When you improve your sales team’s skills, you will also notice an upward trend in your sales volume. Leading by example is always the best choice, but you have minimal time for training your team once the business grows. As a manager, you need to equip your sales teams with the requisite skills for a successful marketing campaign.
Sales training may be boring if you don’t know how to go about it. However, it’s a crucial aspect of the business. Sales training doesn’t have to be boring anymore if you have these three essential tips at your fingertips.
1. Focus on everyday sales challenges and goals
You should have noticed that your sales team requires training that gives a solution to challenges that the sales department faces. It’s crucial to conduct a SWOT analysis to pinpoint your prospect’s goals, pains, and challenges.
The best way to understand your sales team is by hearing from the stakeholders affected or those who see the challenges your employees go through. Don’t hesitate to ask the SDR coach about ideas to propel your team to the next level. You can also tweak the training courses to suit your future goals.
The goal of training your sales team is to have the team members prosper in what they do. However, if you leave out essential details about their roles, achieving their organization’s goals will be challenging.
Every time you bring in a new sales department representative, you need to spell out what you expect them to do. This helps them to stay on track and also gives them something they will aim at achieving.
Communicate how many emails, calls, or leads they should generate. While giving details of what is expected, it’s essential to understand that the new SDR may not deliver the results right aware. They will take time before they adjust, but setting goals will help them work with a purpose.
2. Take advantage of micro-learning
Micro-learning is all about allowing learners to digest information by breaking down the content into smaller pieces. It involves learning more details in a short period. This strategy works perfectly for sales departments since most salespeople are always in the field, traveling more and meeting deadlines. Sales require you to develop multitasking capabilities, so you need to ensure that your team responds faster and grasps quickly.
Micro-learning allows learners to access small chunks that they can comprehend quickly. It’s perfect if you have a sales team that has shorter attention spans. The learners don’t have to take long, so you don’t have to worry about the training becoming monotonous. If you’re into online sales training, micro-learning makes the training program accessible across multiple devices. Besides, it can accommodate different learners with different learning needs.
Some of the information pieces that you can convert into great micro-learning tools include:
- Information about competitors
- Customer reviews and analysis
- Industry reports
- Retrieving call data
3. Encourage peer-to-peer learning
It’s acceptable to allow your sales team to collaborate, share ideas and interact. In fact, most people in your sales team are there because they love interacting. A large portion of learning in the workforce involves informal learning through social activities. It becomes tedious when learners get to know only one person. The best thing you can do is to let everyone be and allow them to learn from each other.
We all enjoyed that moment in school when a teacher would ask us to break into smaller groups. Incorporating peer-to-peer learning is a perfect chance for your team members to bring in more ideas that may take the sales department to the next level. You can include Question and answer sessions to help you instill a culture of knowledge sharing in your team.
Another way to encourage peer-to-peer learning is by allowing the team to practice using call opening sessions. In these sessions, each member of the sales team gets to practice with each other. This boosts their confidence as well as enabling become better before they land on the actual job.
Conclusion
Sales training is complex, but you will have an effective sales training program with these training tips. Ensure that you understand your team before you embark on any training strategy.
