Top 10 Tips for Training Sales Staff Effectively
Wed 9th Sep 2015< Back to Blogs and Tutorials
In an ever evolving consumables market, it's imperative to have a sales force that's evolving just as fast as the products and services they are representing. Here's our top ten list of tips that will help when training your sales teams.1. Provide your Sales Team with the online training tools they need
No matter what industry, every person needs the tools of their trade to do their job properly. Salespeople need the tools of knowledge and training on their industry, the products and services they sell and the competition.
With ClassMarker's web based browser testing tool, you can provide your sales team with the training they require. We give you the tools to quiz your team as new products arrive and give them the ability to better help your customers. You can design your own tests, make those tests product specific, and even make those quizzes be team specific for different departments.
2. Provide accessible training programs
Taking your sales force off the floor for long training seminars is proven to be ineffective and takes your leading players out of the game. Whether members of your team are in the office or on the road, when using ClassMarker to create custom e-learning for sales training, your team can do their training online from any location.
ClassMarker works across all devices, such as PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Chrome Book and all smart devices. This is especially great for call center staff training. A lot of call centers now have their employees based both in the office or at home. So, if you need to provide call center training to hundreds or thousands of employees all based at different locations using different devices, ClassMarker is the smart choice for ensuring your online tests are given on a stable and secure testing platform.
3. Micro-learning: Keep training quizzes short
It's a fact that people respond better to short blasts of training then long winded product reviews. ClassMarker provides you with the ability to keep your team on the leading edge of product development. ClassMarker can be set up to give your sales team short quizzes as new products become available.
Having the option to make quizzes challenging but short can be very positive when keeping things fresh and keeping your team driven to succeed.
4. Make your training more interactive
You will always be developing new sales techniques that you'll want to share with your team. Present these new techniques by creating interactive online sales training tests. You can add your own content, such as images and documents, PowerPoint presentations, etc. to enliven your tests. This will help your team become more involved when they are able to interact by answering questions on new techniques, rather then hoping they read from the front of a board room.
5. Provide training on Active Listening Skills
A powerful sales person is also going to have the ability to listen to what your customers are looking for and understanding in which direction will best fill those needs. With our testing platform, you will have the ability to embed videos into your tests to enhance your test-taker's listening skills by having short quizzes to test if they really understood what they just heard. That is a skill that cannot be tested with a piece of paper and pencil. For example, you could create an 'essay' type question to follow the video where the user can then add, in their own words their interpretation of what they just watched and listened to.
6. Provide your team with feedback
It's always nice to be appreciated and it makes people strive to do better when they are noticed for the great work they are doing.
At ClassMarker, when an online quiz or product knowledge testing has been completed, you have the options of adding custom feedback that will show to the test-takers upon test completion.
We also set you up with the ability to have Test result emails sent directly to your email address so that you can see how your team members are doing. You can then congratulate them personally or draft them a quick email to let them know how well they are progressing. Getting even a simple 'Well done' will be a huge boost to heighten team morale.
7. Track your sales team progress
With tracking your team's progress, you will be able to see what is working and what isn't, and where some or all members may need to brush up on their training skills.
With ClassMarker, you can track your team's progress from anywhere. You can view and export detailed results for your entire team at one time or the results of an individual. There are a number of ways that you can look at the data within the Results section of ClassMarker. View recent results (including those still in progress). You can also view statistics by category, statistics by question. Analyzing statistics will help you discover hurdles that your sales representatives may be experiencing.
8. Be creative with your training modules and tests
When tests used to be on paper, there was really no way for them to be engaging. This made the words 'training' or 'test' dreadful words to hear by the majority of people. How many times do you recall anyone when hearing those words jump for joy?
Now however, with web based training not only has this allowed the convenience of taking and creating tests anytime and anywhere, but it also allows you to be as creative with your tests as your products themselves.
With the embedding of video and your own custom content that you can upload, you can now create tests that will still be informative but also engaging making the testing experience an enjoyable one.
Besides content that will grab the user's attention, try adding some humor or something on the 'light' side.
For example; YouTube offers a plethora of videos on every topic out there. Have you ever searched for things, such as 'Worst sales calls', 'Sales Call Bloopers', 'Best Customer Service Calls'? Not only can these be entertaining to view, they are also very informative and can teach a great deal on correct and incorrect techniques, ways of handling customers and so on - it's engaging and your users are learning from it as well. Place a question under the video with something such as 'What is being done incorrectly'? or 'What would you do differently'? You may be surprised at how much your staff members picked up from something like this.
9. Friendly Competition between your Team Members
With sales, there is always competition. What better way to get your sales team used to going up against their competitors than a little friendly competition between co-workers? Create an incentive or rewards program.
Create 'product knowledge' quizzes every so often where you can create and provide custom certificates upon completion of training modules. You could do something fun where the certificates entitle them to something such as that sought after employee parking spot. This will make your sales team want to strive to learn more.
10. Offer on-going training
Here at ClassMarker, we encounter many different types of companies and organizations with different testing needs. One thing that remains a common ground is how important, not only initial testing and training is for a sales team but also the on-going training needed to keep your staff 'fresh'.
It's great to get your sales team trained however as time goes on new things arise, they may need refresher courses or they may want to educate themselves further on your services and products so that they can represent your company better and have more confidence in doing their job.
With ClassMarker, you can create pre-tests for training, your normal training and then post training to keep your sales team always up to date. Are you now thinking that this will require a great deal of time to create all of these different tests? Well, not with the options that ClassMarker offers you.
Refresher courses - you do not need to even create new tests. You can take the tests you already have and add randomly selected questions. Each time the test is taken, different questions are pulled at random. You can also randomize your questions and answers in which this will also keep your already created tests "fresh". Using the features mentioned above, this will not only benefit you from creating multiple versions of tests, moreover it will also benefit both your new employees and as well as your experienced sales members because you can give them the same test without creating a new one.
With ClassMarker, you will have the system to step into the e-learning world with the sales training testing platform that can take your sales force to the top of the game and keep your team ahead in an ever changing sales market.
Feel free to contact our customer support team, who are always available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to answer your questions, provide solutions or even just pass along a suggestion as to different ways you are able to customize your tests.
Happy Testing!
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