Maintaining a robust sales training program is one of the most predictable ways to reach your revenue goals. Research shows companies with effective training have a significantly higher number of sales reps reaching and exceeding quota than those who don’t have a training program or their program is inadequate.
One of the most significant factors that distinguish highly effective sales programs from ones that fall short is the topics that are covered. To equip your reps to succeed, you need to provide comprehensive training that includes all of the information that buyers expect them to know and enables them to manage their pipeline effectively.
Your buyer personas are the most crucial topic in your sales training. If your reps don’t have a strong understanding of your buyer’s needs, they’re going to make a bad impression.
According to a Forrester report, 77% of executives say that the majority of sales reps they talk to don’t understand their needs. As a result, the majority of buyers don’t trust reps to help them find the right solution and instead strive to make purchasing decisions primarily through their own research.
To ensure your reps are trustworthy, train them to understand the nuances of your various buyer personas. This includes:
Training your sales reps to have a firm grasp of these topics through well-structured sales training courses empowers them to help prospects solve problems instead of just giving semi-relevant pitches.
Expecting salespeople to understand your product/service seems like a very basic expectation that shouldn’t require much training. However, 37% of executive buyers say most sales reps aren’t knowledgeable enough about their offerings.
B2B buyers are highly risk-averse and want to make well-informed decisions. When sales reps struggle to answer their questions completely, this hurts buyer confidence and makes the sale more challenging.
Whether you're selling a product or service determines how you train your salespeople to become experts in your offering.
Training your sales team to be experts empowers them to create great prospect experiences and achieve reliable close rates.
Just as important as it is for salespeople to know what your product is capable of is for them to understand what it can’t solve. Product/service limitations are one of the most underestimated sales training topics. Salespeople naturally have an overly optimistic attitude about their offering and want to do everything they can to solve their prospects’ problems. If you don’t set boundaries, they’re likely to make promises that your service team can’t meet.
This is especially important if you’re selling custom solutions. If your salespeople don’t fully understand your limitations, they’ll agree to customer requests that are well beyond the scope of your offering. Not only can this ruin customer relationships, but it also creates conflicts between your service and sales teams.
To avoid this issue, dedicate a portion of your sales training to clearly defining what your offering can and cannot do. Provide specific examples that show your offering’s limitation so your salespeople can immediately recognize when a prospect’s request exceeds your team’s capabilities.
Though any good sales rep knows how to deflect negative comments and refocus on the positive, you need to train your team to respond to the specific topics they’ll encounter most often.
Today’s buyers are more informed than ever. Your salespeople cannot ignore their concerns and expect to earn a sale.
If you don’t have one already, create a list of your most common buyer objections including:
And any other issues that buyers have with your offering. Then teach them the most effective ways to respond. Share specific examples, so they’re equipped to deal with prospects who see past the sales pitch and demand concrete answers.
One of the biggest productivity mistakes a sales rep can make is treating every lead the same. With a limited amount of selling time each day, reps need to prioritize the highest quality prospects. To do that, you need to train your sales team to look for two types of high-intent triggers:
Train your team to spend the most time on highly qualified and engaged prospects. As they increase their close rate and sales productivity, they can spend less time trying to win over lower-intent leads.
78% of salespeople who practice social selling close more deals than those who don’t. Prospects are much more receptive to sales reps who build authentic relationships with them on social media than ones who constantly cold call them. Thus, social selling is a critical topic for your sales training program.
If your team has limited experience with social selling, conduct a brief training workshop to help them get started. Here’s how:
After the training, check in with them regularly to see how they’re using social media to foster stronger relationships with their prospects. Provide additional coaching as needed until their social selling efforts drive results.
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65% of sales reps struggle to find the right content to share with prospects. This hinders their productivity for two reasons:
Most sales reps struggle to leverage sales enablement content because they don’t know what content is available or how to request new content that addresses their current buyer concerns.
Address this issue in your sales training by having your team review all of your existing material. Make sure they know what’s available and how to access it. You should also assign a marketing representative to the sales team and have them introduce themselves during training. Giving your team a point person makes it easy for them to request content that helps move their deals forward.
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Studies show that reps who know how to leverage their pipeline data can shorten their sales cycle by 8-14%. Robust CRM reports allow them to zero in on the warmest prospects, identify the most effective triggers, and use other insights to close deals faster.
Despite the benefits, sales reps fail to enter 79% of the opportunity-related data they collect. This occurs primarily for two reasons:
You should spend as much time on this topic as necessary to encourage your sales reps to use CRM data in their daily decisions.
No matter how effective your training curriculum is, it will not drive performance improvements unless you follow up. Research shows that without reinforcement, people forget 79% of what they learn within thirty days of a training event.
The easiest time to reinforce your training topics is in your 1:1s. As you address your reps' challenges and pipeline stages, remind them about the lessons they learned in training.
Not only does having frequent conversations about your training topics keep them top-of-mind, but it also makes the lessons much more tangible since you’re applying them to real challenges they’re facing.
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