Establishing a team with a ‘let’s-go-gett’em!’ attitude can be challenging. Experience levels, company familiarity, and differing personalities can make it hard to produce a productive team that works well together.
In this post we’ll show you the best sales training ideas to help your team work more productively. Not only will these training ideas familiarize them with new processes or areas to improve, but they’ll come away fired up and ready to go.
Getting Started with Sales Training
Sales training works for a range of companies, spanning many industries. We’ll introduce you to some of the best sales training ideas so you can:
- Improve your employees’ sales skills.
- Familiarize your office with new terminologies.
- Train employees in a product.
- Encourage the use of sales tools.
A lot can affect productivity levels, so while you’re overall focus may be to get your team to “be more productive”, you may need to break it down to address the things affecting their productivity. What do you want your team to better understand? For example, offices that could benefit from improved collaboration need training exercises that build community. Offices that need a boost in sales could benefit more from activities that give teams a sense of competition.
Don’t be afraid to get creative with your training exercises! You’ll find the foundation for some effective activities here, but feel free to create variations of them to suit your office’s needs.
# 1 Assess Wins and Losses Across Your Sales Team
If you’re looking to successfully sell a service or product, you’ll need to study your teams’ interactions with clients. This means assessing how interactions ended in a positive client relationship.
If your team is having difficulty assessing their success, have a team member sit down with a client you’ve worked with in the past. Ideally, this client would’ve had a positive relationship with your business in the last six months. During this interview, have the present team members ask your client about their experience with your company. The questions can include:
- What did you enjoy about working with our company?
- What made your experience different from other experiences in this industry?
- In which areas do you feel the company could improve?
By asking these questions, your team can better understand how their behaviors are perceived by current and future clients. In turn, they’ll be able to adjust their behavior to better appeal to consumers in the future. And that’s a big win for your business.
But it’s not only the successful partnerships you should dive into. Deep breath: your team need to assess the cause of partnerships that went sour too. Granted, this won’t be as fun, but it will be useful. You may not be able to conduct an exit interview as readily, so have your team assess past emails, meetings, and proposals to see where things went wrong.
By providing your sales team with positive and negative examples, they’ll be better equipped to make sure all future partnerships are positive ones.
# 2 Look at Sales Processes from a Your Customer’s Perspective
Looking at problems from a new angle can help identify new solutions. Let’s say your sales team has a difficult time with a sales pitch. This may be because your team isn’t able to look at your business from a consumer’s perspective.
Customers come to your business because they need your solution and they’ll interact with your business’ processes in a very different way than your team – customers could be facing obstacles your team hasn’t even considered.
If you find that your team is having a difficult time connecting with customers, have them try out sales training ideas that put them in a buyer’s shoes. During this process, you’ll want to outline:
- Funnel pain points and successes.
- Buyer persona details.
- Business challenges, from the buyer’s perspectives.
You should also give your team the tools they need to successfully improvise during a meeting with a consumer. This doesn’t mean lying, of course. Rather, it means providing a consumer with the guidance and comfort that they need to proceed with a partnership instead of backing out. After all, a consumer who feels confident in a salesperson’s knowledge will be more likely to form bonds with the company at large.
# 3 Learning From One Another
Introduce peer learning by reaching out to your sales veterans. Instead of bringing in a third party to impart sales information to your team, have the more experienced members of your team tell the newer staff about their personal success in the field.
That kind of personal, in-industry experience will make your team members more comfortable asking questions that relate specifically to their interactions.
That sense of community in these shared discussions will not only work well for team morale, they’ll also get more of a feeling that they’re in this together. That kind of mindset will work wonders for their productivity.
# 4 Prepare Your Sales Team for Younger Audiences
By 2025, 75 percent of all industries’ workforces will rely on millennial support. This means your sales training ideas need to keep millennial customers in mind and address the learning styles and communication skills of millennial team members.
For example, consumer audiences and workforces thrive on micro-learning experiences: quick, digestible training sessions designed to impart information without keeping your employees from their work for too long. If you break down some of the aforementioned training exercises and have them take place over the course of several days – taking ten minutes, at most – you’ll get all the key information across and maintain your office’s productivity.
Time to Train
Sales training doesn’t have to take away from the productivity of your office. With careful planning, your team will come away from training days more invested in their work. How do you train your sales team? Let us know @TextExpander and in our group on Facebook.
