It’s a fact: sales teams can no longer get by just having basic sales skills. In unpredictable times like these, upskilling with sales training programs becomes even more crucial for sales representatives. That’s because the ever-changing business landscape demands adaptability and resilience from sales professionals. By investing in sales training programs, reps can stay ahead of the curve and develop the skills to navigate uncertain times successfully. These programs provide a platform for continuous learning, enabling reps to refine their sales techniques, master new strategies, and keep up with emerging trends.
With the new selling environment upon us (and still constantly changing), here are 7 top sales training programs companies need to implement to boost reps performance:
- Essential Sales Skills Training
- Sales Prospecting Training
- Lead Qualification Training
- Differentiating from the Competition Training
- Virtual Selling Training
- Digital Networking Training
- Social Selling Training
- Mindset for Sales Training
- Managing Virtually Training
- Advanced Sales Training
What Sales Skills Does a Rep Need to Be Effective?
To be an effective sales representative, several key sales skills are crucial for success. These skills include (but are not limited to):
- Communication skills: Strong communication skills are essential for a sales rep. They should be able to communicate effectively with clients, understand their needs, and clearly articulate the benefits of the product or service they are selling.
- Active Listening skills: Active listening involves paying full attention to what the customer is saying, asking relevant questions, and demonstrating empathy. This skill helps sales reps understand customer pain points and tailor their pitch accordingly.
- Excellent Product Knowledge: A successful sales rep must deeply understand the product or service they are selling. Including knowing its features, benefits, and how it addresses customer needs. Product knowledge helps build credibility and allows reps to address customer questions and objections effectively.
- Relationship Building: Building strong relationships with customers is vital for sales success. Reps should be able to establish rapport, understand customer preferences, and develop trust. Maintaining long-term relationships can lead to repeat business and referrals.
- Persuasion and Negotiation Skills: Sales reps need to be skilled in persuasion techniques to convince potential customers of the value of their offering. They should be able to highlight the benefits, overcome objections, and negotiate win-win deals.
- Time Management Skills: Effective sales reps manage their time efficiently. They prioritize tasks, set goals, and organize their schedules to maximize productivity. Good time management ensures sales reps can follow up with leads effectively, meet deadlines, and achieve targets.
- Problem-Solving Skills: Sales reps often encounter challenges and objections from customers. Being able to think on their feet and find creative solutions is crucial. Problem-solving skills help reps overcome obstacles and address customer concerns effectively.
- Resilience: Sales can be a challenging field, and rejection is common. Resilience allows sales reps to bounce back from setbacks, stay motivated, and persevere through difficult times. A positive attitude and determination are key to success in sales.
- Continuous Learning: The best sales reps never stop learning. They stay updated on industry trends, new sales techniques, and product developments. Continuous learning helps sales reps adapt to changing market conditions and refine their skills.
- Teamwork In many organizations, sales reps work closely with marketing, customer support, and other departments. Collaborative skills and working well within a team environment are valuable for achieving common goals and providing excellent customer service.
Top Sales Training Programs for Boosting Reps Performance
By prioritizing the development of these skills among your sales representatives, you can equip them to drive sales growth, build strong customer relationships, and contribute to the overall success of your organization.
Let’s look deeper at the top sales training programs that will help you do just that:
1. Essential Sales Skills Training
Sales isn’t a skill one is born with. While some people are naturally gifted in building relationships, being a smooth talker or full of confidence, sales is something that needs to be learnt, practiced and fine tuned to truly excel at it.
That’s why we created Fundamental Sales Skills Training, so that our SOCO Selling framework forms the foundation of the sales process.
Overall the sales training program covers the essential skills every sales person needs to learn to have quality conversations with prospects, present your solution, overcome objections and ultimately, close deals.
Who it’s for: Account Management Professionals, Business Development Professionals, Pre-sales, Sales or anyone in a customer-facing role
Learn More About Essential Selling Skills Training
2. Sales Prospecting Training
With the overwhelming amount of emails, your prospects receive these days, it should be no surprise that your results from cold email outreach are dwindling. Not only are your prospects overwhelmed by emails, but they’re also more suspicious of cold emails than ever.
We champion an omnichannel approach to drastically improve favourable replies from your prospecting efforts. A targeted approach where you don’t only reach out to prospects on one platform, you connect with them in various ways.
Prospecting Power is a top sales training program that uses a modern omnichannel prospecting approach. Join now and learn how to ensure your customer acquisition strategy is creative, persistent, and generates real results.
Who it’s for: Teams responsible for generating leads
Learn More About Prospecting Training
3. Lead Qualification Training
MEDDIC, MEDDPICC and its variants are hugely popular sales qualification methodologies because they ensure sales representatives find out all of the information needed to not only make sure your lead is worth pursuing, but to also make sure you’re selling to the right person at the company.
When qualifying is done properly, reps will have a much better understanding of their prospect’s buying process and will be able to do sales forecasting with improved accuracy.
That’s wehre our lead qualifcation training comes in.
Who it’s for: Sales Professionals, Sales Teams & Entrepreneurs
Learn More About Lead Qualification Training
4. Differentiating from the Competition Training
Are you among the top three within your chosen area of differentiation? If you’re not, you’re guaranteed to get lost in the noise of competitors.
Instead, you should gain confidence in your solution with Sales Differentiation Training – because to stand out from the competition, it all comes down to positioning.
