The growth and success of any organization are highly dependent on its sales team. It is no wonder that recruiters are always looking for the best sales personnel. Only a team of exceptionally talented sales professionals can propel your company to new heights and keep it ahead of the competitors.
But how do you do that?
An excellent training program for sales teams can provide a competitive advantage but can also be the primary driver for business excellence. In this article, we will take a closer look at what sales training is, and how good sales training programs can help you transform your sales and give your business that much-needed boost.
What is a Sales Training?
Sales training is a process that is developed to solve both immediate and long-term sales-related problems of an organization. It is typically developed to work towards achieving set sales goals by motivating the employees and guiding them through best practices.
A good sales training process involves a series of steps such as:
Documentation
Documentation should be the first step of a sales training process. This includes documenting all the steps involved in a sales training process to streamline your progress. You can even make use of readymade templates for the same.
Here is a free sales template for you.
Sales rep assessment
Once documentation is completed, it is time to assess your sales reps by understanding each of your sales reps well. Find out their strengths and weaknesses. Use a tool like Rafiki to conduct mock sales calls where you capture their interactivity, talk-listen ratio, patience, etc. Understand where they are lagging behind and get those areas improved.
Learning about the product and company
Now is the time for a sales rep to learn about the company, the product they are required to sell, do sample tasks on CRM, and everything else that forms part of the company's sales training techniques.
Deliver the presentation
Each of the sales reps is then required to deliver a presentation related to the product they would be selling in the market.
Becoming a professional
This is the last step where the sales reps start working as professional sales representatives for the company.
What are the objectives of sales training?
The main objective of sales training is to make salespeople well-versed in their job. Well-designed sales training programs prepare candidates for common sales challenges and the best ways to deal with these challenges.
Other objectives of sales training include:
- Ensuring long-term capability of dealing with sales situations.
- Ability to deal with changing sales needs with changes in environment and time.
- Getting to know the IT aspect of dealing with sales.
- Understanding the customer needs and perceptions.
- Making the sales force more capable and flexible.
What training does a salesperson need?
A salesperson is trained on how to sell the product using their skills and knowledge. They are trained to know everything about the product, its uses, how it addresses customer needs, and how they can build a better relationship with customers.
Here are the different types of training a Salesperson needs:
- Communication training to train sales reps to communicate with customers well.
- Customer service training to enable sales reps to sort out customers’ queries regarding sales.
- Sales negotiation training to train sales reps to have the upper hand while negotiating with customers.
- Emotional Intelligence training enables a sales rep to be emotionally and mentally strong and also understand customers’ emotions better.
- Sales Executive training is provided to sales reps at higher positions too, such as sales managers.
- Technology training to train sales reps to work remotely and be well versed with updates in technology and use them to their benefit.
- Sales onboarding training to train sales reps on the right way to place the company’s product in the market.
What are the best sales training platforms?
There are many sales training platforms available in the market. Here are some of the top ones that can help you achieve your goals:
- Rafiki
Rakifi focuses on using sales calls to understand how your reps are engaging with your customers and makes use of artificial intelligence to train sales reps. It helps in increasing sales conversions and converting them into revenue. The tool comes with a free trial version. For advanced functionality, you can choose from any of its pricing plans starting from $17 per user per month. It also has a pay-as-you-go policy starting from $2 per hour.
- GoSkills
Go Skills is another sales training platform presented by David Brownlee, an award-winning author, and business coach. It helps in improving sales professionals’ sales techniques. They also deal in providing other skills like public speaking, Excel, customer service, etc.
- Mercuri
Mercuri has a stronghold as part of sales training programs as well. It provides training in 30 languages in 50 countries in about 15000 organizations.
- Action Selling
Action Selling is a self-service training resource program that has been providing sales training resources since 1990. It is one of the few companies that focused on integrated training skills data within the company’s infrastructure.
- Factor 8
Factor 8 is recommended for honing your sales training skills like a pro. It focuses on how to book appointments with customers, how to expand new businesses, add value to them, and much more. Factor 8 provides access to ongoing training scripts, coaching guides, and audio samples to keep the rhythm of training alive even after training is over.
How to create a perfect sales training program for your team?
Creating a sales training program from scratch all by yourself can be a tedious task and no company can afford to spend time on it. If you are looking to create a perfect sales training program for your team, it would be helpful to hire the services of a sales training platform like Rafiki.
When choosing a perfect sales training program for your team, make sure they provide training materials in different forms. It is also important to ensure that the sales training program is in tune with your company and sales reps’ needs. For example, Rakifi provides unlimited audio storage, conference call integration, and unlimited listening. Get in touch to learn more.
