Sales Training Courses

"How To Choose The Right Sales Training Course For Your Sales Team"

There are hundreds of commercially available Sales Training Courses in the marketplace today. Choosing the right one for your company and your needs is important, but can also be confusing.

There always seems to be a sales training course that is the current popular course, perhaps because of a recent book, or a trend in the marketplace. But the popular course may not be the one that adds the most value to your sales efforts.

Assess Your Needs

Start your search for the right sales training course by doing an assessment of what is important for your team to sell to your customer base. Then compare that information to how your sales team is doing in relation to those areas. This gives you a view of your overall sales effectiveness and helps you identify areas where your team needs training.

Some areas where you can focus your sales effectiveness assessment are:

People Skills

• Conversation capabilities
• Coaching management
• Questioning techniques
• Presentations
• Relationship building
• Team building and leadership
• Management
• Negotiations
• Interpersonal skills

Selling Skills

• Prospecting
• Qualifying
• Discovery and investigation
• Solution development
• Closing
• Implementation

Business and Product Knowledge

• Business acumen
• Product information
• Customer knowledge
• Market knowledge
• Financial acumen
• Industry training
• Organizational infrastructure

Strategic And Planning Skills

• Call planning
• Opportunity planning
• Account planning
• Territory planning
• Channels planning
• Alliance planning
• Implementation planning
• Program management and project execution

Buy, Build, or Tailor

After determining your top training requirements, you need to decide what sales training course will give you the best results. There may be a commercially available course that will work well for you, but if not , you have two options. Either build a new course, or tailor an existing course to fit your needs. Many times a combination of a your existing courses can be reconfigured to build a new course that provides the best solution.

How sales training courses are delivered

There are multiple ways to deliver sales training courses The standard convention has been instructor lead training workshop (ILT), which has been historically the most effective way to deliver training courses. ILT allows for the sharing of best practices, for direct feedback and emphasis from the facilitator, and it builds teamwork among the participants. In addition, it provides for better control of the delivery because the participants are with you in a classroom and not distracted. The problem with ILT is that due to travel, lodging, meal and venue expenses associated with the training, it is also the most expensive.

An alternate to ILT, is virtual ILT (VILT). This method uses a live facilitator to deliver the training via a web based delivery. These are often linked into a Learning Management System (LMS) and can require unique qualifications for the individual delivering the ILT because of the added requirement of manipulating a web based meeting system. The LMS supports areas like registration, tracking participants, building reports and monitoring test results. VILT can be an effective way to deliver sales training courses and sales training seminars. It is often difficult to keep participants attention for more than one or two hours at a time. For this reason VILT is often broken down into smaller modules delivered over a longer period of time.

A third method for delivering sales training courses or sales training seminars, is pre-recorded, self-paced e-learning. E-learning is instruction delivered on a computer via Internet or CD-ROM. It is self-paced and includes media in the form of text, streaming video, and audio and builds participant sales skill and knowledge. The advantages of e-learning are that it is usually less expensive, can be viewed at the participant's discretion, can be viewed multiple times, and is standardized. The major problem with it is getting proper feedback from participants and measuring consumption of the course.

Making It Stick

• Align the Executives and the Organization
• Provide key sponsorship at executive level
• Set management alignment and performance expectations
• Identify key individual and organizational value deliverables and impact
• Have processes and systems ready and available
• Address cultural integration considerations
• Engage in Change Management and Consider Proper Communications
• Reason for change; both issues and opportunities
• Sense of urgency and commitment of executive leadership team
• Clear vision for the future and how this initiative will help get us there
• How change integrates with long term plan
• Expectations and what is required of people
• How management will monitor and communicate progress
• Things that will not change
• Benefits for customers and the organization
• Which groups are being trained and when
• Involve Management in the Training
• Schedule a management alignment and communication planning session
• Require manager participation during workshop
• Have a coaching session immediately following workshop
• Encourage and foster the sharing of success stories and best practices
• Have a scheduled and structured management review process

Measure Your Results

• Decide what will you measure
• Experience and attitude about the training
• Learning as a result of the training
• Changed behaviors because of the training
• Enhance business results
• Identify key metrics of successful behaviors and results both internally and externally
• Measure current state before training
• Establish a "before" baseline
• Agree on frequency and method of measurement
• Communicate results to team and organization
• Make early successes and milestones visible
• Seek feedback-- negative and positive
• Remember resistance is a natural part of the change process
• Celebrate successes

Conclusion

There are many sales training courses available in today's marketplace. Some are very good, and some are not so good. The key is to find the course that is best for your needs. Ask around to your customers and other sales organizations for ideas and references. Once you find or build what you need, implement it correctly and integrate the best ideas into your sales organization, processes, and methodologies.

Related Articles

• Sales Training Overview
• Sales Training Accountability
• Sales Training Seminars

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