Quick Tips To Engage Your Sales Team
When it comes to maintaining a strong sales pipeline, employees with thorough knowledge of products are indispensable. Your product may be amazing, but if your employees lack product knowledge, they will do a poor job explaining your product's value to the customers. A good product training program ensures your sales team is well-equipped to represent your product well and answer all the customer queries, ultimately leading to increased sales revenue.
In most companies, product training involves long training sessions where employees are expected to sit through presentations and workshops. But this approach is passive, old-school, and often ineffective. To hold the attention of the employees and make sure they are actually learning, a different approach is required.
In this article, we will discuss some proven ways to make your product training sessions engaging and effective so that they don’t turn into snooze-fest.
Generate Excitement By Setting Expectations For Fun
It is really important to get your sales team excited about the training before the training session begins. Here are some ways by which you can generate the interest of the participants and set expectations for fun.
1. Choose A Catchy Title
Give your product training program an interesting title. For example, instead of naming your program, “Product Selling Training for Beginners,” you can name it “Get it; Sell It, Masterclass for Passion Chasers.” Go for a title that is short, catchy, fun, and piques the interest of the training participants.
2. Promote Your Training Program
Once you have chosen the title, promote your event to get the fun started early. Post interesting podcasts, articles, games, videos, quizzes, and other resources relevant to your training on your social media pages to involve the trainees even before the training starts.
3. Give Your Sales Team A Fun Task Before The Event
Give your sales team some fun pre-training activity, such as visiting a local store related to your product or reading an engaging book on the subject to encourage them to research your products more.
Supplement Their Learning
When it comes to creating engaging learning experiences, there’s a lot that can be learned from the learning pyramid theory by Edgar Dale.
The theory describes how retention and recall of information can be enhanced by understanding how the human brain works. The image below represents the learning pyramid. According to the pyramid of learning or the cone of learning, the trainees remember only 10% of what they read from written texts but retain 20% of the information learned if the audio-visual aids are involved. It also emphasizes that by varying training methods, learning can be enhanced to a great extent.
Here are some visual aids you can include to enhance recall and retention:
- Include interesting images, even comics, and drawings to make heavy sections of your training lighter.
- Make sure the graphs and flow charts you use in your presentation are brightly colored.
- Use videos, GIFs, and animations to animate your points.
- Tie heavy concepts to enticing images and visual representations.
- Ensure your presentation is clear enough for the participants to read by choosing the right combination of colors. For example, bright-colored fonts on a solid white background will make the text more legible and help emphasize your points more.
Demonstrate Using Role Play
When trainees' involvement in training is enhanced, they display a significantly greater understanding of concepts. A good way to involve trainees is by engaging them in role-plays and real-life simulations.
Role plays give your sales team a chance to encounter different scenarios in a safe environment and understand common scenarios, sales challenges, and sales mistakes that can hamper the deals.
Role-play encourages the active participation of all the trainees and helps you judge your team’s strengths and weaknesses. Here’s how you can design a good role-play activity for your sales team.
- Pick one topic for each session.
- Portray the customers as demanding and reluctant to purchase. Keep raising the level of challenges as your team gets better.
- Give your team feedback on what they could have done better.
- Use positive reinforcement, such as using rewards, badges, and words of encouragement when they do well.
- Conclude each role-playing session with a quick summary of the lessons learned. You can even have one of your trainees summarize the lessons learned from the role-play session.
Gamify Your Product Training
Model your product training as a game, with clearly defined goals, interactive steps, and point systems. By gamifying your product training, you will get your trainees involved in the training and force them to care about progress. Here’s how you can make your product training game more effective:
- Structure your game based on the information you want to teach and the complexity of your product.
- Your gamification design elements for learning should be such that the team members would want to repeatedly engage with it.
- Use narrative to tie your product-based training. Narrative appeals to human curiosity and makes learning interesting.
Use Interactive Activities
Interactive activities pull your employees in and get them on their feet. Here are some strategies that you can use:
- Have your sales team answer creative icebreakers, like what their favorite sales superpower would be. Icebreakers help more serious conversations flow well too.
- Instead of simply sharing information, share stories relevant to your topic. Keep asking your trainees some fun questions in between.
- Divide your trainees into small groups. Have each group teach a mini-lesson to the rest of the group. This is a highly effective strategy. As per the Edgar Dale pyramid of learning, this enhances learning by 90%.
Assess From Time To Time
Besides using the above strategies, it is also very important to assess your trainees' knowledge from time to time. Doing so will help you identify your employees' training needs and knowledge gaps early so you can mold your training accordingly.
The assessment shouldn’t only be at the end of the training; it should be sprinkled creatively throughout the session.
Conclusion
No matter how good your training material, your training won’t bring you results if your trainees aren’t engaged. By using the strategies above, you can up the interest levels of your trainees and transform your training session into a highly enriching experience.