Supercharge Your Sales: How Sales Training Helps Your Company Reap Measurable Rewards

There’s nothing that makes a dollar bill happier than having friends. As sales professionals, your singular pursuit – your reason for being – boils down to your ability to create a group of friends for each dollar invested by your company.

Did you know that sales training, when effective, can return about four and a half friends for every dollar spent in the pursuit of upskilling your team? A recent study affirmed that, indeed, your company can earn $4.53 for every dollar you invest in sales education.

More than just a moneymaking machine, great sales training can polish the skills of even the most effective dealmakers on your team, help you determine the best sales methodology for the times, and, most importantly, inoculate your company against the gotchas that can infect your sales technique and, potentially, your company’s reputation.

By flexing the strength of your sales team, you’ll create an army that can build bridges to your customers – and loyalty to your brand. A trained sales team can also adjust in difficult times – learning ways to be effective when resources are tight. Finally, they’ll become quite adept at creating new opportunities and convert them into sales.

If the chance to build a team of sales titans – and amp up your earning power – doesn’t convince you about how important sales training is for your company, here are a few other benefits that you should know.

What Is Sales Training?

It’s important to first define what sales training is and, specifically, the subject matter needed to ensure its effectiveness.

Great sales training empowers the professional – helping them to develop the skills, confidence, and knowledge needed to rise to the top. It enhances the qualities that ensure they achieve great sales results by fostering a deep understanding of your customers’ needs.

Some of the subject matter covered in sales training that will improve the skills of your team include:

Sales management
Sales coaching
Sales prospecting
Consultative selling
Sales presentations

Sales negotiation
Sales opportunity management
Seller productivity and accountability
Strategic and key account management

As a sales leader, you should look for sales training programs that rely heavily on these concepts, as they offer the best recipe to position your team for success throughout each step of the sales process.

Ensuring Training Is Effective

Ineffective training not only misses the mark in upskilling your team – it can have the unintended negative consequences of distracting and demoralizing them. This can affect the overall morale of your sales organization. Effective business training starts with changing behaviors so that your sales team and other members of your organization can provide the best experience for your customers.

Sales training will only produce the desired results if it’s well designed, delivered in a manner salespeople can absorb, and has a lasting impact on your sales team’s behavior. Here are some of the key elements your sales training program should encompass for greater effectiveness.

Motivational

Sales training should motivate your sales pros and reinforce the important role they play within your organization. Training should give them the tools they need to provide the best solutions for their customers, helping to make a difference in their professional lives.

Valuable

Training should convey the value proposition your sales team provides to customers. It should include the benefits of your products and services, as well as details on how your pros can personally solve your customers’ problems.

Coaching

Sales coaching can reinforce the behavioral changes needed for the team to be successful. First-line managers can provide this support and guide team members who find themselves on shaky ground.

Feedback is essential to correcting behaviors that don’t promote the goals of the organization. Managers should also provide positive reinforcement when team members are productive and use their initiative based on the training they have received.

Transformational

Your training program needs to include psychological principles to encourage long-term behavioral changes. It should account for your sales team’s learning style and mesh with how they work together and relate to others. Changing behaviors starts with a transformational experience.

Leadership Support

Training should also extend to the leadership of the company so they can best support their sales team. It will help them to develop a culture that provides support to the sales team and drives sales performance. The leaders of the organization should continuously encourage and promote sales success. This is a critical element that is the most often overlooked.

Benefits of Sales Training

For sales training to be effective, it should be customized to reflect your company’s offerings and should cover each step of the sales process. This will ensure you not only achieve an optimal return on the money invested, but your company will also benefit in the following ways:

Improved Communication Skills

Open and honest communication with potential and current customers is important. It involves both letting customers know how your product and services will benefit them, as well as listening to your customers’ needs and providing a viable solution.

Long-Lasting Connection With Customers

Communication helps salespeople build a connection with their customers. This allows them to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and find opportunities that can help them. This connection also helps to build loyalty and trust, which are critical attributes in an environment where only 3 percent of customers believe that salespeople are trustworthy. Trust and loyalty also will encourage your customers to refer your products and services to others.

Enhanced Customer Experience

Your customer’s journey should be a satisfying experience. Four in five customers say that the buying experience will determine if they will ultimately make the purchase.

Sales training helps salespeople learn to create an impressive sales experience that includes amazing customer service.

When done properly, it should be an experience your customers will want to repeat over and over again and tell others about.

Loyal Sales Force

Loyalty goes both ways. The skills your salespeople will learn from sales training will only be effective if they are loyal to you and your customers. Sales reps generate revenue for your company, so it’s important you invest to ensure you have a great team.

Also, your investment in their development encourages loyalty. It will help your sales pros work toward achieving the company’s goals by making customers’ needs a priority throughout the sales process. This ensures a level of customer satisfaction that promotes increased revenue for the company and a successful sales record for members of your sales team.

Knowledge of Your Company's Products and Services

Customized sales training helps you enhance your company’s specific selling techniques and messages, and allows your sales team to immediately apply what they’ve learned to their day-to-day activities.

Sales training should include in-depth training on the products and services your company offers. This will give your salespeople the knowledge to answer customer queries with confidence and know-how.

Training should not be a one-off activity. Your products and services will change over time, as will your sales environment. Continuous training and sales coaching will keep your sales team up to date with these changes, to ensure they can provide new opportunities for your customers.

Lower Turnover

A confident, successful sales team is a happy one. If your sales professionals are happy, they won’t want to leave. Success breeds success. They will want to achieve more and develop their own personal sales goals that will help achieve the company’s overall strategic goals.

If your company is successful, they are also successful. Your team will want to grow with your company. This means increased productivity and less time-wasting.

You’ll have a great sales team, which is the ultimate goal. This will also help you avoid the kind of high turnover which can be a drain of time, resources, and productivity.

Evaluating the Effect of Sales Training

You will know you’re on the right track to receiving a return on your investment by evaluating the effect of sales training. Some of the effects will be immediate, while others will require continuous coaching to achieve a behavioral shift.

Here’s how you can evaluate the effectiveness of your sales training:

Assess Your Sales Team’s Reaction

You should be able to gauge if your team was receptive to the training by evaluating their level of participation throughout the program. You can also take a quick survey after the training to find out if they thought it was useful and will assist them in their daily sales activities.

Find Out What They Learned

You can find out if participants learned the key principles of the program by including interviews or tests as part of the sessions. It will help identify areas that may need further reinforcement.

Observe How They Transfer This Knowledge to Daily Activities

The end goal is for your sales team to apply what they’ve learned to their daily activities. Managers can provide coaching to ensure their team uses what they’ve learned to help customers along their purchase journey.

Measure the Program’s Overall Success

Ultimately, you can gauge the effectiveness of sales training by measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as sales revenue, service quality, and productivity, against benchmark data prior to training.

Improving Sales Through Effective Training

Improving sales company training starts with investing in an effective training program. An effective training program will provide the skills and knowledge to make your sales team successful. A successful sales team is the key to unlocking increased revenue and company success.

The Brooks Group provides effective sales training through our IMPACT Selling® Professional Virtual Sales Training. This program can help your team too.
Let us provide you with a comprehensive training package that will help you assess, train and sustain your sales team.

Contact us today!