How To Improve Your Sales Training: 5 Top Methods

Every company needs to ensure its sales team works as effectively as possible. That means ensuring everyone’s highly trained in all aspects of the sales process, products, systems, and tools. Sometimes, sales training does not deliver the desired results.

Why?

• You train salespeople on all products and skills, not knowing the ones they need
• Death by PowerPoint, no interaction
• One and done, one training and no reinforcement or applications
• No skills assessment to guide needed training
• Wrong delivery mode
• No peer-to-peer learning
• No new behavior changes

If that’s the case, you’ll need to know how to improve your sales training.

You can do this in multiple ways, some of which might be more practical and effective than others. Five of these stand out, as they’ll impact your training process more than others.

They’ll have your sales team closing more deals before you know it.

1. Assess the Skills, Motivations, and Beliefs of the Sales team

How effective is your sales team? How much more effective could they be? What if you identified sales skills goals and closed them? What would be the impact on your net income to increase the sales effectiveness of your team?

These are all great questions a strong sales assessment instrument will answer.

The instrument we use reviews 21 sales competencies while identifying motivations and beliefs.

Once we review the team sales effectiveness and improvement analysis report, we can prescribe specific sales skills training, coaching, systems improvements, and needed sales tools.

2. Make It Flexible

Your employees will naturally be busy. If they’re already on the job, they’ll likely have customers to see and deals to close. You’ll need to be flexible with your sales training to ensure you can work it around their schedule.

We recommend you prescribe blended, stacked sales training programs that leverage asynchronous online learning, live virtual training, instructor-led training, content quizzes, and application exercises.

For example, employees won’t be able to learn effectively if they’re worried about the sales presentation they’re missing out on. By building flexibility into your sales training, you also give them the time they need to learn in a way that best suits them.

It also makes the training more convenient for everyone involved.

3. Provide the Right Resources

Employees will need a certain number of resources to learn how to sell. You wouldn’t get into investing without trading guides, so why expect your employees to sell without selling guides? They must learn how to sell with your company by giving them the resources. You make things much easier.

That goes beyond giving them an employee manual and expecting them to make some sales. Learning materials, guides, software, and similar resources will all be vital.

That makes their training much easier while giving them something to rely on long-term.

We often use the application exercises after each training module to build sales playbooks and battle cards.

4. Offer Cross-Department Training

While the training should primarily be sales-focused, your employees must understand how they fit into the rest of the company. They mightn’t be able to do that without knowing how the other roles work and what other employees do.

By offering cross-department training, you can help them with this. You give them more empathy for their colleagues while building team spirit. You also let them understand that everyone’s working toward shared goals.

5. Good sales skills training facilitates peer-to-peer learning

Every sales team has recent employees, employees who have been in their role for 5-10 years, and seasoned salespeople with over 20 years of sales experience.

Leading sales training facilitates the exchange among salespeople to learn best practices and how to handle common objections.

Often, we find that veteran salespeople with over 20 years of experience have knowledge not captured anywhere, and we must capture it and teach our entire teams how to use it.

Other benefits include:

• Increasing employee skill sets
• Avoiding skills gaps
• Improving communication between departments
• Increased sales
• Increased market share
• Increased profits

The advantages of cross-department training make it more than worth it.

How To Improve Your Sales Training: Wrapping Up

You could reach a plateau with your team if you don’t know how to improve your sales training. They mightn’t convert as many customers as you want them to, so you’ll miss out on a noticeable amount of revenue. This is revenue you could have and should have won if your salesperson was trained in selling skills. Over 50% of salespeople today have not been trained in selling skills. Their training was focused on products and systems.

By offering cross-department training, making it flexible, and providing the right resources, you’ll be much closer to increasing your sales and creating a more effective sales team. You’ll see more revenue in time, making your business more profitable and successful.

 

The training sticks when sales training is delivered in different modes based on the skills the salespeople have and need, coupled with application exercises and times to practice their skills.

 

Would you like to assess how effective your sales team is today?

 

Would you like to close skills gaps that are costing your sales team sales today, like closing skills, negotiations, and discovery skills?

 

Let’s schedule a call to chat about your sales training program and how we can improve your sales team’s results in a shorter amount of time.