The skill level of your sales reps directly affects their ability to close deals, yet companies continue to struggle to offer their sales teams skills and product training that is relevant, compelling and impactful. Traditional sales training is on its way out, says Elay Cohen, author of “Saleshood: How Winning Sales Managers Inspire Sales Teams to Succeed” (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2014).
“I’ve seen teams cooped up in rooms for pricey daylong or even weeklong sessions that delivered marginal (or no) results,” he says. The traditional one-way delivery of training in workshop cram sessions is being replaced by more effective strategies and training tools, including video, mobile resources and peer-to-peer mentoring.
Salespeople learn from salespeople, Cohen emphasizes. As sales managers adapt to the new realities and employ concepts of 21st century sales training, a focal point should be inspiring as much peer-to-peer learning as possible. He offers these insights on new sales training concepts:
• Just-in-time learning: Content that previously would have been delivered in a workshop setting by product managers, marketers or other experts can now be delivered through videos in an online environment when it will be most effective for reps. Video also introduces new ways to “chunk up” the learning, giving reps time to apply the skills in real time on their active deals.
• Mobility: Salespeople are “attending” team meetings from their home offices or even in the field. The ability to share and consume small amounts of information from a mobile device has turned idle time into productive time.
• Peer learning: Salespeople learn best from peers who have experienced similar scenarios. The manager’s job is to facilitate social learning across the team by fostering a culture of coaching, mentoring and sharing of best practices.
• Learning by doing: There is no comparison between giving a salesperson a lecture on a selling concept and showing the same rep firsthand how it works. This ties in well with social learning. You can encourage reps to try new skills and concepts and then come back together to share how it worked for them in the real world.
• Sales huddles vs. annual training events: More sales managers are instituting a culture and curriculum of shorter, more targeted modular learning in lieu of the firehose approach of marathon training sessions. Sales huddles maximize learning, absorption and deployment of new strategies.
”When you scratch the old way of training in favor of a more evolved approach, you’ll see your culture flourish and your team’s productivity skyrocket. More importantly, everyone will have more fun,” Cohen says.
