How to Take Your Sales Team Training to the Next Level
One of the questions we get from our SalesGym clients quite often is how to get more bang for the buck when it comes to sales training. It seems everyone wants more results for less money with less wasted time out of the field. They want their sales team training to be more relevant and create immediate improvements on sales calls that lead to more sales.
Here’s what we’ve found. Most sales training programs would generate better results if they would spend more time on fundamentals like:
How to communicate clear, concise and potent competitive advantages
How to start a sales interaction with an effective agenda every time
Breaking the habit of using closed-ended questions that generate too much talking and too little listening
How to use more persuasive customer success stories to suggest more assertive outcomes
We’re finding more and more sales training programs spend a lot of time on analyzing the opportunity, decision influencers and sales cycle and less time actually practicing the verbal challenge of selling. Year after year, customers tell us the biggest, most frustrating mistake salespeople make is simply talking too much but often, sales team training has minimal time committed to the kind of practice and coaching needed to break this stubborn habit.
4 Practical Steps To Better Sales Training Results
If you haven’t created a cheat sheet of 5-7 powerful competitive advantages in short, bullet point format, do it. This is the DNA salespeople need to create better sales interactions.
Create a master list of best practices when it comes to open-ended questions so every salesperson on the team has 20 possible questions they can choose from when it comes time to practice.
Sales Training Programs are better if there is more practice and coaching and less analysis and taking notes. Sales is a verbal challenge.
Coaches are essential. Teaching is great, but coaching is better. Coaches lead practices and correct bad habits. You must introduce strong coaching into sales team training to generate maximum results.
Elite sports teams, when they train, spend some time analyzing and learning new strategies and plays, but they spend a lot more time practicing and rehearsing those plays so they can perform at a high level under pressure.
Salespeople need more practice and coaching and less analysis and note-taking. That’s how to take your sales team training to the next level.
