Companies spend a lot of time and money on sales training experiences. The goal is to create momentum, align the sales team around strategic priorities critical to the business, introduce new skills, and change behaviors.
Effective sales training also builds camaraderie for geographically dispersed teams, builds confidence and increases collaboration. It develops critical thinking skills and situational fluency. However, when poorly planned and executed, sales training can have the opposite effect.
Let’s dive into seven rules to give you some practical guidance to get the most impact from sales training initiatives.
1. Pick a strategically relevant topic.
Sales training should always be directly relevant to your business strategy. Salespeople will take training more seriously if they understand the connection between what they are being asked to learn and why they need to learn it. This is called “strategic relevance.”
A strategically relevant topic or theme can be based on what’s happening in the market, competitive shifts, newly emerging ideal client profiles (ICP), looking at your win-loss analysis, or new product launches or innovations.
2. Set proper expectations.
Getting value from sales training requires you to set proper expectations with sales leaders, managers, and representatives for what they will do before, during, and after the event, because the event alone won’t make a long-term impact on the business.
Before the training, people need to know what will be covered, how and why they will be doing it, and any preparation or prework required in advance. If you’ve done a good job creating strategic relevance, this part should be easy.
Create excitement by injecting a competitive element. Salespeople are competitive by nature. Be intentional and make the competition during the training relevant. Eliminate distractions, be clear that you expect full participation, and that results will be shared, driving accountability.
Always plan follow-up activities and assignments that require the team to apply what they learned immediately, share learnings and successes, and provide feedback to their manager.
3. Create a highly engaging training experience.
Sales training should be highly engaging, but too often, it’s deathly boring. Think about the training from the participants’ perspective. They sit in a windowless conference center for hours with only the occasional break, enduring slide after slide after slide. Salespeople, like most of us, hate being talked at and lectured to. It’s mind-numbing and painful.
Sales training is an excellent opportunity to get participants up, active and engaged. You can choose to deliver a passive learning experience that is mostly slides and lectures or an active learning experience that requires people to work together, think critically and compete to win.
4. Maximize peer-to-peer learning.
Creating an engaging learning experience means letting peers learn from each other. You have a room full of people who share similar roles and face similar challenges, but who don’t typically have a chance to troubleshoot together.
Give participants an opportunity to learn from their peers and think differently. The idea is not just to share best practices, but to share best practices outside of your region. As a bonus, new friendships form, networks build, and morale and culture flourish.
To maximize peer-to-peer learning, allocate enough time and create the right conditions. There isn’t much peer-to-peer learning when a subject matter expert is on stage lecturing their way through a slide deck. Instead, maximize the opportunity by getting peers actively involved in problem-solving and working together toward common goals.
5. Timing matters.
If you want to deliver an engaging learning experience that’s interactive and where you expect people to think critically, then they need to maintain the focus and energy to stay engaged. Be aware of competing priorities. Try and make your training the most critical initiative at the time. You will want to create an agenda that is robust enough to introduce new knowledge and skills while being concise enough to keep participants alert and focused throughout.
Sales training is the first step in a long journey to develop new behaviors. This requires proper follow-up and reinforcement activities, and coaching, but getting the timing right ensures the first step is in the right direction.
6. Leverage sales managers as coaches.
Too often, we focus sales training just on reps and the role of sales managers becomes an afterthought. But sales managers play a crucial role in the adoption of new sales behaviors.
Sales managers must be directly involved, not sitting on the sidelines, observing from the back of the room while their people get lectured to by a trainer. By actively participating and developing their coaching skills during training, they can reinforce new sales skills and behaviors in the weeks and months that follow.
Sales leaders must have a role at the table to hear concerns, drive conversations, generate new ideas, practice coaching a new process or framework, and develop their own skills specific to reinforcing new behaviors.
If managers don’t have an active role and think the sales training is for the reps and not them, they’ll be disengaged, set a tone that this is not critical to the business, and they’ll end up being a distraction instead of an asset. One idea to consider is introducing the sales managers to the selling skills content separately and allowing them the opportunity to discuss their role as a coach going forward.
7. Don’t do too much.
When it comes to delivering effective sales training, less is usually more. Sales training effectiveness unravels when you cram too much into too short a session.
Be committed to staying on schedule. Resist the urge to overwhelm people by overloading them with information and stuff that is nice to have but not a must-have. If you’re not focusing on new-hire onboarding, remember to only provide them the skills, tools, processes or knowledge they need to drive the strategic initiatives being implemented at that time. Keep the training fun, interactive and competitive.
Lose the PowerPoint, handouts and manuals, and have people roll up their sleeves and work on real-life challenges they need to overcome once they’re back in the trenches.
Finally, have a call to action with timing. Be realistic about how much people will absorb on-site. The call-to-action drives participants to digest the learnings and demonstrate how they can apply what they need to know. Be sure their sales manager is holding them accountable for the call to action.
Effective sales training aligns your team with strategy, builds skills and confidence and drives behavior change. To succeed, focus on relevant topics, clear expectations, peer learning, manager involvement and interactive design. Keep it focused and practical – less is more – to ensure lasting impact beyond the training room.
