual awards! These awards are meant to highlight how top organizations execute strategies that lead to revenue growth and overall business success. We are proud of our nomination in the Excellence in Sales Training category, especially the recognition of our Blackboard Learn for Sales solution.

Launched last August, Blackboard Learn™ for Sales is a cloud-based learning management solution that embeds social learning directly into the Salesforce CRM platform. This allows sales managers and corporate trainers to enroll in and complete required training courses and tailor training programs across their enterprise. Learn for Sales ensures that professional development resources are all easily available within the familiar Salesforce environment, thereby addressing evolving business priorities and measuring successes against team performances and defined business goals.

Last year, journalist and author Jeff Jarvis published his second book, entitled Public Parts.  The book details Jarvis’s support of Internet openness and discusses the ways in which new technologies make modern life inherently public.  Though Jarvis makes many thought-provoking arguments throughout the course of the book, those that stood out to me were those that spoke to the ways in which the openness in the digital age has changed business and how we interact as consumers.

Throughout Public Parts, Jarvis argues that today’s age of openness will help business to find new opportunities while better interacting with customers.  This heighted level of engagement is made possible by new modes of communication that couldn’t exist without technology and individual openness:

During our recent Sales Shift webinar, which highlighted the ways digital tools are changing sales, several participants asked about the future of mobile devices and tablet PCs in the business realm.  Recent studies show that 19 percent of U.S. adults already own a tablet, and there’s a good chance that these devices could have a significant impact on sales as tablet usage continues to rise.

With this in mind, I thought it would be useful to discuss best practices for sales teams that implement tablets. I recently came across this article and video that gives practical advice for leveraging a tablet during sales calls and trade shows:

With all the discussion we’ve had recently about developments in sales training, I couldn’t help but wonder: can sales style actually be taught? Or is it simply something that comes naturally for certain individuals? Without a doubt, there are some aspects of sales that simply cannot be taught.

Prospective sales representatives must be eager to learn about the environment in which they are selling and should have the desire to foster genuine relationships with clients.  Sales representatives should also have the confidence and motivation it takes to follow through on a sale.  Though these primary abilities can be strengthened through training, they ultimately come from within the individual. From my experience, however, there are many lessons to be learned through an effective sales training program.