Why training your sales team is essential

Salesforce Training reported that over 50% of sales managers are too busy to train their sales teams.

A sales team that is always learning is a team that doesn’t become stagnant – particularly if you have more experienced members who are at risk of falling in to a slump, and heading off to find a new sales opportunity. As your sales team is likely filled with a diverse group of employees, with different personalities and approaches to their job, effective training must be unique to this makeup – it takes some creativity, and you’ll likely need to steer away from traditional sales methods.

Below are 3 effective strategies sales managers can use to get your sales staff up to speed, and the boat moving forward for your business:

Make use of effective, knowledgeable content

The amount of resources available on sales techniques are unlimited. Blog are available online, where experts in sales go in to great detail to discuss tactics and strategies proven to be effective.The following are brilliant:

• Neil Patel
• John Barrows
• Matt Heinz
• Life Long Learning

Taking cue from the above (and there are plenty more) and anything you have done in the past that could be useful is a great first step in training your sales team – you can also create a folder where you can store all of these resources, so your team can use them at their disposal.

Richard Palmer, for example, is an experienced sales professional, now running his own Sales Training business, called SureTrain. In the video below, Richard gives us a few pointers of why training your sales team is essential:

Buddy system

Working in sales, you may have experienced this before. The buddy system is the process of teaming up two people, one who needs more training, and another, an expert.

Pairing up a new starter with a more experienced employee is the best way to help your staff learn from each other and identify good or bad habits quickly. The more experienced worker will likely have asked all of the questions your new starter has in the past, so it;s great to have them there to hand. This is a great time saver, while also creating an engaging work environment.

e-learning is an advantage

There are a number of e-learning tools around today, and the best thing is your staff can educate themselves wherever they are with this. e-learning is something companies everywhere are embracing today, because it’s easily accessible if you’re looking to educate your team on new products, procedures or company policies.

Conferences or seminars

All salespeople understand that conferences are great for networking – but they also allow your team to learn from proven leaders in the industry.

Key tip: If you’re sending just a few members of your team off on a day out, put added pressure on that they should bring back value to the company, to make sure your entire team gets the benefit of the chosen few attending a conference. You can ask them to send a round up email to the team or give a quick 5 minute summary in your next team meeting.

Use customer feedback to bring your points home

Customer feedback is something that can really hit home with our team members. While negative feedback can sometimes be a red light, most of the time, it’s ideal to use as a learning experience for your employee. Help them to understand why the mistake, or whatever it was, happened, and how they can rectify and learn from it in future. Sales is such a fast-paced role that they’re bound to make plenty of mistakes – but it’s how they learn from it that is the difference between weak and strong skilled sales professionals.

And what’s the added bonus of training your sales team? Better retention rates. By transforming your workplace in to a positive, supportive environment of constant learning, your team will likely want to stick around. And we all know just how costly a replacement can be…

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