No matter how great a salesperson’s “personality for sales” is, that natural talent is not being fully optimized without proper sales training.
While your skills may be impressive, you could be missing out on a whole slew of untapped talent just waiting to be honed.
Whether your skills are God given, learned, or if they came as a result of a degree from the school of hard knocks, there is always something that can be improved with formal training.
The skills necessary for effective selling are something that takes formal development. You don’t reach peak performance on your own. You need a team behind you, helping you reach your full potential.
Sales training can help salespeople hone and practice these skills, as well as increase their confidence level.
Let's dive into the benefits of investing in formal training your sales force.
When is the last time you diagnosed your sales team's pipeline? Our Pipeline Management guide will provide the steps to take to determine the health of your team's pipeline.
Improve Communication Skills
If there’s one thing salespeople are good at, it’s talking. All that talking sometimes drowns out another important skill, listening.
Both are necessary for great communication, and salespeople without communication skills will probably find themselves out of a job.
Sure, you may have adequate people skills, but is just good, good enough? Do you know how to approach different prospects in unique ways?
Sales training will prepare you to communicate effortlessly in any tricky situation. The exercises and group activities provided will help you to better understand your prospect’s pain points and be ready to react appropriately no matter the situation.
Selling requires a strong ability to ask the right questions in order to build trust and credibility. Training helps improve and master this elusive skills. This is valuable because 71% of people base their buying decisions on trust and believability.
A good sales training program will leave your sales team a little smarter and a little sharper. However, an exceptional training program will enable your staff to balance their interactions with clients, so that the purchases occur in a win-win situation, allowing the client to walk away feeling valued and understood.
Trial and Error
Thomas Edison tried over 10,000 methods before finding the correct filament for the first working light bulb. Persistence is the obvious lesson; however, another key takeaway is the importance of learning what does and doesn’t work.
You organization likely has a proven process and methodology in place that works and has gotten them to this point. Sales training can help dive deeper into WHY it works, and identify opportunities for improvement.
Think of sales training as an algorithm programmed for your sales team’s optimal success.
Training sets your team up with a step-by-step formula for selling, instead of just “winging it”. It also provides a collaborative environment for developing various closing strategies, which are necessary to helping your sales team personalize their pitch for each prospective client.
Training that includes activities such as role playing will leave your sales force with a go-to answer to any qualm, questions, or objection. Your team will learn to strategize pitches to fit anything the sales jungle throws at them.
Don't Take No for an Answer
This is one of the holy commandments of any sales bible. Why? Because most sales people hear the word “no” more than they do “yes”. Even the best salesperson deals with objections often due to the fact that most prospects are looking for reasons not to buy.
However, the best sales staff know that an objection is not an insurmountable obstacle. Rather, objections are just changes in the shape of the road to a closed deal. The best sales staff know that it’s not the end of the world and can move past them to make the sale.
A freshly trained sales staff will not only know to expect objections during the pitch, but will have a well thought out strategy complemented by proven techniques to overcome with them.
Administrative Skills Don't Get Overlooked
What happens after the excitement of closing a deal?
The process of onboarding your new client. These next steps are often left unchecked and can diminish the effectiveness of your sales staff. Setting the right tone and expectation at the beginning of a partnership is essential to satisfying and retaining clients.
There’s more to selling than just making fancy sales pitches and charming prospects, don’t leave those administrative skills neglected.
“Record keeping” and “analyzing data” are words that often make people’s eyes glaze over. While these skills may not be as exciting as the thrill of delivering your pitch or landing that new big client; however, they are vital to sales growth.
Sales training backs up the importance of administrative skills. This can help your team manage their time better, identify what methods are working for them, and more importantly, what’s NOT working for them. They might even learn new methods or programs to use to make these administrative tasks easier!
Be in the Know
Knowing your product inside and out is vital to a sale, but how well do you know the competitor?
A rising trend is the increasing role reviews play in a customer’s buying journey. Customers want to hear what actual people think about the product they are considering.
According to a recent survey, over 60% of consumers said they consult online reviews at some stage of their online buying journey. If they’ve read up on you, you better believe they’ve read up on your competitors.
Only 3% of surveyed customers said that a company successfully differentiated themselves from the competition. Consumers want to see what sets you apart from every other company vying for their money.
Sales training addresses this by effectively teaching your sales team to analyze the competitor and then identify the key differentiators between your solution and theirs. That way, when your sales team is asked by a prospect “what makes you different from the XYZ company?” they are ready with answers blazing.
Sales training is where you learn how to share information like this in an authentic way, leaving no room for ambiguity or misinformation that might develop without proper training.
Training is practice and practice leads to improvement.
When you’re knowledgeable about your product, the industry you’re selling into, and the competitive landscape, you’re able to position yourself in a unique way that will naturally help your product shine through in an already crowded marketplace.
Stop “Winging It”
Your sales team is one of the most important parts of your company’s well being.
Continuous training along with access to the proper tools, technologies, and resources will help elevate your team’s success to the next level and keep them on their toes as the sales landscape continues to shift.
Given the chance, would you rather be on a team that “wings it” or on the team that continuously educates, prepares, and refines their work?
As Colin Powell once said, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
Once your team is trained and selling better than ever before, you need to figure out how to keep your pipeline filled! Check out this ebook to find out how: Pipeline Management eBook
