Selling the Importance of Sales Training to the Exec Team

Sales leaders are often in a difficult situation. You must keep yourself and the team up-to-date with new product releases and features to close more sales, yet you can’t afford to lose time with training. Sales reps also struggle to remember the information they learn. According to Gartner, sales reps forget up to 70% of what they learn within a week of training. Moreover, 87% forget within a month.

You are well aware of sales technology’s benefits for training and coaching. It will help you and your team stay on top of new processes and product releases. However, suppose the executive team is unfamiliar with the importance of sales training and various learning management tools. In that case, it might be tricky to sell them the idea and benefit from practical training.

You’ll need to deliver compelling arguments and offer indisputable proof to convince your executive team that investing in new technology for sales training is a brilliant idea. When done right, sales training with digital tools can be cheaper, provide better results, is easier to implement, and most importantly, is more effective than the traditional forms of sales training.

Benefits of Sales Training

To ensure you get off the right foot, you’ll have to convince your executives that investing in online sales training has excellent benefits.

Sales training creates a discernible difference in employee performance. In 2020, high-performing salespeople were more likely to have undergone sales training than their underperforming counterparts.

Companies that adopt regular sales training have experienced notable profit growth, employee satisfaction, and innovation. Training has a significant impact on sales and the company’s success.

Here are other ways sales training benefits a business.

Increase Revenue

When a company’s employees undergo rigorous sales training, it experiences an increase in revenue. Efficient and effective sales techniques result in higher sales, which translates to better profits.

In order to maximize sales, sales reps must be mindful of the best way to sell the company’s products and services. A well-trained salesperson can close more deals quicker than an untrained agent.

Sales teams well-versed and acquainted in the stages of the sales process, the selling points of the service or product they are promoting, and the techniques to turn a simple inquiry into a sale will often bring in more revenue, improving your business bottom line.

Related: 6 Tips to Transform Your Sales Coaching and Increase Revenue

Provide in-depth knowledge of services and products

Another significant benefit of sales training is that it motivates team members to build an in-depth understanding of the services and products they sell.

When a sales agent comes across as knowledgeable about their selling, consumers recognize the expertise and are more likely to trust the salesperson’s input. This makes it easier to convert an inquiry into sales. Moreover, an in-depth understanding of the product on sale will help salespeople know which features to showcase depending on what the potential customer is seeking. Tailoring sales pitches to the interest of different audiences is an invaluable sales skill.

Close more (and better) deals

Sales training helps sales teams let go of the techniques and practices that produce fewer results and hone those that pay off. When teams learn which strategies are most efficient and focus on building those techniques and methods, deals close more swiftly.

With advancing sales techniques, team members can go after more significant, more profitable clients because their chances of landing higher-paying clients increase when they have been appropriately trained.

Increase productivity

Sales training increases a sales team’s confidence. Self-assured salespeople are more likely to take the initiative to seek out tasks and leads without being prompted by their superiors.

The confidence of team members continues to grow with increasing sales. Discouraged employees are often less productive, while employees who know how effective their roles are are more likely to seek out more and better opportunities for success.

Strengthen an organization

Although sales training improves the skill level of individual salespeople, it also fosters a sense of teamwork and camaraderie.

Effective sales training teaches sales reps to work as a unit and not a series of individuals with different goals and motivations. A proper training program helps team members recognize how their success is interdependent. A well-trained sales team will work together to achieve performance goals and boost sales.

Improve the customer buying experience

Often, consumers aren’t just buying a product or service. The experience is sometimes crucial as the quality of the purchase.

Good sales training teaches salespeople how to make the buying experience pleasurable and memorable for each client. They customize the process according to each client’s needs and interests. Exceptional buying experience helps you draw new clients and keep the ones you already have.

How to Convince the Executive Team of Innovative Sales Training Needs

Executive leaders have to be realistic. Sales teams are often on the go, so it’s difficult for a company to gather them in a single place for a traditional sales training session. After all, customers and clients can’t be made to wait. But this doesn’t mean that organizations should ignore sales training altogether.

It takes knowledgeable sales teams to close deals in a competitive field like sales.

To work around the various constant challenges, the best solution a company can implement for its sales training needs is online learning with digital sales technology. It’s not only the most straightforward solution but also offers the following benefits, which count as online training success factors for executives.

Technology improves sales training processes.

One of the primary reasons executives need to adopt new technology for sales training is to streamline the training stages.

