Your sales team is growing, which is great. In fact, it’s growing so quickly that you can’t train them all yourself, which is bad. This worries you, because some members of your team sort of “fell” into sales, and haven’t received proper sales representative training. Others understand sales techniques on an almost cellular level, but don’t fully grasp your company’s products and services.
Your sales process is in your head, and you need every sales rep to know, understand, and implement it in the same way. So, how do you ensure that your entire team is always on the same page?
The answer lies in standardized online sales training.
Why your sales representative training should be standardized
No matter how amazing your products and services are, they just won’t sell themselves. No, you need the persuasive prowess of a well-trained sales team for that. Consistent, ongoing sales agent training will be your key to unlocking their potential, and a bunch of other benefits, too.
Let’s explore these next.
Faster onboarding for new hires
Depending on who you speak to, the ramp time for a new sales rep can be anything from 4 to 12 months. That’s up to a whole year of missed sales quotas and clients (yikes!). So, why do sales reps take so long to adjust to their new role, or a new company? Usually, it has to do with onboarding.
When onboarding is rushed or inconsistent, new sales agents won’t have enough knowledge about the industry, customers, products and services, or sales strategy to perform at their best. Heck, when a rep is new to sales altogether, they might not even have the skills to sell a product they’re actually familiar with. So, they’ll learn from costly mistakes.
Comprehensive and tailored onboarding training for sales representatives can speed up new hire ramp time significantly. Take it a step further by including mentorship and eLearning courses in their onboarding program, and your new reps will have everything they need to perform as well as the rest of the team in no time!
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Better customer experience
Have you ever asked a question about a product or service that you’re considering purchasing, only to hear “Uh, I’m not sure” from the sales rep assisting you? Worse, have you ever been told one thing by the rep, only to discover how wrong they were after talking to another rep from the same company? Well, you’re not alone!
When sales reps have different information about products and processes, they’re not able to give potential customers the consistently positive experience they expect. This is a big problem. After all, your sales reps are the very first customer touch point for your company, which means that they determine first impressions.
By investing in ongoing sales representative training for the whole team, you’ll ensure that all reps have the same, current information and use the same best practices. This means that all of your new customers will have a consistently awesome experience, too.
As Marcus Verri, global sales training manager at Deliveroo, puts it, consistent sales training means that salespeople have one single source of truth, where they can find useful resources and answers to common customer pain points.
Lower sales rep turnover
Customers are important, but Richard Branson would argue that your employees are more important. He says that if you look after your staff well, they’ll look after your customers — and, of course, they’ll want to stay at your company. Why? Because when your team feels like they’re growing, improving, and ultimately making more sales, they feel happy! And happy employees aren’t usually the ones looking for new jobs.
Let’s take property sales as an easy example. An agent who receives standardized real estate sales representative training is likely to feel confident when they meet with buyers. They’ll be knowledgeable about the properties in the area, and will be well-equipped to help buyers find their dream home. The result? More sales, increased motivation, and one happy sales agent.
Improved sales performance
Sales is all about understanding your customers’ problems, and then persuading them that you have the solution they’re looking for. But what happens if your sales reps aren’t kept up to date with the solutions your company offers? Well, you’ll probably lose sales!
Here’s a quick example. A doctor lists a number of conditions that they’re treating patients for, and the medical rep offers them the same product for all conditions. The doctor is likely to become skeptical. In fact, they’ll probably discover quite quickly that the product isn’t effective across all conditions, and never order it again.
However, a rep who’s received ongoing, standardized pharmaceutical sales rep training will be able to match the best product to each medical condition. The doctor is more likely to trust their knowledge, and repeat an order when the products live up to the promises made by the rep.
How to deliver standardized sales rep training — easily
The many benefits above make a convincing case for standardized sales representative training. But there’s more! Delivering your courses can be super quick and easy. All you need is the right sales training software.
With TalentLMS, it’s easy to create, upload and edit courses so that your whole team learns the same skills and information, at the same time. Because TalentLMS is ideal for mobile training, your reps can even learn on the go and from different locations. Plus, you can track which reps have completed their training, and ensure that everyone on your team is always up-to-date.
And one more thing: Sales training is not just about teaching your sales reps about the products or services you’re offering. Successful training for salespeople should also include soft skill training, for example developing your listening skills, learning how to build rapport, etc. TalentLibrary™ comes with ready-made online courses for salespeople so that you don’t have to worry about creating the content from scratch.
Meet TalentLibrary™
A growing collection of ready-made courses that cover the soft skills
your teams need for success at work
Next steps
The results are in, and they’re pretty clear — standardized sales representative training is the key to unlocking your sales team’s potential. You’re ready to jump on board, so why not start by choosing the perfect LMS for sales training to keep everything in one place?
Originally published on: 05 Sep 2019 | Tags: Employee Training,Sales Training
