Sales training helps improve a seller’s skills and knowledge to ensure a successful sale. With the right training program, your employees will be equipped with the necessary skills and resources they need so each time they talk to prospective clients they are maximising the opportunity for sales and improving the customer experience. This, of course, can positively impact the growth of your business.
Whether you’re training new sales hires or simply want to upgrade the skills of your existing team, having your employees sign up for sales training courses is always a good idea. When choosing which one to enrol them in, you must take a closer look at the finer details of each program and how it can support the goals of your sales team.
To help you pick wisely, here are a few important components you should look for when deciding what sales training program to invest in:
Essential Sales Skills
It’s always good to start with the basics, whether you’re a total beginner or a more experienced sales manager. Indeed, sales training is a good opportunity to get acquainted or re-acquainted with fundamental skills that any salesperson should have. Some of the basic skills that should be included in any training program worth its salt include the following:
- Searching for prospects, and assessing whether they qualify
- Making cold calls or writing cold emails
- Crafting a compelling and convincing sales pitch
- Negotiating with clients and successfully closing deals
- Assisting clients through every step of the sales process
- Ensuring a good after-sales experience
These are all vital skills that any newly hired or experienced sales representative needs to succeed in their chosen field. To effectively teach these skills, each session must follow up demonstrations with practical exercises. Your team will not only learn new information, but will also get to apply these fresh learnings with hands-on experiences.
For example, the training program can ask trainees to sit in on a session where your more experienced employees conduct actual client phone calls. This way, your best sales employees can demonstrate their sales skills to new employees. In addition to this, more experienced sales employees can benefit from interactive sessions where each participant can make a sales pitch to the group, and then ask the rest of the team to offer feedback.
Responding to Objections
Ideally, each sales pitch should end in a closed deal. However, this doesn’t always happen. In sales, objection and rejection is part of life, and salespeople need to accept that. What’s important is knowing what to do next after receiving an objection, or rejection.
Sales training programs must include modules on handling different types of customer objections, such as those that stem from a misunderstanding, scepticism, or indifference. To learn how to respond to objections, employees can role-play several scenarios wherein they may encounter such situations. For example, how should they respond to a prospective buyer who is sceptical of a product or service? What if the person is looking for a certain feature that isn’t included in the company’s current offerings? How do you handle this situation?
Learning How to Empathise with Your Customers
Creating the best customer experience requires building lasting relationships with one’s clients. To do this, salespeople must cultivate empathy so that they can communicate effectively and listen intently to their customers’ needs. From there, your employees can identify your clients’ pain points and offer solutions via your company’s products and services.
As with responding to objections, role-playing is an effective and practical exercise that can help employees put themselves in their customers’ shoes. To better understand what customers are looking for, some training programs invite customers to participate in the sessions. They can talk about the product or services, their challenges, and the solutions they need, providing your team with unique insights they may otherwise not have access to.
A Complete Understanding of Your Offers and Your Market
By the end of the training program, employees should be able to intelligently answer why your company is unique and what makes it different from its competitors. They need to fully understand all the products and services that your brand offers and why they’re valuable in today’s market.
Your program of choice should encourage training participants to use your products or services themselves so that they can see things from an actual user’s perspective. This will help them become more familiar with your offerings’ features and benefits, making it much easier to convince prospects of their value propositions.
It’s also a good idea to invite members of the production or development team to these training sessions. They can offer better insights regarding the products and services as well as give you a heads up on any new features they may have added. You can also invite your marketing team to these sessions so that they can share their collaterals or sales ideas. This can be a great opportunity to get new and more experienced employees to align their sales strategies with existing or upcoming marketing plans.
When your sales team is equipped with the proper resources and skills, they become more confident and efficient in performing their tasks. With a quality sales training course, you can ensure not only the success of your employees, but also that of your company. So, make sure to carefully consider the pros and cons of any training program you’re planning to invest in. Then, choose only those that are guaranteed to help your sales team get positive results and meet your business objectives.
Priority Management Australia’s courses is offering sales courses perfect for your team. What should your teams get from a sales training course?