In today’s highly competitive business environment, it is important to find and develop any advantage you can over your competitors. One of the best advantages you can bring to the marketplace is a well-trained sales team. This is especially true if your company engages in B2B selling where the skills and preparation of your sales reps are critically important for finding new prospects and converting them into customers.
A properly trained sales team has a thorough understanding of your company and its offerings as well as your industry and competitors. To achieve consistent growth, the ongoing training and development of your sales team needs to be part of your strategy.
The Benefits of Sales Team Training
If your company is considering the implementation of a training program for your sales team, some of the benefits you can expect include:
Increased Revenues and Profits
Done right, sales training will benefit your company in both the short and long-term. In fact, according to HR Magazine, organizations that annually invest $1,500 or more on training for each sales rep have seen an average of 24% higher profit margins (compared with companies who spend less on sales training).
Advantage Over Competitors
A better-trained sales team has an advantage over its competitors in all areas of the sales process, from finding and qualifying new sales prospects, gaining an understanding of their needs, to actually closing sales.
Decreased Onboarding Time
When the sales training program covers your best practices and the effective use of your sales playbook, it eliminates guesswork and allows new reps to make sales contributions sooner.
More Productive Sales Managers
Sales managers tend to be very busy executives. To be effective, they need to spend their time strategizing with reps and analyzing performance. Effective sales training frees them up for these more productive activities, rather than spending their time answering questions from their reps.
A Culture of Success
Providing sales training on a regularly scheduled basis lends to a winning culture. This is especially true if your training includes a focus on success stories and how your most successful reps tend to operate.
Training Topics for Your Sales Team
Even if your company agrees that ongoing sales training is key to developing your team and will provide a good return, it can difficult to determine the right topics to cover without being redundant or too simplistic.
Given that, here are four topics to consider:
Capturing the Prospect’s Attention
Ask your reps to put themselves in their prospect’s position. Would they want to make time to meet with them? Would their dialog capture and hold their attention? This topic focuses on helping reps make the right initial pitch to the right prospects in order to increase their sale pipeline and increase their opportunities for successful closes.
Building Rapport with Clients and Prospects
Professional salespeople have a way of building solid rapport with their clients and prospects. This creates a feeling of trust that is the foundation of doing business as people generally buy from those people they like, believe, and trust. Training for effective rapport-building will teach reps such things as how to properly discover a prospect’s needs, listening with empathy, and making the prospect believe that you understand their challenges and can assist in overcoming those challenges.
Developing a Powerful Presentation
Building a powerful presentation represents a large piece of the sales puzzle. While there are many elements that go into to making a sale, nothing is quite as important as tailoring a presentation about what your company can offer, specific to your prospect’s current challenges.
Closing the Sale
Asking for the business and closing the sale is the culmination of all the prior steps of the process. But in an effective close, the right decision makers have been identified, the specific product offering is agreed-upon, budget and pricing have been discussed, delivery options have been clarified, and any objections have been addressed.
eLearning for Sales Team Training
As online technologies continue to evolve, eLearning has emerged as a powerful option for sales team training, either to supplement or replace in-person sales training.
If your company is considering implementing eLearning for your sales training, some of the benefits you can expect will include:
Cost-Effectiveness
eLearning reduces or eliminates many of the costs of in-person, classroom-based training, such as travel expenses, classroom/ venue fees, the costs for on-site instructors, catering, and distributing printed materials.
Convenience
eLearning allows your sales team to conduct their training activities at a time and place that is convenient for them. All they need is an Internet connection. And with eLearning, training activities can be conducted after hours, so there is no need to pull your sales team out of the field during business hours.
Measurement
Many eLearning platforms provide tools for data collection and analysis. This information can be very helpful as you look to revise and improve your sales training over time.
Communication and Collaboration
If your company has remote offices, the ability to offer group and one-to-one online communications can be extremely valuable as your reps work to understand the learning materials and make it part of their sales practice.
LMS Portals for Sales Team Training
LMS Portals provides a cloud-based eLearning platform for sales team training. Our system makes it easy to develop and deliver sales team learning content under your company branding and as part of your existing web infrastructure.
Contact us to get started today!
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