Creating Effective and Interactive Sales Training Programs

Creating Effective and Interactive Sales Training Programs

Sales training in its true essence is a learning program focused at imparting skills and knowledge to the sales professionals equipping them to perform their tasks better and address any shortcomings in their skillsets. Sales training programs can be split into following types based on their end goals.

4 types of sales training programs

1. Product and Market Training

Sharing an organization’s product and market knowledge is quintessential when a new employee joins the team and when there are any changes in the organization’s offerings or market dynamics. These trainings should also be used as refreshers to regularly emphasize the unique selling propositions and assess the learners’ knowledge.

2. Sales Skills Training

From effective communication, writing targeted emails, to prospecting new clients, these training cover the essential skills that are required in both chasing new clients and nurturing existing accounts. Real-life scenarios based learning in form of role-plays or simulations have proven to be highly impactful in imparting these skills.

3. Process Flow Training

Each organization has a characteristic sales process that is unique even from its closest competitor. Each new joiner has to be informed of the sales CRM process and leads management for effective record keeping and accounting purposes. Usually, refreshers are not required in this kind of training unless there is a deviation from the regular flow.

4. Team Management Training

Most organizations have a large, geographically diverse sales team. The leaders have to be awarded right set of skillsets for managing these high-performing, ambitious reportees. Communication skills and time management are key skills that every sales leader needs to possess for not only delivering his/her own KRAs, but to also keep the team well informed and motivated.

33% of customers say the impression the frontline makes changes everything. While sales professionals play a critical role in the overall success of a business, many organizations will overlook the importance of investing time and resources in developing sturdy sales training.

With the change in organizational working dynamics most departments, including sales have become remote operating. The client interactions have become limited to time bound Zoom and Teams calls, increasing the pressure on sales personnel to create an impactful pitch in the time-constrained environment.

In order to achieve the desired sales outcomes, organizations need to build sustainable sales training that is rooted in business reality and adapted for a digital era.

Challenge with developing sales training programs

1. Dynamic nature of the job

One of the biggest challenges organizations face with sales and frontline staff is that what sold yesterday may not sell today. As the business scenario remains dynamic, so does sales and so does the sales mantra of an organization. Keeping the sales training abreast with just in time requirements needs a significant amount of investment in terms of time, money, and leadership commitment.

2. Ensuring Engagement

Salespersons know that their ultimate goal is to “sell” and often see trainings as the time spent away from the activities directly linking to their goal. Well-defined end objectives coupled with Top Management participation are prime requirements for ensuring adoption of the sales training programs.

3. Time management

The organizations and functional heads not only need to ensure engaging, periodic, and sustained training for those working on their frontlines; they also need to do so without taking them out of production, by equipping them with ready and immediate access to information at their points of need.

4. Real life applicability

Another notable challenge is bridging the gap between conceptual learning and contextual learning. How to enable salespeople identify and understand the customer need so that they can not only solve the immediate business requirement but also develop a lasting relationship is the underlying requisite of an effective sales training program.

5. Transition to sales enablement

How do we transition from learning to sales enablement? Most sales teams now have more than one product in their offerings bag when they pitch the client. Having important contextual learning support within reach on a real-time can help sales and frontline staff understand the customers underlying need, pitch the most befitting solution, and handle and overcome objections to effectively close the sale.

Ways to personalize sales training

While organizations rarely need help knowing that their sales team needs training, they do need help to ensure that their programs personalize training. They need targeted and individualized training. Online sales training programs can help achieve notable personalization in following ways:

1. Automated Learning Journeys

Learning platforms are multifunctional tools that along with hosting the digital learning assets also enable automating learning journeys for trainees, tracking and quantifying their performances.

2. Immersive Learning Solutions

Learning solutions like simulations and capstones are effective ways to enrich both technical and soft skills targeted sales training programs. In-built real business scenarios can help salespeople think like leaders of the business and help leaders understand how to better position and support the sales team.

As salespeople love challenges and chasing targets, Gamification has proven to be one of the most effective modality of delivering sales training. Along with making learning fun and interactive, it also offers real-time feedback to the learner. Smartly incorporating real-life scenarios in a game environment enhances the learning experience and hence boosts retention.

3. Interactive elements

Interactive videos like “talking heads” can serve as a powerful tool in communicating the management’s recognition and the vision for the training. The associations made by using these formats have proven to be more long lasting than simply reading the text or listening to the voice-overs.

Easy to consume bite-sized learning nuggets along with timely placed assessments assure learner engagement. In addition to being learner centric, they are also easier to modify than longer learning formats, enabling organizations to share just in time learning assets of new product and process changes with the frontline employees.

Integrating digital elements with on ground interactions bridges any gaps left in understanding of learning needs. In order to develop an empathetic sales training program that really resonates with the audience, a talk with frontline salespeople and spending a day in their work lives can help learning heads figure out the nuances and unique pain points of each role. It can also give them a broader understanding of the ground realities and help frame training messaging using the language of the industry. Speaking to past sales trainers and an analysis of sales data from the last 2-3 years helps too.

Strategy to derive maximum value from the sales training programs

Right from the early stages of developing a sales training program, there must be a total alignment of the messaging within the training and the unique sales challenges the organization faces.

Conversations with the sales head or CXOs can help frame the broad problem statement while consulting with sales experts and other SMEs can help gain a wider perspective on common issues within the industry and target markets.

The objective of the sales training should be to deliver more value within short spurts of time, thus making it worth their while. There must be a focus on constant practice and giving learning content some form of context that enables them to perform better.

Learning heads must develop quantifiable ways to document evidence of the impact of their sales training programs. Whatever the goals of the program, whether it is reduced time to performance, improved sales figures, or a reduction of issues in sales compliance, they need to be kept in mind during every stage of the development of the sales training program.

Prioritizing the outcome

Worldwide, the sales environment is constantly shifting. In most cases, when it comes to sales training, organizations and learning and development teams don’t need to reinvent the wheel. They can simply build on existing learning foundations but need to ensure that they are employing new ways to keep their resources engaged with training material. The messages should keep getting pushed out to sales professionals in a sustained manner. Think of it as periodic OS updates that save your phone from becoming obsolete.

Sales is a tough job. There are no quick-fixes to enhance performance, and training is only a part of the groundwork. People, processes, and backend support play a large role in driving the right sales outcomes for businesses. Organizations aren’t looking for “Sales Training,” they are looking for ways to achieve business outcomes. Thus, learning needs to be quick and have proven results at the end.

To know more about creating effective sales training programs, write to us at marketing@mpsinteractive.com.

– Contributors:
Anna Kuehl, Senior Vice President – Customer Solutions at MPS Interactive Systems
Rajesh Jumani, Senior Vice President – India Sales at MPS Interactive Systems
Debabrata Paul, Vice President – Learning Design at MPS Interactive Systems
Kanhiya Agrawal, Senior Manager – Projects at MPS Interactive Systems