Stage 1: Training Assessment

Before you can measure whether learning has occurred, you must have a sense of what information an individual already knows. The first step in exploring the value of technology in training and development is to assess an individual’s knowledge and skills.

Traditional classroom assessments can be informal and unrecorded. But you can do this at scale and apply the results to developing individual team members with the right technology.

Technology allows companies to understand how effective a training program is by tracking individual knowledge before and after the process. It enables you to see how well-structured your sales training is. For instance, you can track trends along various demographics to ensure you haven’t developed inherent biases or realize that training needs to be re-crafted because everyone who takes it underperforms in the evaluation.

When your training technology becomes more complex, your assessments can also suffer. For instance, you can expand the baseline beyond check-the-box learning to capture an accurate image of a salesperson’s priorities and growth opportunities. You’ll get a sense of their leadership goals, how inclined they are to act in leadership roles, and even how they think about specific sales problems.

Stage 2: Simulation

Practical, real-world practice is the proven standard way of learning something new because you can apply new knowledge and skills before you can own them.

However, at a certain point in a company’s growth trajectory, it’s often impractical to bring that kind of experience to every sales agent at scale. But technology makes it much easier for sales reps to simulate real-life learning. For example, when you train sales teams about customer service skills, practical simulations provide excellent chances to practice value-based decision-making and support. Instead of practicing their new skills and concepts on real customers, salespeople can simulate and practice making sales in a safe environment.

Stage 3: Reinforcement

It might be easy to disseminate premium training content to many sales reps, but providing opportunities to reinforce the training material is another thing. Its vital to have a scalable and cost-effective strategy to reduce distraction sales teams often deal with and bolster the training they receive.

Technology can help your reinforcement stage by creating custom support for an individual salesperson, course, or subject. This makes it easier to integrate learning into the salesperson’s experience right after they’ve undertaken training.

Within an enterprise, there might be a lot of flexibility for customizing training reinforcement. One course might offer reminders, while another provides pointers and tips triggered by an individual’s learning profile. Yet another can leverage leaderboard learning or gamification to encourage friendly competition among team members who’ve taken the same training.

Stage 4: Feedback

Personal, live feedback makes the application of knowledge more alive, but you can imagine the challenge of providing that kind of detailed critique for every sales rep in person. It would be nearly impossible even with a fully staffed training and development team.

But advanced sales technologies like virtual avatar programs or video conferencing make it possible to review, assess and provide feedback on team members’ performance at a scale that would otherwise be inconceivable.

In addition, modern videoconferencing tools are a tremendous advantage for companies with remote sales teams. Real-time feedback improves salespeople’s selling skills, facilitates learning from anywhere, and makes a perfect solution for mentoring, coaching, and group collaboration.

AI and machine learning hold power to success

Sales technology, including sales enablement software and tools, has been growing steadily for years and has proven incredibly effective in helping sales reps sell smarter.

Artificial Intelligence and machine learning are similarly powerful tools for sales training. They hold the power to provide the information needed and find data quickly in what would otherwise have been a manual and time-consuming task with AI and ML set to create a real impact in sales training and improve your training sessions.

From predicting the best courses and learning needs to cover to digging up new training opportunities and quantifying learning outcomes through key metrics, these technological tools will make your sales training much more efficient.

Related: Can AI Really Unlock Sales Coaching Opportunities?

CRM offers valuable insights into sales opportunities

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are robust, cloud-based tools that offer an end-to-end view of customer relationships. These systems integrate sales and marketing with customer support in one single framework. You can leverage CRM to ensure your sales team uses relevant, updated, and mission-critical information during training to become more productive, proactive, and agile when dealing with prospects and customers. Technology can help personalize training to meet individual training needs.

The one factor that makes sales training ineffective is the traditional, generic curriculum that is not personalized to meet individual training needs. Sales technology can help.

When an online course is customized with engaging role-plays, the training can even more effectively cover various learning preferences land facilitate better learning retention empowering your sales team to increase leads and close bigger deals.

In Summary

Companies should always regard sales training as an investment, not an expense.

Some managers and executives may think sales training costs too much money or require a lot of resources, but they never consider the return on investment it usually delivers.

Thankfully, technology can empower receptive organizations to go the extra mile when training their sales reps to generate a steady stream of new clients while retaining their existing ones. Delivering effective sales training through trusted sales technology like Quantified helps the sales teams reach new excellence levels and improves overall business performance with cumulative rewards. Contact us for evidence-based, AI-powered, personalized training that measurably enhances outcomes.