Sales: how to set up efficient training
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 8:05 am
Creating or promoting sales training is one of the crucial investments in human resources when the goal is the economic growth of the organization. This is such an important point for companies that many of them have a T&D professional dedicated exclusively to developing professionals with essential skills, such as sales techniques.
In this article, you will discover the importance of sales training and what best practices are already available for L&D professionals to implement them.
Why Sales Training is So Important
Every business owner will, at some point, be faced with the need to increase sales in order for their company to continue growing. This is simply a fact of the market. No business can stay in business, let alone thrive, without continuous increases in sales.
Companies can essentially act in two ways to generate this increase in sales. The first is to invest in a promotional campaign and increase their marketing investments, which generates high costs.
The other is to use existing potential customers more intelligently, improving the skills of your salespeople through sales training and increasing the assertiveness of their actions.
Despite the advantages of the second option, there is a frequent problem with some approaches to this type of training: lack of engagement.
What Makes Sales Training Boring and Ineffective
When a company invests in promoting sales training , it is expected that it will be interesting, motivating and instructive. To ensure this, many processes look for a professional tutor — usually for lectures — who teaches the proposed topic well, but who can also be charismatic, captivate the sales team and generate audience engagement with the lecture and training.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case and, often, training sessions are seen by professionals as a waste of time , which occurs when the topic of the lecture is not actually useful for the company or for the sales force. This is the main reason why training sessions are boring and uninspiring: the team does not feel that the training has added to their capabilities.
Do you want to avoid this in your company's sales latvia email list training ? Then check out the following tips to create training that really makes a difference.
Putting together effective sales training
To be truly effective, sales training needs to be set up strategically. The tips below provide a step-by-step guide to creating and promoting these trainings:
Analysis of the current situation
The first thing to do before promoting sales training is to analyze the current situation of the sector in the company.
It is the job of the T&D professional to make a complete diagnosis of the sales force. This includes an assessment of people, sales processes and performance indicators .
The information obtained through this process helps professionals better understand the real needs of this sector. And allows them to know what should be on the training agenda.
Goal setting
The second step is to outline the training objectives in a clear and achievable way.
Essentially, all sales training has some basic objectives when promoted by a company:
Transmit content on sales techniques and good practices to the company's team;
Develop practical and dynamic skills that help salespeople close more deals;
Change of attitude in the sales team.
Depending on the need, one or another of these objectives needs to have greater priority in training, and it is the duty of the T&D professional to define these objectives and their proportion.
Break down the training into parts and choose a good instructor
Now that the objectives have been defined, the next step is to separate the training into modules or stages that are easier to absorb, giving preference to separating related topics for each objective. This definition is essential for the success of the training project, as it allows each employee to maintain their focus on the topic that interests them most at each stage of the course.
The T&D professional must also carefully define the origin of the materials that will be used for the course, valuing their quality and ease of absorption. When the content is either too easy and commonplace, or too complex and dense, the tendency is for engagement to decrease.
Implementing the course and measuring the results
Before even starting to implement the project, the results measurement methods must be well planned and aligned with the objectives defined in the previous stages.
This analysis needs to be constant because learning will not be uniform across all employees and, as results grow over time, short, medium and long-term monitoring is necessary.
In this article, you will discover the importance of sales training and what best practices are already available for L&D professionals to implement them.
Why Sales Training is So Important
Every business owner will, at some point, be faced with the need to increase sales in order for their company to continue growing. This is simply a fact of the market. No business can stay in business, let alone thrive, without continuous increases in sales.
Companies can essentially act in two ways to generate this increase in sales. The first is to invest in a promotional campaign and increase their marketing investments, which generates high costs.
The other is to use existing potential customers more intelligently, improving the skills of your salespeople through sales training and increasing the assertiveness of their actions.
Despite the advantages of the second option, there is a frequent problem with some approaches to this type of training: lack of engagement.
What Makes Sales Training Boring and Ineffective
When a company invests in promoting sales training , it is expected that it will be interesting, motivating and instructive. To ensure this, many processes look for a professional tutor — usually for lectures — who teaches the proposed topic well, but who can also be charismatic, captivate the sales team and generate audience engagement with the lecture and training.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case and, often, training sessions are seen by professionals as a waste of time , which occurs when the topic of the lecture is not actually useful for the company or for the sales force. This is the main reason why training sessions are boring and uninspiring: the team does not feel that the training has added to their capabilities.
Do you want to avoid this in your company's sales latvia email list training ? Then check out the following tips to create training that really makes a difference.
Putting together effective sales training
To be truly effective, sales training needs to be set up strategically. The tips below provide a step-by-step guide to creating and promoting these trainings:
Analysis of the current situation
The first thing to do before promoting sales training is to analyze the current situation of the sector in the company.
It is the job of the T&D professional to make a complete diagnosis of the sales force. This includes an assessment of people, sales processes and performance indicators .
The information obtained through this process helps professionals better understand the real needs of this sector. And allows them to know what should be on the training agenda.
Goal setting
The second step is to outline the training objectives in a clear and achievable way.
Essentially, all sales training has some basic objectives when promoted by a company:
Transmit content on sales techniques and good practices to the company's team;
Develop practical and dynamic skills that help salespeople close more deals;
Change of attitude in the sales team.
Depending on the need, one or another of these objectives needs to have greater priority in training, and it is the duty of the T&D professional to define these objectives and their proportion.
Break down the training into parts and choose a good instructor
Now that the objectives have been defined, the next step is to separate the training into modules or stages that are easier to absorb, giving preference to separating related topics for each objective. This definition is essential for the success of the training project, as it allows each employee to maintain their focus on the topic that interests them most at each stage of the course.
The T&D professional must also carefully define the origin of the materials that will be used for the course, valuing their quality and ease of absorption. When the content is either too easy and commonplace, or too complex and dense, the tendency is for engagement to decrease.
Implementing the course and measuring the results
Before even starting to implement the project, the results measurement methods must be well planned and aligned with the objectives defined in the previous stages.
This analysis needs to be constant because learning will not be uniform across all employees and, as results grow over time, short, medium and long-term monitoring is necessary.