Training Your Sales Team
Confidence and selling ability go hand in hand. Building confidence can be
tricky, but having a good understanding of your product, your competition, and
the most effective sales techniques can help build that confidence and make an
average sales rep into a star performer. A good sales training program for your
reps can help them in numerous ways. You need to conduct training not only about
your own products, services, company history, and existing clients, but also
about selling techniques, technology, and software.
Ongoing and useful sales training is one of the most beneficial things you
can do for your sales staff. Sales training can have tremendous impact on sales
and keep your staff "on their toes" as far as new and potential client needs and
new techniques in the sales world go. By ongoing, we don't just mean annual
training. For many companies, annual sales training is the most they ever do,
but the real benefits come with more regularly scheduled training sessions that
build on each other. For instance, you may choose to talk about a specific sales
technique as it applies to your product line in the first session, and then
build a cross-selling technique onto it in the next session.
Keys to Successful Training
The keys to making your sales training effective lie partially in how you
present the training to your staff. One of the most important things to get
across is how this training is going to increase your reps' sales, as well as
benefit the company. In other words, what's in it for them? Make specific
statements about how using this new technique can improve the percentage of
closed sales by X% (Of course, making sure you know your statistics is
important, too!). Or, how it can improve customer satisfaction by X%, which will
in turn pull more sales from those happy customers.
Another key element of your sales training is making it interesting and
entertaining. You don't want your staff snoozing through your brilliant
PowerPoint presentation any more than they want their prospects snoozing through
theirs! Make sure you (or whomever you hire) are entertaining enough to keep
everyone awake, and more importantly, interested!
Give specific examples about how to use the new techniques. Tell stories that
realistically reflect your product and market. Be overly prepared for questions
and have multiple scenarios in mind to illustrate your points. Make all of your
sales training information specific to your product and your market.
Make sure everyone participates. What they "do," they "learn." Simply
listening to an idea about how something should be done is never as effective as
practicing it. Also, encourage participation in the discussion. Have everyone
come in with a list of questions from prospects that have stumped them, as well
as some answers they've given that have landed the sale. Then have discussions
about these problems and keep track of the solutions that come up.
Handouts (or e-mails) that recap some of the best ideas that were generated
from the meeting can be sent out for reference later. You can also use this
information to build a database of questions and answers that can be accessed
electronically when a sales rep is stumped.
Some final points in sales training include:
- Encourage and motivate your sales staff through enthusiasm and on-target
information.
- Keep it lively!
- Provide useful information, and make sure they understand why it is
useful.
- Make it specific.
- Make future sales training sessions build on techniques learned from
preceding sessions.
- Have a reward system for those reps who have used the new techniques and
been successful.
- Set up regularly scheduled sales training sessions.
Lee Ann Obringer
http://communication.howstuffworks.com
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