Boost Your Sales Training!
Every sales training is about catching the attention of your sales managers. If you do not manage to get their interest, they are likely to not profit from your training or to lose the knowledge shortly after it. Following a study by Xerox, 87% of newly acquired skills are lost within a month of the training. How to make your training more attractive and exciting?
Fortunately, there are multiple ways to give it a new push. Here are five propositions to integrate excitement in your sales training:
1. Make it a game
2. Use videos
3. Bring your team together
4. Track progress
5. Repeat
1. Make it a game
People like games! Especially salespeople have an absolute preference for competition. Games are perfect to fulfill this demand and, at the same time, train important sales concepts. People are rarely able to remember some slide of sales training but are very likely to remember that and how they have beaten their colleagues in a game. Use quizzes or online tournaments with leaderboards. Make remembering procedures fun with flash card games. An added benefit: salespeople can use them on their mobile phones at any time.
“Gamification”– the application of typical elements of game playing to other areas of activity, typically as an online marketing technique to encourage engagement with a product or service.
2. Use videos
Videos catch our attention and facilitate recall. Use this advantage by creating videos for sales skills. Videos show how to do something in practice and not just in theory. Replay the videos at convenient occasions and make them accessible for your sales force. Consequently, if your sales team wants to check up on how to do something you don’t have to repeat the entire sales training. On the one hand, your videos should be exciting and not just be an extension of your slide deck. On the other hand, you should not exaggerate the excitement or show videos of low quality, as this might just unsettle your viewers.
In 2013 American companies invested 164.1 billion dollars in the training and development of their employees.
3. Bring your team together
Go, team! Sales managers oftentimes work dispersedly over different geographical regions. Meetings are costly. However, there are positive effects of regular meetings by sharing best practices and ideas. Nowadays, many technologies can bypass geographic distances and thereby bring salespeople together. It is crucial to use the right technologies, which prompt vivid discussions and idea sharing. Try to give the conversations a direction from initial ideas to real life experiences. Especially, leaders are in demand here, as employees expect feedback to their suggestions and doubts.
47 percent of experts have lost an assignment or customer because they haven’t had enough personal meetings.
4. Track progress
Monitor the progress of your training participants. Many pieces of training are executed “just to be done”. Keep in mind that the actual goal is improving the skills of your sales employees. You don’t know how your salespeople improved if you don’t know from where they started. Use progress dashboards to track progress. They quickly show a salesperson’s strength and areas of improvements. This is especially useful for leaders who need to decide which skills should be developed.
The Great People Index (GPI) as a measure of the ability, to detect and choose the right team.
5. Repeat
People need constant training to internalise new behaviors. There is still a broad discussion on how many repetitions people need to keep something in mind. Nevertheless, the necessity for repetition is hardly doubted. It is impossible to be an expert after just one training session. The development of new skills needs effort, practice, and reflection.
On average, half of the content of a sales training event is lost in 5 weeks.
Accordingly, proceed as the following:
Initially, measure your sales manager’s skills. Afterward, construct learning units which they can solve on their own. Allocate units to your employees based on their necessities. The next step is to hold workshops to put the theory into action and to give your salespeople relevant feedback. As the effect of coaching is very high, it is useful to assign an experienced manager to your sales managers. In the last step, use a platform which collects all the relevant information and data for development and evaluation.
Take advantage of this advice and give your sales training a new boost!
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