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Investing in team training is a critical part of business success and growth. Your sales team is the backbone of your company, and your employees are just as vital to business success as your customers.
In today’s age of digital transformation, sales management teams must adapt their sales training strategies to evolving consumer trends and the global shift towards remote work.
You can’t simply train your sales reps once, send them out into the world, and expect them to adapt to new challenges without fail. Investing time and resources into sales rep training can make a dramatic difference to your bottom line sales and overall business growth.
Sales is a dynamic area of business that’s constantly in flux. For this reason, it’s essential to update training materials and methodologies regularly to ensure your sales team is always empowered with the knowledge and resources they need to handle customers effectively and close more deals.
Effective sales coaching is about supporting sales reps and ensuring they’re well equipped to manage the sales pipeline successfully and meet sales goals. So, how can you ensure your sales rep training is raising your bottom line rather than lowering it?
In this article, we’ve outlined four tips to help you create an effective sales training strategy.
1. Take advantage of eLearning opportunities
In the post-pandemic world of remote sales, eLearning is a key trend that businesses everywhere are leveraging in the absence of regular in-person coaching sessions or classes. Providing your sales teams with online opportunities to keep developing their skills is a low-cost investment that can impact bottom-line sales.
eLearning solutions are great ways to help reps hone existing skills or learn new ones via guided modules. These can be completed during periods of downtime or during specified training sessions to ensure reps meet learning goals.
You can angle these eLearning opportunities as a way to bring remote employees together to facilitate a friendly and sociable workplace culture among remote sales teams. Set aside time for bi-weekly or monthly teleconference meetings where sales reps can converge to discuss their course, what they’ve learned, and how that knowledge aligns with company goals.
You can use an employee schedule template or cloud-based scheduling software to program specified eLearning time into your sales team’s working week.
Why go to those lengths to introduce eLearning into your sales training strategy? Because employees want it. Fully 94% of workers said they’d stick with a company longer if it invested in their development, according to a recent LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report.
2. Empower your sales teams with the right tools
An essential part of sales rep training involves ensuring your team is equipped with the right tools and knowledge to utilize them effectively. With a great tech stack, your sales team can more effectively automate and accelerate tasks like sales prospecting, lead qualification, and social selling, leading to more sales and improving your company’s bottom line.
There are plenty of tools your team will need to become the most successful salespeople possible. Here are some examples:
- Call center software: Ensure the solution you choose offers essential features like outbound diallers, caller ID, IVR, scripting, etc.
- CRM software: These allow your sales team to manage and access customer data.
- Sales prospecting tools: Tools like Crunchbase will help your sales reps to identify valuable leads that are more likely to become paying customers.
- Sales enablement tools: Provide your sales reps with complete visibility across the sales content lifecycle.
It’s crucial to ensure that your team knows how to leverage these tools to the best of their abilities. For companies taking on remote sales reps, it’s a good idea to create walk-through webinars explaining how to use these tools and share a sales playbook to ensure reps have the resources they need to tackle situations on their own.
This includes making sure sales reps are equipped with all the product knowledge they require to answer customer concerns and questions from potential customers.
For example, suppose you provide software development services. In that case, your agents need to be able to answer any technical questions they might get—from “what is regression testing,” “what coding languages do you work in,” or something else entirely.
3. Keep it short and sweet with micro-learning
Did you know that continuous training gives 50% higher net sales per employee? Most sales training is forgotten after 30 days, and sales reps often revert to old strategies. Therefore, companies must implement regular training as part of their sales training program to ensure that reps continuously learn, develop, and move forward.
The average sales rep spends just 36% of their time actively connecting with customers; the rest of it is divided up between an array of other tasks, including administrative tasks (25%), service tasks (16%), and traveling (6%). That doesn’t leave much time for training!
Microlearning is a great way to keep your sales team engaged with bite-sized learning that can adapt to a busy sales rep’s schedule. This involves sharing short learning units that take 5-10 minutes to complete and can be accessed from any desktop or mobile device.
These learning units allow sales reps to participate in learning and skills development whenever they have a few spare minutes during their day. Microlearning can be used to develop sales reps’ behavioral and communication skills.
Sales managers and business leaders must think of innovative and engaging ways to present these learning opportunities, such as through video, gamification, interactive activities, short webinars, simulations, and micro-assessments.
Ensuring your sales team is kept up-to-date on the latest sales strategies and consumer trends via microlearning ensures that agents are consistently improving to align with business goals.
4. Reward team and individual achievements
One of the most effective and least complicated ways to ensure your sales reps are happy and engaged is to recognize and reward their achievements. As individuals, we like to know when we’ve done something well. This is what makes us feel valued as employees. In the same way sales managers use a rep’s mistake as a learning opportunity, they should recognize their team’s wins—whether they’re big or small.
Say, for example, your team was asked to promote a new product release. Collectively, they did a great job and closed lots of sales. Acknowledge their achievement in your next team meeting and ensure they know that their effort is appreciated.
Remember that it’s not just about recognizing closed deals as wins. You can point out other things that team members are doing well to boost team morale and encourage productivity. You can also offer incentives in the form of bonuses, gifts, etc., to encourage sales reps to raise bottom line sales.
Final thoughts
In essence, selling is about closing deals. However, in reality, it’s so much more than that. Your sales team is made up of real people who are constantly learning, growing, and improving. Businesses need to conduct regular training sessions (online or offline) that foster an environment where reps can communicate and collaborate as they hone their skills.
Remember, your company’s success depends on having highly trained sales reps who can close deals and raise your bottom line. So make sure you’re investing the appropriate time, resources, and energy into the people who are driving your financial success.
Sam O’Brien is the Director of Digital and Growth for EMEA at RingCentral, a Global VoIP, video conferencing and call center software provider. Sam has a passion for innovation and loves exploring ways to collaborate more with dispersed teams. He has written for websites such as G2 and Hubspot. You can find him on LinkedIn.
