Selling a product is an art. Every salesperson has their own style and set of tools to assist them with a sale – unique strategies evolved and bettered over time to perfection.
However, giving sales skills a little background in professionalism and objective strategizing helps increase the odds in favor of a sale. To corroborate, today, 62% of companies invest in sales training tools and lessons, according to a Salesforce report.
Training retail sales reps on a product helps highlight the unique selling points of that product properly, adding to the likelihood of securing a sale. Sales training works wonders for the bottom line in more ways than one.
The Importance of Sales Training
Training sales representatives in effective sales training techniques does more than just increase the odds of a sale. Some of the major reasons why sales training is so important are as under.
- Sales training enables the representatives to establish trust with their consumers, which is a cornerstone of gaining loyalty. Consumers like to purchase from the brands they trust.
- Sales training helps the executives learn good communication skills. It is essential for them to know how to properly speak for a service or a product in front of the customer to best showcase the item.
- While sales training guides the representatives on how to sell a product, it also helps them discern the tactics or strategies that aren’t working or yielding any results. This helps them improvise and switch to other strategies.
- Sales training equips the representatives with various techniques, tools, strategies, and methods to try out and use when needed.
Top 5 Sales Training Techniques
There are many ways to educate your sales team on techniques and strategies to use while conducting a sale. Here are a few tried and tested sales training techniques that work best.
Leveraging E-Learning
With digitalization transforming every single industry in its wake, the training industry has also experienced an evolution.
E-learning is a great way to get your sales teams up to date with the latest resources and material to help them make a sale better.
E-learning tools can be accessed on the go, saved on a device, rewatched, and customized – a functionality that makes this technique extremely flexible and in step with modern times.
Remote working has scattered the organizational workforce as far as across borders, making e-learning essential for the employees working out of premises. Leveraging e-learning helps dispense training to all the sales representatives within the same timeframe, without them needing to come to work physically or assemble at the training location.
Bite-Sized, Modular Learning
It isn’t possible for the human mind to retain a huge amount of information that’s delivered within a very short time. Training sessions are usually a couple of hours long; it becomes difficult to retain the learnings effectively to apply them to a real sale.
In this scenario, bite-sized, easily consumable bits of information can be created and sent to sales representatives to help them retain good information for longer periods of time, making it more usable.
This makes the session highly effective and keeps the lessons fresh in the sales team’s minds. Rather than having multi-day training sessions with hands-on learning, promote modular training at recurring intervals and set up reminders to brush up on the concepts learned.
Use Real Success Stories to Inspire and Motivate
While learning individually definitely does help build more skills, it helps to share some success stories with the sales team to inspire them to break the ceiling and go above and beyond. Nothing works better than seeing real people navigating the same challenges they face and excelling at it enough to inspire others.
Success stories also help the sales team glean new methods and new combinations of strategies to use during a sale, knowing that they have worked before and can work for them if used right.
It is like learning a few tips first-hand in a highly competitive industry from those who have succeeded in mastering it.
Versatility is Key
Not everybody has the same learning needs. While some glean better by watching videos and live demonstrations, other professionals may learn more efficiently when they read about a concept or a sales technique.
Additionally, while some prefer being seated with a laptop for learning sessions, others may prefer using mobile devices to save time or to learn while commuting.
Whatever the needs of your sales teams, ensure that the learning modules are versatile and accessible so that the learners can customize them according to their specific needs.
After all, the objective is to get the sales professional to build their skill – the “how” part should be their choice, according to their time and preferences.
Anytime, Anywhere Learning
The concept of “remote working/learning” is being reimagined and expanded to include the “Anytime, Anywhere” mode of working and learning. With a stable network connection, it is possible to be equipped with just a device to log in to a training module and begin lessons.
Ensure that your organization leverages this flexibility to provide your workforce with better and wider options to get their training completed. In addition to letting users access training modules on any device, enable streaming or downloading over the Cloud to make it a truly remote-friendly affair.
This method also helps to save time spent on training by giving employees a chance to catch up on it wherever they are.
The Kytes Way
Kytes helps organizations share training content of various types – audio, video, text, infographics, or any other module – in a centralized, democratized manner that promotes uniformity at an enterprise level and keeps things cohesive.
The platform also makes it possible to create custom cohorts and distribute relevant, curated content accordingly. Kytes’ platform is versatile enough to be suitable for use in any industry.
Conclusion
Sales training is as important to the organization as hiring skilled hands. Constantly learning about new techniques and honing sales skills is the only way a company can face competition; the better the sales representatives of an organization are at their jobs, the better the bottomline will be.
