Imagine this: A sales professional on your team is meeting with a potential client who’s in the market for a new excavator. The client asks about hydraulics and your seller… draws a complete blank, then proceeds to ramble about irrelevant features. The prospect winds up confused, while your seller has a sinking feeling—knowing they just blew a six-figure sale.
Yikes, right? This cringe-worthy scenario is all too common when businesses skimp on sales training. In the high-stakes world of B2B sales, a single botched interaction can cost your company big-time.
But don’t worry—this post shows why investing in team sales training is the foundation your sales professionals need to avoid facepalm moments.
Why Invest in Sales Training?
Sales training for your team can greatly improve effectiveness and enhance productivity, leading to higher sales and increased profitability.
There are three main reasons companies invest in team sales training:
- Increase sales productivity
- Expand customer accounts
- Build an outstanding sales team
1. Increase Sales Productivity
The first reason many companies invest in sales training is to boost the team’s productivity and generate more revenue.
Sales training helps sales professionals sell more efficiently by teaching them a repeatable sales process. This establishes consistent steps for positioning, pre-call planning, prospecting, selling with value, negotiating, and closing the sale.
By learning these essential skills, team members begin to speak a common language. This helps the team work together more effectively and efficiently to reach their sales goals.
In addition, instruction enables sales teams to understand their customers better and learn how to provide customers with the best possible experience. By figuring out customers’ needs and wants, sellers can offer better solutions and build long-lasting relationships.
A competitor with a well-trained sales team will likely outsell your organization, even if your product or service is superior. That’s because these sellers are better equipped to move prospects through the sales process.
Training helps you get a competitive edge by upskilling your sellers and increasing your team’s productivity.
2. Expand Customer Accounts
A second reason to invest in an effective sales training program is that it gives sellers the skills to expand customer accounts through cross-selling and upselling. Well-trained sellers can manage customer accounts strategically and expand existing business.
Customers are more likely to do business with companies they’ve had a positive experience with. Sales instruction can help your sellers learn how to manage existing accounts so they want to do business with you again.
In addition, training can also help team members learn how to ask for referrals from satisfied customers and reach new potential prospects.
Understand Customer Needs
Sales training helps employees better understand a customer’s needs by teaching them how to ask the right questions. Asking probing, open-ended questions helps a seller uncover customer concerns and identify ongoing issues. They can then present products or services that fit those needs more confidently.
Improve Customer Communication
Sales training can help your sellers improve customer communication with active listening skills, pre-call planning, sales negotiation tactics, and more. Training equips your team to communicate in a way that will overcome objections and maximize sales.
Handle Complaints and Rejection
Sales teams are often the first point of contact for customers, so they must be trained to deal with complaints in a way that is satisfying for both the customer and the company. The same can be said about rejection. Understanding how to properly and confidently handle difficult situations allows sales professionals to retain existing customers and maintain high-quality relationships.
Cross-Sell and Upsell
The best sales training program will show your sales professionals how to find and assess customer needs so they can uncover opportunities to expand each account. This enables sellers to identify the best products or services to match customer needs, make persuasive presentations, and overcome objections to cross-sell and upsell their key accounts.
3. Build an Outstanding Sales Team
The third reason to invest in sales team training is that it builds stronger sales teams, helping sellers reach their full potential.
Here are five ways in which investing in sales training builds an outstanding team:
Develop Essential Sales Skills
Sales training equips your team with the tools to confidently engage with your target buyer, ask the right questions, and listen to understand their business challenges. It gives sellers the ability to connect with prospects making purchasing decisions, have more effective sales calls, handle objections, and negotiate to close more business.
Establish Trust
Trust is a crucial component of a cohesive and effective sales team. Whether reaching out for guidance or asking for assistance on a sales call, it’s crucial that members of a sales team are able to rely on each other.
Sales team training helps build trust by providing sales professionals with a common sales process, skillset, and language. With this fundamental base, sellers have confidence in the abilities of their teammates—making it easier for them to collaborate and support one another as they work toward common goals.
Improve Communication
Sales education programs teach communication, negotiation, and conflict resolution skills, which allow team members to interact more effectively and avoid conflicts with customers and each other.
Sales skills coaching also gives sellers an opportunity to practice and receive feedback in a safe environment. These programs often include communication exercises that help sellers learn to listen more attentively and understand behavior styles and nonverbal communication.
Sales training programs such as IMPACT Selling® include personal assessments that help sellers understand their own communication styles and preferences—and how to adapt to customers’ styles.
While these skills can be incredibly beneficial for sales, they can also make a big impact on team cohesion. As a result, teams that participate in sales skills programs typically see a positive impact on their ability to communicate and close deals.
Understand Strengths and Weaknesses
Every team is different. Even sales professionals trained in the same program will take away a unique understanding and skillset from the experience. The best sales programs help team members learn more about each other’s strengths and weaknesses so they can work together more effectively.
When team members understand one another’s areas of development and appreciate each other’s capabilities, they can identify opportunities to help each other and grow the business.
Facilitate Team Bonding
When team members work together well and support each other, it creates a positive work environment. Having a culture that fosters this mentality makes sellers feel they are part of a team. This motivates sellers and makes it more likely the team as a whole will succeed.
How to Evaluate a Sales Training Investment
With a well-trained sales team, you’ll have more confident and competent sellers and steady growth. Hiring a sales training provider to deliver training can be one of the most rewarding investments you can make. Here are a few tips when evaluating a sales training provider.
Learn More: Download your copy of the Sales Training Buyer’s Guide
Content Customization
First, make sure the sales training companies you’re evaluating offer customized content. The most successful initiatives involve a high degree of program customization.
You don’t have to build your sales training program from the ground up. You can modify a proven sales process (such as IMPACT Selling®) with language, exercises, and support tools that are relevant to your selling environments. That way, the material becomes immediately usable and doesn’t require a leap to tie it into daily selling activities.
Pre-Program Discovery
There’s nothing worse than training that doesn’t help further an organization’s sales strategy. Make sure the cost includes pre-program discovery. Best-in-class companies will recommend some sort of discovery phase to a meaningful sales training initiative.
A vendor should invest time, energy, and resources into gaining a rich understanding of your sales team’s strengths, weaknesses, competition, etc., so the content addresses those areas in the context of the sales process
Ongoing Coaching
One-time event-based training is over. Or at least it should be. Find out if the cost of sales training includes reinforcement with measurable outcomes and ongoing sales coaching.
Top-tier companies offer robust approaches to follow-up that ensure what is taught in the classroom gets used in the field. Online sales learning following a live event is good, but many online programs are learner-led and require a motivated sales professional who is willing to maintain momentum.
Instructor-led reinforcement gives sellers access to a coach who can help them with questions about using their new knowledge in real-world selling scenarios. Participation in a live coaching session also keeps sellers accountable.
There are many other components to consider when planning a successful sales training initiative. These are just a few. Don’t assume anything, and ask a lot of questions. It’s important for you to know exactly what is (and isn’t) included in the cost.
Don’t wait to invest in quality sales training. The sooner you do, the sooner your organization will see an improvement in its bottom line. Find out more about sales training programs from The Brooks Group that can help your team be more successful.
