Sales Training Ideas Which Work

Training sales people is a problem faced by all business managers and especially training sales people newly joining our business.

Whatever they’ve learned in previous roles doesn’t fit with our particular way of doing things. They may be accomplished hunters, closers and farmers but they still won’t understand our special value proposition – what makes us stand out from the crowd, and able to make a profit doing just that.

When they join, our first challenge is training sales guys in our special formula. If they’re any good soon we’ll see some value add – their professional interpretation of our model, to suit their individual style. If they aren’t we’ll need to manage more closely.

Poor sales people, using bad practice, will ruin our business faster than anything else. Customer service issues are opportunities to delight customers with our response, but disaffected prospects never give us the chance. They aren’t ever coming back to us, and neither are their friends. Training sales people to avoid such a situation pays dividends two ways, or even more.

So right from the start we need to train our sales people in our value proposition, our end to end sales process from first call to delighted customer. We can’t be with them all day, every day, but they’re representing our business so it’s up to us to make sure they’re doing it right.

Luckily there are a number of tools we can use for training sales guys to maximize their opportunity and minimize our risk:

Write a Blog

Blogs are so much more flexible than traditional web sites. We can write every dimension of our business model including value proposition, customer situation specific benefits and testimonials into our blog. Prospects can research who we are and what we can do for them, without a sales guy’s interpretation. We can make sure of making our best pitch, every time – with a blog.

Build a Footprint

The way the web is nowadays it’s easy to make sure we can be found wherever prospects look – Search engines, Facebook, Twitter, Google‘s Buzz, Google Local. That way prospects will come to us, and our sales team can spend less time searching them out and more time closing.

Design a Process

No matter the type of business, we can always design and then improve a process – some standard way of explaining what we do, checking that’s what the prospect’s looking for, agreeing how we’ll do business and getting contracts signed. Training sales people in our process pays the highest dividends, because then we’re all on the same page, using the same language.

Use Software

Embed our relationships and process in some software so we keep all our information in one place, get the whole team on the same page and find the information we need, when we need it.

Manage with Plan, Act, Review

Failing to plan is planning to fail. That’s a cliche, but it’s still true. Plan how we’ll achieve our goals, execute the plan in actions, and continuously review progress so we can alter course if necessary.

Training sales people is much easier when we implement these ideas – they only have to follow our rules, not figure it out for themselves. This way we can find the route to success with average ability sales guys.

When we train them to use our marketing pitch, follow our process, use our software and expect regular reviews they’ll be happy getting on with the job, because they’ll understand how the big picture works.

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