Unlike the belief we might have, a salesperson’s duties go beyond simply contacting potential customers and giving a demo to pitch a sale. It involves them truly comprehending the clients, their needs, and their issues, being able to communicate with them, and providing genuine insight into how your company can actually assist them. Long-term customers are won only if your salesperson can do all of this.
Today’s buyers seek a partner in the sales process – someone who can walk them through the details of their products rather than basic information and generic sales pitches and who is aware of the customers’ requirements. The first step is building a productive training program that can equip your sales staff with the knowledge and tools they require to develop those significant buyer engagements.
Keep reading this article if you also wish to develop a successful and effective sales training platform.
Components of a successful sales training program
Interactive sessions
The most popular type of training is live training presentations since they can be made quickly, allow for last-minute modifications, don’t require rehearsals, and emphasize lecture over activity. Although contact is crucial to learning, it is challenging to design and needs to be delivered by trained specialists.
However, your training program should have numerous interactive sessions that force salespeople to communicate with the training instructor and one another. Discussing solutions to a problem, brainstorming ideas, and exchanging experiences are all viable possibilities. Roleplays and situational exercises are particularly helpful in fostering teamwork and learning. Consider having each member present a sales presentation to the group, after which the rest of the team is invited to comment.
Interdepartmental connections
Sales, marketing, and product teams must work together to successfully sell the product. Invite the product team to provide insights about the products and services, their unique features, and new product innovations. Request the marketing team to present collateral, new content, and sales ideas. Including all three departments in sales training results in a comprehensive learning experience and strengthens relationships across the teams, all of which have long-term benefits.
The customer’s viewpoint
Here is a new approach that might sound bizarre initially, but trust us with this. Inviting clients to take part in your training program is a terrific idea.
Customers are the best experts on the purchase experience. They are what your salespersons work for and try to understand. The sales crew gains a special and beneficial perspective when they invite customers to participate in training sessions. Having them discuss their shopping experiences, how they use your goods or services, and the difficulties they encounter is only a better way to understand the purchaser’s perspective and improve your strategies accordingly.
Online sales training vs. face-to-face sales training
Sales training has always been conducted face-to-face with managers or other sales team members. This is excellent since your salesman can converse, pose questions, and get feedback in person and in real time.
But today, you have more choices. More and more organizations are switching to online learning environments with learning management systems. What do you think might be the cause? Online training is adaptable. It has quantifiable effects and enables your company to train personnel wherever they are. The majority of rapidly expanding businesses nowadays have many offices in different locations. Face-to-face training is not very effective in this situation because the sales team sometimes has personnel in different cities or even different time zones. Online access is required.
You could also choose to go mixed by adopting a blended learning approach, but the final decision will be your organization’s calling and what works best for your setup.
Developing an online sales training program
Once you have a rough map in mind of what your training program will look like, what it will have, and what needs to be kept in mind, you can develop your training program.
Planning
Your firm will have a distinct planning process for your sales training. There are a variety of procedures, industries, and products at work, but there are some common actions that any organization can and should take. Begin by reviewing the prior training that was being provided, whether you’re just beginning to develop an organized sales training process or seeking to improve the one you already have.
From here, you may start considering the type of training you’ll be providing and the ideal time for doing so. Choosing the formats, you’ll use to present your training material is a good idea at this point. What classes will be offered online through your LMS? Consider if you want face-to-face sessions and how many talks, live webinars, or videos will be recorded. Knowing this will provide the training structure and help your team execute the plan successfully. Check out https://www.allego.com/learning/sales-onboarding/ for ideas on how to create a successful sales onboarding and training program.
Access to the training
You must choose how the training will be available to your team and whether you will link it to the LMS, which will link to your HR system. This implies that a salesperson is automatically added to the LMS when added to the HR system at the time of joining. Additionally, they can immediately access all of their training on the first day. You may add a smaller team using a CSV file if you have a smaller team.
Automating management
Making sales training as simple as possible is essential if your company is rapidly expanding and constantly adding new team members. A learner may be automatically allocated to a group when added to the LMS. This group’s membership can be defined by predetermined criteria that you choose in the LMS. For instance, your groups might be chosen based on the new salesperson’s sales rank or their instructor’s identity.
Testing your team
How can you determine whether your salespeople are genuinely learning and remembering what is being taught once you’ve prepared the training and have the skills to handle it?
Assign the weekly tasks through LMS that every member of the team is required to finish within the given timelines. Run a webinar or in-person session to make it more customized and mixed. Your salespeople can demonstrate what they’ve learned over the past week, boost their product knowledge, and receive immediate feedback from other team members in person.
Measure and repeat
The procedure is not over once the training session is ended. You should evaluate the effectiveness of your training as a company. You may use the report feature of your LMS and compare these to the outcomes your sales team obtained before implementing this training technique based on your KPIs, such as ROI per salesperson or onboarding time.
By building an effective training program for your team, you can change the results of the most crucial parts of the business and prepare your sales team to counter and navigate sales through every potential customer.