How to Build a Sales Training Program for your Business
The role of a salesperson should go beyond just reaching out to prospects and doing a demo. It’s about them fully understanding your customers and their problems, knowing how to talk to them, and offering real insight into how your business can actually help them. This is what wins long-term deals.
This is easier said than done; only 10.7% of sales training programs exceed salespeople’s expectations, 42.5% meet expectations, and 43.5% need improvement. As a business, you should strive to be in the first group – exceeding expectations. The reason? On average organizations that have implemented sales training that exceeds expectations, achieve a 10% higher win rate, lose almost 5% fewer deals, and lower sales rep turnover by 10%. That’s a lot of revenue.
Today, let’s take the first step to building a strong, revenue-driving sales training program. By sharing our experience here at LearnUpon, as well as what we’ve learned from our customers, this guide will help your team shape and improve its sales training program.
The goal of sales training
In the past, training for sales teams had a bad habit; it was myopic. It focused on educating salespeople on the product and maybe a little on best practices, but it was limited. In today’s world, that doesn’t cut it anymore. Customers and prospects want, expect, and need more.
To reach the big goal of positively impacting your bottom line, you need to look beyond just sharing information on your product. You need to give your sales team the tools they need to take a consultative, partner building approach.
To do this, at LearnUpon, we investigated what training would help with this process, which in turn would help build relationships between our salespeople and our customers. From this, we created “mini” learning objectives that, when tied together, created a comprehensive training strategy that leads to our overall goal – more sales. Here’s what we believe should be prioritized throughout the training:
1. Product
Every salesperson should know your product inside out. This means understanding the users’ perspective, what they want to achieve with the product, what each feature does, and how it helps them solve their problem. Embedding this knowledge into your Sales team means they can competently show your product in the best light, and answer every question a customer has about it.
2. Communication
How do you want to talk to your customers? Do you take a formal or more casual approach? What questions do you ask a prospective customer? These are integral things that your salespeople need to know. By establishing and teaching them a set tone of voice and cadence, they’ll be able to effectively interact with customers to clearly communicate who and what your business is.
3. Customer use case
Who are we selling to? If not properly communicated, this can lead your business down the wrong path. If your Sales team knows their core audience, they understand why this potential customer is interested in your product, the problem they want to solve, and successfully sell to people who are more likely to stick around in the long run.
4. Tools and resources
Within every organization, there’s a system of tools used by the Sales team and its key that each one of them knows how to correctly use them. For example, in order to communicate and track your prospective customers, your salesperson needs to understand how to use your CRM and how it interacts with other sales tools your team is using.
5. Company culture
Team and company culture is something we focus heavily on in LearnUpon. We believe every organization that puts its customers at the heart of everything they do should too. This means that from the get-go, your employees are instilled with the values of their team and wider organization That they know their coworkers, and the business’s history, to ensure everyone is working towards a common goal.
