The Road To Effective Corporate Sales Training
Great products or services can’t speak for themselves. You need to set up a series of marketing strategies to attract and retain clients. Eventually, it all comes down to the people at the forefront of communication: your sales employees.
Sales techniques are not difficult to teach, but they're just the tip of the iceberg. A competent salesperson doesn’t close one-off sales, but builds strong client relationships. To achieve that, they need to showcase strong interpersonal skills and in-depth knowledge of the market. Unsurprisingly, it all starts with the right sales training.
Effective corporate sales training can help your sales team achieve great results in the long run. It builds a resilient workforce that consistently improves their sales skills and numbers. You want that for your business, but how do you make it happen? Here are 6 tips for sales training that makes a long-lasting impact:
1. Train Sales Employees On How The Market Works
Many companies make the mistake of focusing on product knowledge. Educating your sales employees on your products is essential. But sales team training needs to go beyond that. Employees should know not only how their product works, but also how the market works.
Today’s clients are knowledgeable and do thorough research before their purchases. A sales employee that knows less about the market than your client will be far from convincing and can hurt your brand reputation.
To that end, share the findings of your market research with your sales team to help them understand the industry dynamics. Walk them through your buyer personas. Demonstrate the different sales strategies that apply, depending on how far they are in the buyer’s journey.
Focus on the client’s pain points and how your product can address them. Study your key competitors. What are their offerings and prices? How can you compensate for a missing feature or higher price?
A sales employee with no clear understanding of the target market and competition will fall right into the trap of client objections. Equip your sales reps with well-rounded knowledge to help them approach clients with confidence and minimize objections.
2. Focus On Customer Experience
If your sales employees know their stuff inside out and are attentive to customer needs, kudos! That makes for great customer service. Is it enough to captivate the clients and build a loyal clientele, though? It’s a great start, but no.
Client retention is the result of outstanding Customer Experience. In other words, clients will return only if they associate your brand with positive emotions. Cultivating traits like active listening and empathy will help sales reps form an emotional connection with clients and offer them a memorable buying experience.
A consistent brand image is inextricably linked to superior Customer Experience and high sales rates. Since your sales employees embody your brand image, you want to get everyone on the same page. So, part of your sales training should focus on communicating your mission statement and company values. A clear company vision will not only inspire and motivate your employees but also give your brand a stronger voice.
3. Include Soft Skills Training
Increasingly more companies realize the benefits of cultivating soft skills in their workforce. There are two good reasons to include soft skills in sales training programs, too.
First, soft skills are versatile and can be put to good use in any job position. Essentially, they are valuable tools that enable employees to grow professionally and expand their careers. Corporate sales training is a lot more relevant and appealing to the millennial workforce when it includes soft skills training.
Second, sales reps encounter all sorts of different personalities every day. Unfortunately, there’s no script to tell them how to deal with each one of them. There’s only one way to do that, and that’s through increasing their emotional intelligence.
So, what soft skills does your sales team need the most? Sure enough, communication and persuasion skills are the bare essentials. However, an often-overlooked soft skill that deserves a special spot among your sales training topics is resilience. Think about it: with rejection being part of their daily routine, your sales employees’ self-esteem takes a hit every so often. To help them view challenges under a new light, you need to teach them resilience.
4. Tap Into The Knowledge Of Experienced Employees
It’s always best to hear it from the horse’s mouth. And there’s no one like an experienced salesperson to reveal not only the tricks of closing a deal but also the challenges of working in sales.
Enlist your most experienced or high-performing sales reps and create training videos where they share best practices and pitfalls to avoid. Or those reps could host a live online training webinar, including a Q&A session to add interactivity.
Ask them to speak of experiences that had an impact on their careers, giving examples of both successful and failed deals. Once your sales employees realize that rejection is part of the game, they’ll start seeing setbacks as learning opportunities.
5. Leverage The Right Technology
An effective sales training program is more than informative. It’s also engaging and tailored to your modern learners’ needs. With the right sales training software, this should be no problem.
An LMS like TalentLMS offers multiple features that maximize online sales training effectiveness. For example, you can create simulations and branching scenarios to imitate close-to-life situations. Your sales reps can practice different scenarios and hit the sales floor fully prepared to negotiate and handle objections.
Also, between sales meetings and client pitches, sales employees are pretty busy. Use mobile learning and microlearning to offer them effective sales training that fits into their packed schedules. These two powerful tools combined are also ideal for Just-In-Time training—and saving the day when the mind goes blank!
Last but not least, don’t forget about gamification. Given the competitive nature of sales employees, gamification elements will pique their interest and enhance their learning motivation.
6. Evaluate Gaps And Training Effectiveness
You can’t develop effective corporate sales training without evaluating knowledge and skill gaps first. Instead of making assumptions, carry out eLearning assessments to know where everyone stands. You can then personalize training and break your courses down into different levels.
For example, a seasoned employee probably doesn’t need to take a beginner’s course on sales strategies. But, your eLearning quiz might reveal that they need to refresh their key competitor knowledge.
Another essential part of sales training is measuring its effectiveness. High completion rates don’t necessarily indicate training success. On the contrary, your LMS reports and the results of eLearning assessments can be eye-opening. Review them carefully to figure out who has truly benefited from their sales training and who has room for improvement.
Conclusion
The market never stops evolving, and client expectations keep increasing. Why should your sales training remain static? With TalentLMS, you can create effective corporate sales training and update it along the way to keep your sales team on top of their game.
