10 ways to improve your Business through Sales Training

Sales Training programs for Sales executives working in a business enterprise are always focused on how to improve sales skills of the team. The fact that Sales Training is one of the important tools for improving your business performance is something that one needs to realize, assess, and implement in their respective businesses.

Let us understand in this blog, about the specific ways in which Sales Training helps improve business performances.

1. Skill-Will Matrix of a Sales Team

The skill of a salesperson is many times misaligned to the will of the person. I have met a lot of people who are perfectly fine with a backend clerical desk job but when forced to do a front line customer facing role, they even choose to resign from the assignment. A sales trainer can judge the default will of the salesperson in a sales team of any business enterprise and help reallocate job profiles within the organization. This may lead to fresh recruitment, especially in the front line customer facing sales assignment.

2. Sales training helps plug weak areas on Selling competencies and sharpen the saw

Sales Training helps in sharpening the saw of the sales skill of each individual salesperson by imparting all the skills required to sell well in the market. In the course of a sales training it is very easy for the sales trainer to do a live SWOT analysis of each salesperson participating in the sales training.

Salespersons could be very good in sales call opening but poor in need analysis of objection handling. You can also have salespersons who are very good in sales demonstrations but very poor in Sales closing skills. Many salespersons are not able to conduct Sales Negotiations even after Sales Closings. There are a lot of salespersons who are unable to take an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) or to a BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeframe) Lead thereby leading to a high Lead Score.

3. Key Result Area (KRA) of a Salesperson is curated as per core competency

If you ask a bird to swim or a fish to fly, you will surely fail! This is exactly what happens in sales when the business person allocates a particular type of sales job to all salespersons. Sales is a team work where lead generation, lead engagement, sales process, sales closing, sales negotiation, sales order, customer loyalty and customer lifetime value monetisation must happen one after another. Surely all this will not be done by everyone in the sales team.

To maximize the outcome of sales from the business, one has to assign Key Result Area to each salesperson according to their core competencies as well as the need of the business model. This is best attained by Sales training which highlights the missing gaps and helps the business person plug the same.

4. Overall Ability of a salesperson is upgraded to Capability

Human beings are blessed with the ability to work. The same, however, needs a lot of capacity building before it becomes the default ability of a salesperson.

For example, Sales training may be conducted to do route working in a channel of distribution mode of business. The salesperson who was hitherto making only 30 calls gets to know that he can do 50 calls per day. If he does this for some more days, the capacity of his mind to think and the capacity of his body to do increases as an outcome of the sales training program.

Every salesperson has the following 3 Cognitive stages of learning

• I know what I know
• I know what I do not know
• I do not know what I do not know

Sales Training adds new inputs from the third stage of cognitive development for every salesperson, i.e. "I do not know what I do not know". The more this is done through sales training, the more the salesperson starts thinking about vistas of business which was hitherto a blindspot for him!

5. Sales Training gives a methodology to work which optimizes sales efforts for best results

Optimization of sales efforts helps in aligning all energy of the sales team in a predefined direction. This gives rise to better sales team work in a business and therefore better business results in terms of market penetration, net contribution, market expansion or market diversification.

Sales training introduces a method through a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Random and ad hoc methods of working where each sales team member is working as per their own whims and fancies is not the best thing to happen in any business.

6. Sales Training arms you with a sales kit

A brave soldier of the Indian Army will not be able to perform well without his arms and ammunition. Similarly, Sales training arms a salesperson working for a business with the necessary sales kit which essentially comprises the following

• Feature, Advantage, and Benefit kit (FAB)
• WIIIFM statements
• Give and Take Kit
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
• Cost Justification Sheet
• Need Analysis Sheet
• Competitors trade off landscape
• Sales Pitch

7. Sales Training prepares you with all possible sales scenarios in a simulated environment

Simulated scenarios can be thought of in a sales training and the salespersons working for a business can be made to encounter the same as part of the training. This makes the salesperson sharp and helps them convert more business when they encounter similar situations in real sales field work.

8. Sales Training helps create a positive peer pressure and a spirit to excel.

When you see other sales team members in a business perform better than you, the realms of possibility become bright in your mind and you tend to work towards the same. The motivation for this could be to win or to earn more incentives or just to prove a point in the sales team. Irrespective of the reason for the same, the business house surely gets more business and this is good for all and sundry in the game.

9. Sales training reinforces correct actions of a salesperson and helps in course correction if there is a self-realization of sales blunders.

Weak spots, blind spots, false premonitions, cobwebs in the mind are some of the things which any sales training attacks directly and almost annihilates them to nothing. Wherever positive actions occur it reinforces them as well.

10. Sales training helps build the right attitude of the sales team.

Any sales training helps build a positive attitude of the sales team members and this in turn leads to higher productivity, better performance, and more profitability for the business house.

In a Nutshell

Sales Training improves your business in 10 ways described in this blog. It is worthy to note here that Sales Training is a wonderful method to take the sales team members one up on their skill, motivation, and methodologies as well as a sure shot way of improving the competitiveness spirit in them. The two coupled together surely helps a business house to sell more, earn more, and produce more.

The Sales Coach I Helping Salespersons Sell! I Corporate Sales Training I Family Managed Business Enterprises I Rotarian, Golfer, Blogger & Author