Oftentimes, sales team members seem to be stuck in the vicious cycle of urgent client needs and sales calls. On paper, you may have assembled a dynamic, driven sales team that will drive you to success. However, no matter how accomplished and talented your team is, they still need recurring training in order to keep them sharp and motivated.
Without proper supervision and concrete training your team will run around like headless chickens without clear direction. This puts your company at the risk of being stagnant. Constant input and guidance is needed in order to prevent this. Both seasoned new team-players need to be coached constantly.
In order to achieve and maintain excellence, you can follow these five methods to further equip your sales team!
Tap into valuable resources
There are numerous online resources and e-learning courses available on sales strategies and best practices. The challenge lies in curating the most appropriate and most useful content for your team. Not all resources are valuable, so make sure that you are getting information from the best sales gurus with established reputations. Many companies are also tapping into e-learning platforms to educate their staff. This empowers them to access valuable information anytime, anywhere.
Set up a buddy system
91% of salespeople recently surveyed believe that peer learning accounts for their success. This is why pairing up an experienced team member with a newbie is good for opening professional dialogue. It’s also an opportunity to give and receive valuable knowledge through social interaction. This does not educate the members of your team, but it also allows you to establish a sense of camaraderie among them.
Create training nuggets
Training doesn’t always have to be a full-day, in-the-office event. In fact, research shows that no matter how compelling the training material is, there will always be a 10-to 18-minute lapse in attentiveness during a full-hour lecture. Training should be done consistently and regularly, part of your weekly or even daily routine. You can create bite-sized training nuggets that you can regularly share with your sales team. Create training opportunities during meetings and sales calls, which is usually when important information will most likely stick. It is also important for mentors to spend a full or half- day with sales reps at least once a week. Real-world training has a greater impact than classroom training.
Adapt to market trends
With the ever-changing landscape, the profile of a “good salesperson” keeps evolving. For instance, changes in buying behavior have shifted. Buyers are now researching potential solutions to their problems independently. They typically have dozens of vendor options. With this in mind, a salesperson should be a trusted business advisor, able to craft unique solutions for clients’ unique needs. The best sales coaching is all about individualized attention, not creating mini-mes. It is all about allowing a team member to find their own voice and guiding them on how to think about business problems that your company addresses.
Use the clients’ point-of-view
Our buyers are all different – they have different goals they want to achieve and problems that they are trying to overcome. With all these different variables at play, following sales scripts and rote memorization isn’t effective anymore. Instead of focusing heavily on product details and messaging, mentors should make the journey of the client or buyer the main focus of their training. Your training curriculum should include buyer persona, addressing key challenges and pain points. You should teach your salespeople how to engage clients at each step of the buyer’s journey. A very important aspect of your training should be responding to different types of buyer objections – from skepticism to drawbacks, and indifference.
It's true that selling is no easy feat. Each buyer has different motivators that lead them to purchase. On top of this, buyer behavior evolves CONSTANTLY. This makes the selling process more painstaking than ever. Learning, adapting, and executing new strategies helps you keep up with the ever-changing industry standards.
