There’s an old saying: “Act like a lamb, sell like a lion.” This sales training program teaches salespeople to use both approaches—being gentle and empathetic with customers while being assertive and taking action.
Most companies customize their sales training to fit each company’s structure, market, management process, key performance indicators (KPIs), culture, and talent. This ensures that the training will stick and drive behavior change.
Invest in your people.
People are at the heart of any sales organization. Whether your salespeople are early career professionals or senior sales executives, their ability to communicate effectively with customers makes your business unique. It gives you an advantage over other industry players.
A good sales training company can transform your team’s communication skills and increase customer satisfaction. The best sales training companies can deliver programs customized to your business and its unique selling environment. This is achieved through various methods, including ride-along and field observations, an audit of your sales org, personalized assessments, and interviews with salespeople, managers, and executive leadership.
It is designed to help salespeople break through the resistance that senior-level decision-makers often display when approached. It also allows salespeople to develop the critical skills to build a pipeline and close deals. This includes understanding the buyer’s journey, overcoming challenging objections, and using a compelling sales presentation. This is a unique approach that ensures a lasting impact on sales performance.
Focus on the right things.
One of the most essential things salespeople can do to overcome a sales slump is to focus on the right things. This means shifting their mindsets, seeking new insights, and leveraging tools like Salesforce Sales Cloud features that offer goal-tracking capabilities. It also means recognizing that setbacks are temporary and every day presents an opportunity for renewed growth.
Getting back on track requires focusing on the key sales metrics that drive results, such as revenue growth, forecasting accuracy, pipeline velocity, and win-loss rates. These metrics provide a clear picture of sales performance and progress from month to month, quarter to quarter, and year to year.
It’s also vital to keep up with industry trends and adopt new strategies to boost your confidence, such as incorporating a confident stance into your body language. Changing your posture and curbing nervous habits, like fidgeting, will help you appear more authoritative and trustworthy to customers. You can also build confidence by focusing on personal growth, such as attending professional development sessions or learning a new skill. This will allow you to grow your knowledge base and expand your customer reach.
Create a culture of learning.
For sales training to be truly empowering, employees must have the time and resources to focus on it without distraction. Unfortunately, it’s easy for busy employees to feel overwhelmed by their day-to-day responsibilities and the pressure to reach short-term KPIs. To cultivate a learning culture, managers must be vocal about the importance of learning and development programs and encourage their teams to participate.
One way to do this is to provide various sales training options and offer a flexible schedule so employees can fit it into their plans. Another is to promote learning initiatives through internal channels, such as an email newsletter or social media posts. This will show employees that learning is a top priority and that the company cares about their professional growth.
Additionally, it’s important to include learning metrics in employee performance reviews and quarterly status meetings. This will help employees feel a sense of accountability and ensure that they’re not neglecting their learning. Finally, rewarding employees who engage in learning and demonstrate a commitment to developing their skills is also helpful.
Build a strong team.
Teamwork creates a human synergy that amplifies the results of each member. It keeps morale high and limits workplace frustration by allowing employees to focus more on the project and less on their performance. It also prolongs the momentum of a successful team and increases the odds that your business will achieve its sales goals.
Team leaders who provide purpose, clarity, and psychological safety are essential to building a solid team. They can do this by communicating the goals and expectations of their organization, coaching and supporting sales professionals, providing training opportunities, and identifying talent gaps.
A good sales training program will help new hires ramp up quickly, master full-cycle sales methodology, and reach quota faster. This will improve new pipeline creation, time first to deal, and other sales metrics.
Teams that feel supported by each other will be able to work together in unison, even when the road gets bumpy—supporting team-building activities, such as giving employees time off to volunteer, promoting company-wide charity events, and offering financial incentives for success.
Create a winning strategy.
The best sales training companies understand that a winning strategy requires a holistic approach that includes the whole team. Sales, marketing, customer success, products, and more need to work together to create a unified system that delivers superior value to customers and shareholders.
For example, identifying the correct target accounts is essential for building a robust pipeline and growing sales. This can be done with targeted prospecting training, which helps sellers identify opportunities and prioritize account targets based on the likelihood of them converting to sales and their potential for creating higher customer value.
Creating a unified buyer experience is another crucial aspect of a winning strategy. A buyer-first approach to aligning sales and marketing teams can reduce friction and improve win rates.
A great way to achieve this is by leveraging empathy with buyers through questions designed to encourage them to share their purchase journey, pain points, and the value they receive from your solution. By enabling your team to put themselves in the shoes of their buyers, they can develop a deeper understanding of their needs and close more deals.