We equip you with the skills to study the competition, determine how you’re better AND effectively communicate it. Alongside the essential questions to ask to identify and stand apart from the competition to allow you to highlight your strengths based on your customer’s priorities.
Who it’s for: Account Management Professionals, Business Development Professionals, Pre-sales, Sales or anyone in a customer-facing role
Learn More About Sales Differentiation Training
5. Virtual Selling Training
Selling virtually is the future and it’s already here. With this in mind, new environments require new skills, especially in a digital setting. Sales teams need to build rapport virtually, present their solution online effectively, and understand which digital sales tools to incorporate into their processes.
There’s a reason why we put Virtual Selling as the top sales training program – it’s the most important skill all sales professionals need to master right now.
Who it’s for: sales professionals and sales managers that reduced or eliminated face-to-face meetings but still want to effectively build rapport and close deals without having to meet with prospects in person.
Learn More About Virtual Selling Training
6. Digital Networking Training
Another essential skill to have in sales and one of the top sales training programs being implemented this year is Digital Networking. You’ve probably noticed that online networking strategies are quickly replacing traditional in-person networking events. Sales professionals now need to learn how to network online without coming across as spammy or disingenuous.
With digital networking, sales professionals can use Facebook, LinkedIn and WhatsApp Groups (or any type of online group for that matter) to get an insight into what’s going on with their prospects and customers, generate leads and stay top of mind with customers.
When done well, sales reps come across as an expert and an authority. You’ll find that people will even seek you out for their go-to questions!
Who it’s for: Sales Professionals, Business Development, Sales Leadership
Learn More About Digital Networking Training
7. Social Selling Training
Who doesn’t want to reach their ideal target customers at a scale they’ve never been able to do before? Today’s sales process includes more technology, tools, automation, social media, chat, and AI than EVER before. Critically, sales representatives must be effectively harnessing these new tools available to them.
Sales Teams benefit from using social media to find their audience, have conversations with prospects, generate sales leads, get past gatekeepers, and fill their all-important sales pipeline.
Who it’s for: sales professionals and sales leaders regardless of whether they’re responsible for lead generation or not. Everyone needs to learn the fundamentals of Social Selling.
Learn More About Social Selling Training
8. Mindset for Sales Training
Believing you will succeed is already half the battle, especially when times are tough. This is why sales professionals and small business owners must learn how to stay motivated when the economy slows down, when anxious customers say no, and when things just aren’t going according to plan.
It’s often a strong sense of internal motivation that separates the top performers from the underachievers, which is why all of our sales training starts with attitude.
Who it’s for: Account Managers, Business Development, Pre-Sales, or any customer-facing role.
Learn More About Mindset for Sales Training
9. Managing Virtually Training
We are in unprecedented times where the crisis has fundamentally changed the way people live, work and do business. With teams around the world working from home now, many leaders and companies are scrambling to adapt not only how their teams work from home but also how managers can lead remotely.
By learning the fundamentals of Managing Virtually, leaders can ensure productivity, collaboration and team morale are maximised even when work environments change.
Who it’s for: All leaders managing remote, blended or split teams.
Learn More About Managing Virtually
10. Advanced Sales Training
While prospects are more informed than ever, they also struggle to make sense of the extensive range of information they’re trying to process. As a result, buyers become paralysed about making decisions without second-guessing themselves.
Take control of the sale. Help customers make sense of what they’ve learnt without you by learning how to provide unique insights and instil confidence in buyers with valuable challenger-inspired sales techniques in Advanced Selling.
Who it’s for: Seasoned sales professionals/Fans of Challenger Sales training
Learn more about Advanced Sales Training
Upskill your most valuable resource
Nothing is more demotivating than not having the skills to excel in one’s role. By providing corporate training for your personnel, you can develop their weaknesses into strengths. Ultimately, allowing for increased productivity, motivation and adoption of new technologies while reducing employee turnover.
We’re the leading corporate training provider – and for a good reason. Our diverse range of training courses are interactive, fun, memorable and most importantly, effective. Â
Don’t just take our word for it; See what others are saying!
“We recently had Tom conduct a virtual external Sales Training Program for our entire commercial organization at Carousell Group for our different brands in 5 countries.
Tom shared great insights on consultative selling and needs analysis to win new customers. He energized and fuelled our sales & trade marketing teams to apply the concepts they learned into their day to day interactions with customers. Throughout the session, all 200+ attendees were fully engaged and inspired to apply the concepts shared into their interactions with clients.
At the core of Carousell, we constantly raise the bar, growing and inspiring one another. Thank you Tom for helping us raise the bar. “
– Vishal Salunkhe | Head of Sales Operations & Enablement Carousell
“I had the pleasure of working with Tom to deliver a live webinar to our customers across 3 continents! From the discovery and planning meetings right down to customizing content to meet our objectives and engage our audience, Tom is a pro. He is energetic and has the ability to cut through – so it feels as though you are right there in the room with him. If you are hesitating don’t; we already booked him for a keynote at our next virtual event!”
– Kiera Kramer | Brand and Experiences Marketing for QuickBooks
“I had a great sales training with Tom! I have learned so much especially on the prospecting part. He gave me more motivation in making cold calls and building better relationships with my clients.”
–Mathilde Ramoisy | SaaS Enterprise Business Development at Perx Technologies
Also read: