Leveraging Interactive Sales Training Tools

Why Are Interactive Sales Training Tools Essential, Even for High-Performing Sales Teams?

The best interactive sales training tools can help you stand out from the rest, be a powerful resource to empower your sales team, and inspire them to improve their performance. According to Forbes, keeping your sales staff engaged and adequately trained allows them to focus on interacting with prospects and clients, building trusting relationships that drive better outcomes.

The same report highlights a series of tactics to keep field reps your best salespeople, and sales managers motivated despite the often monotonous tasks they still have to perform. As you will see, training weighs heavily among the factors that will make them succeed and sales soar. Let’s review:

Tactic #1: Empower Your Sales Managers with Leadership & Coaching Training

Sales managers interact with field reps every day. Unless they receive ongoing training to keep your team energized, you’re most likely dealing with disengagement.

Gallup analyzes the engagement and performance of 35 million workers across every role and consistently finds a causal relationship between engagement and productivity. Their research shows that productivity among highly engaged teams is 14% higher than those with low engagement, and employees who are not engaged cost their company an equivalent of 18% of their annual salary.

Well-planned leadership training for your sales managers will help them become great coaches and motivators for their groups. Their development programs should include techniques to prioritize their time to work with their sales teams over paperwork-related tasks. Over 50% of sales managers are too busy to train and develop their sales teams.

Additionally, you can plan weekly activities like simulating sales calls, goal-setting meetings, frequent checkpoints, and immediate feedback.

Tactic #2: Adapt your Training Program to Different Learning Styles

Utilize adult learning principles to create an engagement atmosphere in your sales training. Your sales representatives must be able to relate what they’re learning to their daily lives in order to be engaged.

Your courses and training sessions should include many real-life examples and give your salespeople a chance to participate in exercises instead of just watching a presentation. Think of this as an enhanced workshop-style format.

It is well known that, in adults, learning is most effective when it is interactive since they retain subjects better when presented in immersion. Also, it is critical to ensure sales reps can learn as they go about their day-to-day duties instead of requiring them to attend scheduled, time-consuming classes or lessons based on hypothetical situations.

In the following sections, you will learn how a modern, interactive sales training tool that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) can help you achieve these developmental goals.

Related: The New Science of Training Sales Reps

Tactic #3: Connect Your Team to Its Higher Purpose

There is a disconnect between how salespeople think they come off and how customers actually perceive them: 50% of customers consider salespeople as pushy, yet only 17% of salespeople say the same. Even worse, a dismal 3% of buyers trust sales reps. Much of this has to do with the fact that salespeople either don’t believe in what they sell, don’t understand the benefit they can bring to customers, or are not aware of the perception they create with customers.

Whenever possible, try encouraging your team to connect with a variety of customers more relationally. Motivate them to keep in touch with clients whose lives have changed because of your product. Your salespeople will be inspired to do what they do because they know they contribute to something greater than themselves.

Tactic #4: Leverage Your Most Successful Reps

To mentor newer members of your team, pair them with more experienced, successful salespeople. As newly recognized experts, mentors will be celebrated and motivated, and they will also benefit from the challenge of teaching a early-stage professional.

A leading interactive sales tool will let you automatically gather data on the real-life behaviors and actions of your best salespeople and use it to train less experienced reps with these skills.

Tactic #5: Implement Learning On-Demand

Develop a “learning on-demand” system so your salespeople can get access to an ever-growing repository of knowledge at any time. Depending on the type of content, it could be an interactive knowledge base, a webinar collection, or a subscription to a learning website.

Premium interactive sales training tools will allow you to set up learning strategies to identify and address skills gaps, build critical capabilities, and develop your team’s talents to improve their performance continually.

Related: The Definitive Guide to Virtual Sales Success

Features to Look for in an Interactive Sales Training Tool

In 2020, the way people communicate changed forever. It is no longer a trend to meet via video; it has become the new norm for businesses across many industries, and sales teams are no exception.

The good news is that even though these new virtual channels present a series of challenges, companies are in control of their teams’ communication skills more than ever. Read on to learn what you need from ant interactive sales training tool if your organization wants to take its sales ability from great to extraordinary.

1) State-of-the-Art Technology

Consider a tool that combines AI with behavioral science and experiential learning to provide you with a personalized, scalable and practical skills development system based on science. Using this sort of technology, you can dive deep into what’s working and what isn’t, and access provides even your best salespeople ways to improve.

You won’t find this capability with traditional sales training tools. An interactive, experiential learning platform will give you the most accurate and reliable data and continuously improve your team’s communication and connection skills.

A world-class platform should include the following to facilitate your training program design:

• Behavioral assessments
• Experiential learning
• Role-based scenarios
• Video and transcript library
• Personalized feedback
• Aspirational and competitive benchmarking
• Guided learning journeys
• Progress tracker
• Milestone motivators
• Tips and best practices

Rather than just another online course, your platform should serve as a comprehensive tool that identifies skills gaps and opportunities for improvement by leveraging sight, sound, and language data gathered from real conversations.

2) Assessment, Development, and Improvement Capabilities

Your choice of background and clothing is not enough for video communication to be successful. The way your salespeople say things and their body language is just as, if not more, important as what they say. Delivery determines what makes or breaks your argument, whether they are selling in person or through a screen.

With video conferencing technology, salespeople face several new challenges in engaging, persuading, and inspiring audiences. A science-driven, interactive sales training tool could help you, for example, analyze individual speakers presenting in-person and virtually, giving them feedback to compare their performance across the two channels.

It could also help you identify specific communication characteristics and how they align and differ with best practices for in-person and virtual. You can use these key insights to get your team to deliver your message more effectively through screens and face-to-face.

In short, with the right tool, you can discover your organization’s opportunities for improvement and learning, identifying where gaps exist. It will also let you generate individual development plans to create lasting behavioral change for your sales managers, reps, and talent based on your goals. A powerful, interactive sales training tool will analyze and connect individual, team, and organizational improvements with business results.

3) Integrations

By connecting a professional, interactive sales training tool to the solutions you already use, you can seamlessly gather the data to provide personalized feedback and training. For example, connect it with your video conferencing platforms, calendars, customer relationship management apps, and other systems to get the most out of the training platform.

4) Built-in Reporting

Analytics and reporting will help you demonstrate measurable results and identify skill gaps across the organization. An interactive sales training tool will give your reps the relevant, personal information and feedback to improve their performance and close more sales by providing versatile reporting and resources.

Quantified’s AI technology enables sales reps to establish better human connections to close more deals. We are more than just an interactive sales training tool. Our AI-powered solution assesses customer-facing conversations, scores the performance along key behavioral dimensions, and develops your people into top-performers with automated feedback, coaching, and measurement, to deliver improved sales performance.

Get Quantified’s unique personal analytics, feedback, and development plans to improve your reps’ communication and drive their results. Request a demo now.