Your sales team is one of your company’s most dynamic and influential departments. They are your brand’s front-line soldiers and have a direct and profound impact on your organization’s bottom line. If your salespeople aren’t equipped with the sales skills and mindset needed to overcome objections and challenges to close sales, your company will suffer.
Fortunately, a high-quality, comprehensive sales training program can be the solution to all of your revenue problems! In this guide, we’ll take you through five ways that investing in sales training can supercharge the success of you, your brand, and your sales teams.
A Sales-Ready Mindset
Your sales department doesn’t just get products off shelves. Often, they are the first company representatives that a potential customer encounters – making them your brand’s first impression to your prospect.
Having an effective team of salespeople requires them to have the right mindset for the job. They must be resilient and respectful, firm and fair, and strong, honest negotiators. The sales department is one of the fastest-paced and most stressful parts of your company. If your inside sales or field sales representatives don’t have the right sales mindset, they are prone to burning out, leaving, and costing your revenue.
When choosing a sales training program, be sure you understand the trainer’s Sales Training Philosophy as much as you understand their process, methodology, and curriculum.
The right sales training program equips your sales team with the mindset they need to engage your prospects in a human-to-human way, navigate objections, handle rejection, and gain new customers while closing sales.
A strong sales training program will teach both the tactical and soft skills required to build trust with your prospects. It is this trust that makes your prospects become customers.
Some examples of these soft skills include sales training around the psychology of the customer’s mind. Specifically skills around Active Listening, How Humans Make Decisions, Respect Contracts. Which then teaches your sales teams how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask, and when to do it.
Builds Understanding of the Buyer’s Experience
One of the biggest myths in sales is understanding the buyer’s journey. It’s not about the buyer’s journey, it’s about the Buyer’s Experience.
People don’t buy products, they buy on emotions. When they just buy a product and don’t recognize the emotion behind the purchase, it leads to a closet full of nothing to wear. Why? Because after we make a quick purchase, we get home, try it on, and then we change. There is a dissonance between how we feel and how we expected to feel. That is the definition of buyer’s remorse.
Often, the difference between a missed opportunity and a closed sale is how much the buyer feels understood and valued. In short, do they feel, “heard?” This is another example of where having strong soft skills around active listening is so important.
Before your salespeople can start having productive interactions with prospects, they must first understand the buyer’s mindset. This includes understanding your ICP (Ideal Company Profile) and your IPP (Ideal Persona Profiles).
If your sales department doesn’t recognize your potential clients’ struggles, pain points, and reasons for being hesitant, they can’t effectively overcome the objections and close sales.
Best-in-class sales training not only helps your team listen to your prospects, encourages your potential customers to paint pictures of pain. In turn, this allows your salespeople to present a solution that takes their pains away.
Going one layer deeper, when you teach your sales reps how to navigate a sales conversation painting a picture of pain, it reinforces their good sales habits like compounding interest in your 401k. Furthermore, it helps your sales teams get into the mind of your prospects and customers to allow authentic empathy to be a part of the sales process. Again, this is where your prospects and customers “fall in trust” with your organization.
Assists in Navigating the Sales Process
Many salespeople – especially newer additions to your team – might have trouble navigating the sales process. You wouldn’t play chess without understanding how pieces move on the board; the same goes for sales. If your team cannot recognize where they are in the sales process or sales conversation, they won’t know which next steps they should take.
Should they be trying to set an appointment, exchange information, or go for the close?
Knowing when to make the right move can mean the difference between winning the sale or losing it to your competitor. The world’s best salespeople are masters at understanding their position in the sales process and acting accordingly.
Your sales process should have proper stage naming and specific exit criteria to move from one stage to the next. This way, salespeople know their objectives and the moves that they need to make to achieve them. If not, your company is missing opportunities and leaving money on the table.
Competent sales training helps reinforce and teach your team members the various parts of the sales process. It should include the specific exit criteria at each stage to move the deal forward and the specific soft skills and tactics to use in each phase to get those answers. All of which help lead your prospects – facilitating better customer relations and more closed sales!
