Most of the time a sales organization’s success depends on its sales force having a high level of sales effectiveness. In order to meet this need, you must continuously train your sales team, especially when sales is broken. There are a few training techniques you can use to speed your team's development and improve sales performance. These seven sales training techniques will provide you with a range of options.
- Role-playing
- Workshops
- Online sales training courses
- On-the-job training
- Shadowing effective salespeople
- Sales coaching
- Sales meetings
Role-Playing
The best sales teams spend time role-playing. The better the sales conversation, the better the salesperson's results. Those who don't include role-playing as part of their training strategies will find their sales force struggles because they lack effective sales talk tracks, which work best when they are practiced through role-play. The first time your team uses talk tracks should be in a safe environment where they can gain the confidence and competency to use powerful sales language choices and value-based conversations.
There may be nothing more helpful for a sales team than working out the language for the different conversations they have with their prospects and clients. Rehearsing and adopting the language necessary to execute a sales strategy improves sales results. To get the most out of this powerful training technique, you can learn more about the rules for role-playing.
Workshops
A sales workshop is a highly effective way to train salespeople, especially when it comes to sales skills. Providing the sales force with a strategy and a set of sales exercises that allow them to work on the strategy with their team allows salespeople to learn from each other. Because some salespeople have greater experience or competency, they can help their peers see something that was invisible to them before the workshop.
This approach can include other sales training techniques, including sales role-plays. The major outcome of a workshop, however, is the ability to acquire or improve a sales strategy and its accompanying tactics.
Online Sales Training
The best part about online sales training is that it can be custom-tailored to the individual. Each person on your sales team has strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities, the areas that cause them to lose deals they might otherwise would have won. For example, one salesperson may need to improve their ability to gain the commitments they need to facilitate the buyer's journey. Another sales representative may need to improve their negotiation skills to see better results.
A development platform that provides a large catalog of content allows you to build a development and sales growth path for everyone on your sales team. While it's a good idea to train your entire sales force, you speed up your results by training and developing each individual, increasing their overall sales effectiveness.
On-the-Job Training
There are sales roles that can benefit from on-the-job training. Inside reps often learn sales by working in the role. These companies typically have assets such as interactive sales playbooks that help the salesperson know what they need to do and teach them the talk tracks that give them confidence.
The simpler the sales, the more viable on-the-job training is as a sales training technique. In large, complex sales, on-the-job training isn't the best technique. These types of deals often require a few sales frameworks and a sales methodology, or several frameworks and methodologies. These are better trained in workshops, live sales training, or virtual sales training.
Shadowing Effective Salespeople
Of all the sales training techniques one might employ, this one is underestimated. The ability to join a highly effective salesperson on a live sales call can teach and train a salesperson by giving them access to a strong sales conversation. Experiencing the sales conversation provides an example of what sales effectiveness looks like. You can identify the best salesperson to shadow by using five KPIs that measure sales effectiveness.
To use this technique to produce results, the shadowing B2B salesperson should not be permitted to passively watch the interaction. Instead, they need to write down every question the effective salesperson asks and the client’s responses. They should also write down every question the client asks and the salesperson's responses.
The real training happens when the salesperson being trained asks the effective salesperson to explain why they asked and answered questions in the way they did.
Coaching
To speed up the development of a salesperson or a team, coaching is one of the most effective strategies available to you. You can provide all the sales training techniques listed above and still have more potential growth in each team member. Coaching can tap into that.
The benefits of sales coaching are so powerful because it allows an outcome that is more difficult to produce in other training strategies. The sales coaching process addresses the behavioral change that produces better results. Sales managers who want to be good sales coaches would do well to use coaching techniques based on a competency model. This can help them to assess each member of their sales force and provide coaching in the areas where a change in sales behaviors leads to closed deals and high performance.
Sales Meetings
Your weekly sales meeting is a boring affair, one that does little to improve the sales force. By tackling some obstacle to success in sales, you can spend the largest part of that meeting solving sales problems. When a sales team leaves a meeting with something they can use to improve their sales, they will welcome it.
The key to the success of this sales training technique is to focus on one issue preventing the sales team from achieving its sales target. When the issue is identified and discussed, the team can identify the strategies and tactics they can use to solve it and make the necessary changes.
Using the Seven Sales Training Techniques
Each sales training technique can improve your sales force's effectiveness, and when they are used in combination, you can rapidly increase sales results. Understanding the different techniques available to you and the benefits each provides will help you decide the combination that will work best for your sales team.
The value of sales training is clear. By providing a range of training techniques, sales teams can develop the skills, knowledge, and confidence to become more effective and successful. Investing in sales training can have a tremendous impact on sales performance and help organizations achieve their desired outcomes. sales teams should take advantage of the many sales training techniques available to maximize their sales effectiveness and reach their goals.
