Well defined goals
Before any sales training program is created, it’s recommended to first decide upon the outcomes you are looking to achieve in the trainings. You do this by analyzing the data your organization is tracking now and finding the hidden opportunities for improvement. Let’s say you are exploring the amount of new business your company is currently bringing in today.
Some example questions to help you reflect and analyze:
- Do your numbers show that your sales team is not closing enough new business?
- What numbers are you getting right now?
- Where would you like for that number to get to?
- How important is that metric to improve?
- Are others more critical to your growth?
You can use the same process of analyzing as an individual trying to improve.
Are you achieving your sales plan at the moment? The goal should be to overachieve on the compensation plan given to you by your organization. Your goal needs to be consistency and hitting every category. What skill sets do you need to improve to help you do that?
After analyzing the data, decide upon the goals you would like to achieve moving forward.
Using the right methodology
The next part to consider is the sales methodology you use to achieve your goals. There are many different options and they are best utilized with certain types of sales processes. For example, if you are in a more transactional sales environment where it’s common to close a deal every day, then you wouldn’t want to use the Challenger methodology as it would extend the length of the buying process. On the other hand if you want to build a considerable amount of value in your sales process, you might now want to use SPIN selling techniques.
Deciding upon the right methods is important as your entire sales force and sales process should be acting from the same sales playbook. Learning one way in training and then observing your manager follow a completely different philosophy is a fundamental error in a sales process.
Alignment with the sales process
All top business to business (b2b) sales organizations have a proven sales process they follow religiously and execute daily. They use the process to find the right customers at the right time with the right message. They use this process to qualify opportunities and forecast business they can count on in the future. They use this process to help with time management and skill set improvement. Without a sales process in place, they would be leaving their success to chance.
Related Content: How to create a sales process that accelerates growth
Well defined goals, a sales methodology that is designed to reach them and a sales process that everyone on the team understands is a recipe for success. From here it needs to be determined on how you will onboard new salespeople into this process going forward.
Build out a sales onboarding program
A sales onboarding program is one that’s constantly evolving to better prepare new salespeople for success in your company.
This means that as goals and sales strategies change, the onboarding is modified to match the new changes. When a new sales employee starts they need to be completely aligned with the company culture and the goals of the organization. They need to clearly understand all of the critical information around what they sell and the sales process they are following in their deals and finally, they need to be taught how to sell in today’s modern sales world. Every piece of information they are trained on needs to be designed around creating the perfect sales professional that will be set up for success.
Choose the right sales tools
There are a wide variety of sales tools available in the market today. That doesn’t mean you need to use all of them. There are tools that will record your calls and meetings and help you analyze the words that were said, and tools that will help you create proposals and send over contracts. Like any tool, they have a purpose so you will need to find the ways that help your team sell more effectively using the strategy provided for them in the sales process.
One mandatory tool, however, is the CRM. Using a customer relationship management (CRM) software that helps you track and analyze data is necessary to grow your business so choose one knowing that it will always be a source of complaints from your sales team. Because companies want to bypass the comment, “our CRM is awful,” they tend to choose Salesforce, as they are as good as it gets.
Build in sales skill assessments
As follow up tends to be a major problem with sales training, it’s critical to build in sales skill assessments inside of your sales training program and sales process. These skill sets are ways to identify the proficiency of your sales team. Sales assessments are also methods to ensure your salespeople retain what they learned inside of training and are still utilizing it in their daily activities.
Some common ways of sales skill assessments are to revisit sales training inside of monthly one on ones, field ride days, and regular skill certifications.
Scale with sales programs
Learning paths are a critical part of growing your business. That’s why adding to your current sales training program is a major component of improving your results. Here are some questions to help you consider where you might start to add new sales training programs into your sales process.
- What skills does your new hire sales onboarding program teach new employees?
- What processes do you have in place to reinforce learning outside of new hire for tenured salespeople?
- What sales training programs do you have for your underperforming sales employees?
- What advanced sales training programs do you have in place for the high performers?
- What sales training do you have for your major account professionals to help them sell to enterprise customers?
- What leadership development sales training programs do you have in place?
- What sales management training programs do you have?
Keep in mind that as you add to your sales training programs, you will have to go back and update everything else to ensure alignment across the learning paths.