Helps Identify Different Types of Buyers
This is a place where sales and marketing don’t always get along. Despite this, understanding the buyer types, their personas, and the pains of each persona is of concern to both sales and marketing.
Buyers are unique. Although the people buying your products might be similar in their industry or profession, they all have unique problems, needs, and ideals. Yes, they are precious little snowflakes, and as such, you should treat them that way.
As such, different buyers are inspired and influenced by different things. Some people are motivated by growing their brand, while others want to spend more time with loved ones. Ultimately, everyone is inspired to do a good job, get promoted, and of course, make more money. Your salespeople must approach different types of buyers appropriately in ways unique to the buyer’s experience, not the buyer’s journey.
A salesperson who can distinguish between the different types of buyers immediately becomes more effective at closing sales. By actively recognizing the metaphorical “sales territory” or “sales patch” in which they are operating, your sales team supercharges their influence when dealing with clients.
Your sales training should include pains by persona, pains by role, and pains by those who affect the decision but never use your product or service (IT, Security, Procurement, etc.). The soft sales skills taught by your sales trainer are your secret sauce to winning more deals and losing less to going dark or the competition..
Building Confidence, Courage, Adaptability, and Accountability
So what’s the ultimate goal of a world-class sales trainer or sales training program? It’s not about the money, or the growth, or the new customers and logos. Yes, they matter, but a lot more comes before those things.
Ultimately, improving your sales teams’ sales skills will develop their self-esteem. With greater confidence comes more courage to implement the sales skills taught. With this improved courage and confidence, your Sales Development Team, Inside Sales Team, and Field Sales Team will be more agile, have a greater ability to adapt as the sales conversations shift.
Sales is a lot more like Jazz than Rock-N-Roll. It has a flow, a rhythm, but it can also turn on a dime, just like a sales conversation. Giving your sales teams confidence can make or break your company’s success. Confident salespeople are less likely to get discouraged by a challenging client when handling objections, pricing negotiations, and closing the deal.
If your salespeople aren’t confident in their abilities and the quality of the products they sell, they won’t be able to make the moves that it takes to close sales. When your sales team exudes confidence and pride in what they sell, potential buyers pick up that confidence. When you combine that confidence with a conversational sales approach like N.E.A.T. Selling, your customers “fall in trust” with your team and your company.
When you implement a strong sales training and reinforcement program, all those end-of-the-month, end-of-the-quarter, and end-of-the-year discounts can go away.
Expect and Require Customization
Two of the gravest mistakes sales leaders make when choosing a sales training program are not ensuring that it’s customized to their specific industry, customers, and services; and that the training includes a reinforcement program.
With regards to customization, this means more time is spent in the training session on real-play and role-play scenarios of your prospects and customers. Your sales trainer should be asking you to pull specific deals in the pipeline to role-play or lost deals to do real-play so you can practice the, “Oh, I wish I had said _____”
Expect and Require Reinforcement
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve. In short, the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve states that unless something is reinforced and practiced repeatedly, it will be forgotten.
So, when choosing the right sales trainer and sales training program, whether it’s for SDRs, AE’s, or Customer Success, be sure to confirm the programs include post-training reinforcement coaching sessions.
The best programs, like the N.E.A.T. Selling 4 Week Training and Reinforcement Program not only offer weekly coaching for the sales teams. But also include weekly coaching for the sales leadership team.
Conclusion
A high-quality, world-class, and comprehensive sales training program is key to building a confident, adaptable, and effective sales team. Which in turn grows your revenue. When your salespeople are equipped with the right soft skills, sales tactics, and mindset, they can supercharge your brand’s cash flow and success.
Unfortunately, it can be challenging to find sales training that you can trust and that you know will benefit your brand. That’s why we created the 4 Week N.E.A.T. Selling™ Training & Reinforcement Program! In this course, your team will learn industry-leading techniques and tactics for discovery, prospecting, and qualifying in today’s fast-paced business world. Learn more about our new program today and find out why companies like Google, Pilot, and Zoom partner with us to supercharge their sales teams!
