There is a common illusion that an effective salesperson is a slick talker, who answers questions even before you have them on your mind. However, the truth is quite the opposite. The best salesmen are those who listen more than they talk. Identifying client’s need and giving the client what they want is what makes an effective salesman standout. Such skills have to be honed through consistent training.
As a manager, you should adhere to certain sales training techniques that will help to keep your sales force on their toes and perform to the best of their abilities while keeping in mind this aspect of training. Here are a few tips that can your guide to assist your Salesforce to be right up there.
Encouraging Micro Learning: Keep it short and simple, and do not complicate things. Sales people like all others cannot retain a huge amount of information at one single time. Multi-day training can actually lead to overtraining which can push technique over ability, crush confidence and be detrimental to the natural talent of the salespeople.
Educate through E-Learning: It is pertinent to the sales team to know the product inside out. If they do not know your product front to back, no matter their expertise and skill set, they would not be able to succeed. Salesforce are always on the move, and therefore, it makes it difficult to get the entire team under one roof for training purposes. To even this, it is best recommended to encourage e-learning through online videos and modules. This will help them brush up their product knowledge while on the go.
Rewarding Achievements: Creating achievements based training programs can be very encouraging. It is important to recognize specific achievements like when they close a particularly difficult call. Apart from group achievements, individual achievements too can be recognized for enhanced motivation. Using specifics to make the successes meaningful and tangible is recommended.
This is a very useful blog that details on some of the techniques that are very important when it comes to sales training. It has helped me a lot to understand the techniques that are involved, and I could implement them in my projects as well.