3 Phases of Sales Training You Must Have
This is the second of two articles on why sales training is the backbone of sales success. (If you missed it, here’s part one.)
A good sales training program provides the confidence and reassurance your sales team needs in an ever changing and dynamic marketplace.
Want to improve bottom-line results?
According to CSO Insights, salespeople who complete highly rated sales training programs have 10% higher win rates not to mention are more likely to achieve their quota, and are less likely to leave your company for another.
To facilitate an elite training program, you should have three distinct phases to help reps execute:
Onboarding: Dynamically train new reps on your industry, organizational processes and systems, products, and competitors.
Real-time coaching: Sales managers provide feedback following a demo or meeting and during weekly check-ins where they discuss open opportunities.
Ongoing: Reinforce best practices by sharing what top sales reps are doing to win business, address industry changes, understand new product rollouts, and strategize how to best overcome hot competitors.
Top organizations focus on all three phases of training. Regardless of the growth phase of your company, it’s important to follow this model to help your reps succeed.
Onboarding can make or break your results
Onboarding needs to be encompassing and comprehensive, from industry to processes and products, competitors, objection handling, and negotiation—you need to touch on it all. Why? Because it is the single most important time period for any new sales rep.
Now, that’s a lot of content for someone to create (think: curriculum, instructional design, measuring rep success), someone needs to teach the courses (think: engaging, challenging, and inspiring) and time needs to be spent bringing it all together.
But how much time should be invested in onboarding your new sales reps? A lot depends on the complexity of your industry and the number of products you sell. One suggestion would be to create an outline of all the classes you can think of and then create each week’s curriculum by clustering similar or related classes in the same week. This will give you a rough timeline of your overall training schedule (4 weeks and up to 20 weeks). How well you train your reps should trump how fast you can get them out the door.
Onboarding process should have a rhythm and be highly organized
A good sales rep always wants to win, and they want to feel prepared for any situation. If they aren’t winning out of the gate, the first thing they’ll point to is the training they received. And obviously, you don’t want to be losing good hires. According to The Bridge Group survey of hundreds of B2B SaaS companies, the national average sales rep turnover rate is 35% with involuntary turnover making up two-thirds of that number. Unfortunately this points to either bad hiring or poor training.
During onboarding, avoid memory fatigue
B2B sales reps need to learn a lot in a short period time and the key to their success is how much information they can retain. The best way to combat memory fatigue is by doing mock presentations.
This sounds simple (it is) but you’d be surprised to learn how many organizations don’t force reps to do mocks. Repetition and having to simulate a situation is what helps reps retain information and enhance decision-making skills (probably why top athletes and military personnel focus on simulation training).
Here’s a simple way to setup your mock process:
Explain mock sales presentations (live or web-based) are a huge part of the onboarding process. Share good mock recordings with the trainee so they can see “what good looks like.”
Provide a sales scenario and scoring parameters with the trainee so they know how to prepare. They should practice mocking with a mentor before their actual mock.
For a live mock, make sure to have a good camera so you can record the entire environment, most importantly to see and hear the trainee (this allows them to replay the recording for further review).
The trainers (sales managers too, if applicable) should score things like confidence level, excitement, rapport building, clarity, value proposition, uncovering pains/opportunities, product navigation, ROI, objection handling, closing and next steps, etc. It’s best to score on a scale of 1-5 to make it easy.
Once the mock is complete provide feedback (careful to not to over do it). First focus on the positive, then the constructive stuff. Their mock scores should then be recorded in a systematic way to aggregate over time to see how they are performing overall.
Great sales reps will want to do well any time they are being scored on something. Constructive feedback is also important to them as long as you share exactly how to improve (again, good time to point them to a “what good looks like” video to learn exactly how to say or demo something).
I’ve always found it useful when giving constructive feedback to a rep, that they repeat it back to me or acknowledge they understand my feedback—that little piece allows their brain to work differently than just listening to your feedback and assuming they understand what you’ve told them.
Some reps will fail your onboarding process and that’s OK
Just because you hired a rep, shouldn’t mean they’ll automatically pass training. Don’t be surprised if you see a 25% failure rate. Keep an eye out for red flags during training (bad test scores, lack of professionalism, low engagement, weak mocks, late to meetings, etc.) and either course correct or part ways with the person.
It’s more costly for you to put a weak person through training and fire them later than it is to catch them before they go live.
Real-time coaching is an opportunity you don’t want to miss
Sales managers should be meeting with their reps every week, and it’s not surprising that much of the focus in these meetings is getting deals in the door. A big mistake is focusing solely on that and not working on developing the rep or evaluating how they are handling various situations.
Ask questions about their positioning, have them share with you what they are saying, what they are showing, etc. As they provide details, look for opportunities to give constructive feedback, and have them repeat these new practices back to you. Get them to role play. Have them show you how they demo’d something. Take the time to do this—don’t try it once and then go back to discussing deals again.
If you focus on developing the rep during weekly check-ins, it will not only increase their confidence but they’ll close more deals because of it.
Ongoing training is simple if you implement a certification process
Picture a third-year sales rep. They were onboarded a long time ago and they’ve had a sales manager coaching them through lots of opportunities. But now there is a shift in the industry and they need to adapt fast. How does that happen? How do you streamline the process without taking them out of the field for very long?
You implement a certification process.
One suggestion: have your best rep or top sales manager record a video overview of what’s changing in the market and how to adapt including new positioning talk tracks. This recording is basically a “what good looks like” video. Then have all your reps watch it, and request that they record themselves doing the same thing so it can be reviewed and graded. If their recording hits on all the points you shared with them, they pass—they get “certified.”
This process is fantastic when you need reps to adapt to changes or if you have new product rollouts. It ensures that as time moves on you have a process that ensures your reps are using the certified positioning and talk tracks. By requesting that reps send you a recording, it makes the process certifiable and reps can keep trying until they get certified. As head of sales or training, you’ll feel confident that your entire team is in sync and using approved positioning out in the field.
Final thoughts
You can have the best product and infinite opportunity, but without well-trained reps, you can’t maximize revenue growth. Well-trained reps are always a win-win. Also, with a solid sales training process, you’ll be able to scale much easier and faster because the wider your team gets, the more critical it is to keep every rep sharp and speaking the same language.