Want to help your team improve its sales strategies? How do you empower your recruits to become more effective salespeople? A sales training program will help sales reps be more efficient with their time efficiently and resources while making more contacts and closing more deals.
Proper training sets workers up for success in any field, but it’s particularly important to sales teams. How else can a new sales rep dive into the process of cold calling and closing sales at a new company without the knowledge and expertise to deliver the proper message?
Providing both training for new recruits and recurrent training for experienced salespeople provides a variety of benefits to a sales manager, including:
- Reps develop the skills they need to boost their confidence – and confidence sells.
- Reps learn how to build stronger relationships with clients and customers.
- Reps consistently obtain new knowledge about the products and services they are marketing, helping them better engage prospects.
- Sales teams maintain higher retention rates when workers are more confident and successful on the job.
Looking for innovative ways to train your sales team? Check out the following eight tips for sales leaders that will help your teams become more successful:
1. Conduct short training sessions
To ensure sales reps are engaged with their training sessions and retain the information provided, it’s important to keep lessons short and concise. Research points to a 10- to 18-minute window in which students are the most focused – and attention spans are only getting shorter.
2. Embrace e-learning platforms
E-learning now dominates workforce training as companies around the globe embrace online platforms to train and educate their teams. With e-learning, sales reps can educate themselves where they are at their own pace. Plus, the information is readily available should any questions arise.
3. Crush it with content
Content – in the form of articles, videos, infographics and other multimedia resources – engages sales reps with their training in ways traditional lessons simply cannot. Fortunately, a plethora of resources are available to promote and train every aspect of the modern sales strategy. Can’t find the perfect content? You can create your own thanks to PowerPoint-alternative software tools like Beautiful.ai. Just add your content and watch as artificial intelligence designs interactive multimedia presentations for your sales training program.
4. Practice for rejection as well a success
Handling and overcoming objections is one of the most important skills a salesperson can have, but working with negative responses often is omitted from sales training programs. Sales teams can practice performing various potential rejection scenarios, preparing themselves for the multitude of interactions that can occur with prospective customers.
5. Incorporate data
While successful sales managers are well-aware of their team’s performance, it’s also important for sales reps to regularly reflect on their results. As a part of ongoing sales training, salespeople should review their recent sales calls and meetings to understand what worked and what needs improvement, examining the data that measures their performance at each stage of the sales funnel.
6. Utilize plenty of listening
Listening sessions are one of the most effective ways to train new hires on sales teams. By listening to not only demos but actual calls from experienced sales reps, recruits can get up to speed faster. Later, reps can practice making calls and listen back to their own recordings, listening for ways to improve.
7. Make training personal and consistent
Sales reps will have far greater engagement with personalized training sessions. Make time to regularly meet with every team member and conduct one-on-one personalized training sessions, offering consistent feedback and establishing open communication. Be sure that whatever training sessions you provide, they are frequent and consistent.
8. Empower recruits with onboarding
How do you empower new sales reps and send them into the marketplace with confidence and skill? Onboarding describes the process of introducing new salespeople to a brand, its products and services, as well as the company culture. It’s more than orientation since it can involve a variety of processes ranging from initial contracts to training and social introductions.
Beautiful.ai – and PowerPoint alternative presentation software like it – makes it simple to create entire onboarding programs with interactive presentations. Check out our New Hire Onboarding Template among our various presentation templates for a guide to crafting your own beautiful onboarding presentation.
