In today’s highly competitive business landscape, developing any advantage over your competition is helpful. One of the most important assets a company can build to ensure a competitive advantage is a strong sales team. A highly trained sales team can generate new opportunities which can mean greater revenue for your company.
Without ongoing sales training, your team’s skills can deteriorate. Your more experienced reps may go into a rut, as they try to stick to old or outdated methods. And newer members of your team may be working with a limited set of information and techniques, resulting in lower sales contributions.
The Benefits of Sales Training
Here are some of the reasons that continuous training and development can help your company thrive in a changing landscape.
Reinforce Your Selling Methods
If your company already has already developed a proven selling system, frequent training can reinforce these methods. Over time, reps tend to work in a selling system that fits their own personal process, which might not be the most effective approach. Some reps might even get into the bad habit of skipping essential steps in the sales process. While your team might not notice they are doing this, an effective sales training program can help detect and correct these issues.
Leverage the Value of Practice
To be truly good at something, you need consistent practice. For sales teams, repetitive practice helps to ingrain your selling system and makes it second nature to your reps. For sales team, consistent practice has proven to increase opportunities and revenue generation, thus leading to greater commissions and income. This fact should make your reps want to practice their technique.
Improves Listening Skills
The right training techniques can help improve your reps’ active listening skills. Active listening effectively probes for the prospect’s pain areas to understand how your product or service can solve their issues.
Propose the Right Solution
While understanding the prospect’s pain is the key to qualifying opportunities and closing sales, it is critical that your reps understand the range and specifics of the products and services your company offers so they can determine the right fit in each situation. Including product and service training as part of your overall sales training program can help to accomplish this.
Five Sales Team Training Ideas
Below, we have outlined five training ideas you might consider to help improve you sales team’s skills and production.
Review Common Prospect Objections
It is likely that your reps are hearing the same objections from prospects repeatedly. It is also likely that at least one of your reps knows exactly how to counter these objections. A good response to a challenging objection can help establish credibility, thus increasing the chance closing a sale. Sharing these common objections and proven responses can help everyone on your team improve.
Selling Through Curiosity (STC)
STC is a concept that is gaining traction as a sales training method. In STC, a cooperative dialogue is engaged between individuals. Through this conversation, salespeople ask questions to stimulate critical thinking and create new ideas. The practice helps your reps to learn to ask questions in a way that uncovers the prospects’ challenges, goals, fears, and long-term ambitions.
Elevator Pitch Training
There are many occasions when sales reps encounter a short window to make an impression with a potential prospect. In these situations, the use of a short (30 seconds or less) ‘elevator pitch’ serves as a powerful sales tool. It is a good idea to work as a team to develop a universal elevator pitch. For this exercise, you may want to provide your reps with some creative freedom to let their personalities shine through. However, you’ll still want significant alignment so that there isn’t a great deal of deviation in the message across your sales team.
Presentation and Demonstration Training
Once your reps your sales reps have gained a good understanding of a prospect’s challenges and goals, they will want to leverage those findings as part of a presentation or product demonstration. In practice, it’s best to customize the presentation according to the prospect’s specific needs. The rep can then focus on a specific solution and build a path toward helping the prospect achieve their goals.
Share Success Stories
Taking the time to have reps share their successes with the team can both motivate the team and help to identify types of opportunities that may be repeatable. If you have a small number of reps who are generating the majority of your team’s revenue, it may be helpful to have those reps share their stories to create a valuable learning experience.
LMS Portals for Sales Team Training
LMS Portals provides a cloud-based eLearning platform that enables our clients to quickly and easily deliver powerful online training programs. Our system connects directly into your existing web infrastructure and supports your company branding for eLearning.
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