Are You Providing Effective Sales Training to Your Team?

A Shift From Traditional Sales Training

In an era where the average adult attention span has supposedly narrowed over the past 20 years, more traditional methods and practices of Sales Training are starting to become obsolete and ineffective. You might be finding it harder than ever before to engage your team and see substantial results. Sales Training needs to be reinvented for the modern day to strike a chord with employees and adapt to the shifts in habitual human behaviour that see us constantly checking social media and glued to our mobile devices.

Sales Training is a core practice in business. As a business, you want to ultimately drive sales of your products or services, and do so in the most efficient way possible. Effective sales training should allow your employees to continue to learn, improve their skills and adapt to an ever changing sales environment. Working out the best and most effective ways to train and work with your colleagues is mutually beneficial to stakeholders at every level of the company.

Sales Training shouldn’t be viewed as a standardised set of workshops that have to be completed throughout the year. They are a key component in improving the workplace environment and an opportunity for your team to grow and flourish together. Sales Training is a chance to get the whole sales team together to learn with one and other and from one and other. It’s also the perfect time to encourage colleagues to bond with each other across different levels of authority. This is great for improving team morale and gaining a greater sense of teamwork in the workplace.

A problem with traditional techniques for sales training is the lack of room for personalised learning. Everything used to be standardized and everyone would have to learn the same, the “correct way”, however we know that everybody learns slightly differently to one another and so these standardized sales training workshops wouldn’t be most effective with the whole team. Having different approaches to sales training can offer effective, interesting and relevant content to those who learn through listening and those who learn through doing.

One thing that needs to be ensured is that the key sales skills are addressed. Knowing how to approach everyday issues is an invaluable skill to have. Even the most experienced of salespeople face obstacles in their work that can be prepared for by simply producing scripts that can perfectly answer various everyday complaints. Another important skill is spotting the signals from a bad customer and ceasing to proceed with that customer as soon as possible. Chasing prospects with no potential aren’t worth your time. The art of the cold sale is a skill that every salesperson needs. Getting over the innate fear of speaking to strangers is the first step in perfecting a cold sale and gaining confidence in sales.

Whilst the content of the Sales Training is very important, there is often a disconnect between the training content and its application to real life scenarios and situations. If there is no obvious application to real life scenarios then interest is lost very quickly and the attention paid to the content can dwindle. To bridge this gap, it is vital that there is time to practice transferring what they’ve learnt from the sales training to realistic situations. One of the best ways to do this is by role playing with your team. This can help to make it clearer on how each workshop should relate to everyday work life.

Another good way to ensure that the Sales Training skills transfer to the workplace is by providing further guidance for your team beyond the training day as they start to build their confidence. The training days are only the start of the learning process.