Sales departments are notorious for their high rates of turnover, yet they’re one of the most critical functions within most companies, and the sales role is also particularly challenging to effectively train.
Learning leaders must work closely with their counterparts on the sales side to ensure sales training is effective, efficient, and that key portions remain “evergreen,” so that new salespeople can hit the ground running and more experienced staff have the refresher training they need to remain at the top of their game.
Sales organizations tend to focus only on the obvious training efforts, such as what to sell and how to sell it—the basic sales process in 5–7 easy steps. Generally these are short-term promotions aimed at hitting quarterly revenue targets or launching new service or product offerings.
What gets left out is… everything else. Onboarding, industry trends, sales management training, internal processes, best practices, who to call for what and when to call them, reporting procedures, available sales tools and how to use them, and the company’s implementation guidelines are just a few of the things that are left for the team to figure out as they go along. These are the evergreen sales skills that are critical for salespeople to have success, and these skills often transcend promotional needs. Unfortunately, the time salespeople spend acquiring tribal knowledge directly detracts from their ability to meet sales goals.
Engage Directly with Sales Leaders
When was the last time you had a real conversation with your company’s head of sales, or the heads of sales for your organization’s key business units?
These people are ultimately responsible for the company’s ability to stay in business, let alone hit the growth targets that provide opportunity for other staff, and they have everything to gain if salespeople are producing and working at their highest potential. They also have training budgets that they can swing your way once you show that you can help them hit their metrics—metrics that are easily understood and greatly appreciated by the C suite.
For this cross-departmental collaboration to prove fruitful, it's critical to understand the sales organization’s goals and challenges. Ask questions like:- What are the goals for sales this year?
- How did last year’s sales numbers look?
- What are your top people doing differently than poorer performers?
- What special knowledge do new hires need in order to have immediate success?
- Where are the common gaps in process adherence among salespeople?
- Which sales tools and systems go underutilized?
After every question, follow up by asking, “WHY?”
This should be a discovery meeting that will help you build rapport and better understand the problems and challenges that need to be addressed to make the sales organization successful. You might well uncover some very specific performance improvement needs. But, even if not, you can at least support the sales organization through a robust slate of evergreen training offerings.
Core competencies and foundational training concepts
Training of basic internal processes, job-specific best practices, and productivity tools used inside your company are great to have for initial training, as well as for refresher training when processes are being improperly employed or ignored. Knowledge of how to leverage the customer relationship management system, pricing and prospecting tools, RFP development processes, and the expense reporting process are necessary to onboard salespeople quickly and effectively. Likewise, organizational processes—such as how and where to get assistance from SMEs, proposal and contract writing, procurement requirements, and marketing—can be of great help to all salespeople, new and experienced alike.
Onboarding strategy focused on rapid ROI
The average tenure of a sales manager is 19 months, and less than 24 months for a salesperson—but if the new hires take part in a structured onboarding process, 66% of them are likely to remain with a company for longer than 3 years. Studies have also shown that effective onboarding programs can improve employee performance by 11.5%.
Evergreen sales training content
There are three specific topics where L&D can help the sales organization with onboarding and evergreen training content: competency, activity, and communication.
Sales Competency: Ensure your salespeople have 360-degree knowledge of products, customers, and sales processes. Salespeople don’t just need to know what your products are or what they do, they have to understand why a customer would care and the value it brings. Train them on what questions to ask, when to ask, and what answers to listen for to identify client needs. Develop sales-specific product training that addresses the benefits of using your product/service and creates value in the mind of a buyer. And don’t forget training on how to share your organizational mission and values. How they communicate is as important as what they communicate when it comes to winning loyal customers… and repeat sales.
Sales Activity: Set expectations for the salespeople by communicating the best practices of their position and what they should be doing to hit their goals. What should their pipeline of opportunities look like? They should know small but important details like how many sales calls are usually needed to close a deal, and whether email or phone is the best way to initiate contact with a prospect in your particular industry or market segment.
Salesperson Communication: Building a support network at the beginning of a job will not only help with onboarding—it will be a retention tool, as well. Good communication builds corporate and cultural knowledge, and helps new team members assimilate and become productive quicker with less stress.
Working in concert with sales managers, the L&D organization can provide meaningful assistance with sales onboarding, as well as deliverables that will impact sales success over the long term. Learning leaders have the opportunity to use their training knowledge and expertise to enhance sales success. Partner with the head of sales to build a learning strategy to improve the abilities of the sales team —and with it, organizational revenue.
If you don’t already work with your sales leadership, set a meeting ASAP!
Topics: Training and Facilitation