Sales training helps sales people learn new skills, and improve their selling techniques and processes. The goal is to enable the sales team and drive revenue growth.
We have collected 5 tips to help improve your sales training relevant for all sales training ranging from virtual sales training to on-site sales training, and from SaaS sales training to pharmacutical sales training.
Table of contents
- How to make the training relevant
- How to make the training interesting
- Build a culture for sharing best practices
- Create a mentor system
- Ask your sales team for feedback.
1. How to make the training relevant
For the sales reps to pay attention, engage and reap the full benefit of the training, it is essential to make the training relevant.
Changes in technology, legislation, customer needs, or your own product offering all serve to make the sales harder unless the salespeople stay on top of the changes. You might have some clear ideas of what the sales reps should learn, for example how to sell in a virtual context, which is increasingly relevant.
But how can you know what is top of mind for your salespeople? Are they struggling to know which questions to ask? Or is it something completely different that holds them back?
To make sure that the training is relevant, you should start the session by asking where the sales reps are most interested in improving.
With this Curipod template, the sales team together comes up with ideas and votes on what they are most interested in learning. Connect their responses to the rest of the training.
2. How to make the training interesting
No one likes watching a PowerPoint presentation for 2 hours sitting still - especially not salespeople who like to engage. Variation is key. You can use techniques such as demonstrations, role-playing exercises, or video examples.
However, sometimes you have a lot of content you have to go through, such as the basics of writing cold emails, writing proposals, or something else.
In this case, make sure to let everyone engage in between your presentation by using polls or word clouds. For example, let everyone write the words they would avoid using in the subject line in a cold email.
3. Build a culture for sharing best practices.
Improve your sales team by building a culture for sharing best practices, tips, and tricks. For new methodology and practices to take root in your company, you should discourage individual hoarding and encourage collaboration.
You can use the opportunity during sales training to strengthen the culture of sharing. One way to do this is to let everyone write down their best sales tips or success story, and then let everyone vote for which top 3 stories or tips they want to hear more about.
Get started creating a culture of sharing with this template.
4. Create a mentor system
Starting off in a new sales team can be intimidating and overwhelming. If you have new people on your sales team, you should consider making a mentor system where one of the more senior sales people acts as a mentor to one of the junior sales reps.
This will lower the barrier to ask questions for the junior salesperson, and it helps build up a collaborative culture. It might even further develop the skills of the senior salesperson who gets the chance to serve as a mentor and reflect on his/her own skills and processes.
5. Ask your sales team for feedback
Some sales training sessions change our lives, and some get forgotten the moment the 274th PowerPoint slide leaves the screen on the last day of the training.
You want to know how your salespeople feel at the end of the training.
To get feedback from everyone, you should ask for it at the end of the training, and not send it out as a survey after the training. I repeat - get the feedback immediately. Sending out a survey afterward gets fewer respondents and a biased outcome. The feedback should be given anonymously to ensure honest feedback without people needing to think about how you might or might not interpret it.
Curipod’s sales training feedback template is a great way to get feedback from your team at the end of the training.