Five reasons why you need to invest in sales training for your team

Sales training provides a return on investment by making your team more effective across the board. Let’s find out more. 

How are your sales team going to get better if you don’t train them? Sure, training your reps requires an investment of time and money, but if you get it right, you’ll see a tangible return on that investment. Great sales training can give your reps new skills and enhance their existing ones – and you see the benefit in your revenue figures.

In this article, we’ll look at five ways that training makes a difference to your bottom line, as well as show you how to get the most from your sales training.

 

1 – Better product knowledge

While salespeople don’t need to know their product inside and out in order to sell it, it certainly helps. The better you know your product, the more effectively you can:

• Match your product’s features to your prospect’s pain points
• Position yourself as a trusted advisor to your prospect, rather than someone trying to sell something
• Convey what sets you apart from your competitors

If your team can get better at these parts of the sales process, they will win more deals. 

Training helps your team get to know the product they sell in more depth. However, make sure sessions on product relate to how your reps actually sell, rather than just technical jargon. 

 

2 – Advanced sales skills

Quite simply, training helps you hone your sales skills. You can use training to improve at virtually any area of sales, including:

• Conversation – Training can help you handle sales conversations in the right way, including building rapport, asking the right questions (and listening to the answers), and moving the conversation to the next stage
• Qualifying – When you train your reps to qualify prospects in and out of your funnel more effectively, they can spend more time with prospects who will actually buy
• Positioning – It can sometimes be hard to match the pain your prospect is telling you about with the way your product works, but training can help you get better

Improving in these areas makes your reps work more efficiently and effectively, leading to a higher quantity and quality of deals.

 

3 – Attraction, motivation and retention

The most successful sales teams attract the best people. Then, they get the best out of them and keep them on board. Training plays a massive part in achieving this.

Top talent will ask you about training when you interview them, as they will want to know that if they join your organisation, you will make them better than they are now. 

During their time with you, training your reps shows them that you value them and actually want them to get better. This is a vital motivating factor.

Finally, upskilling your reps so they have the right attributes to progress in your organisation helps to keep them on board. For example, if one of your SDRs can gain the skills to be a closer, you can move them to an AE position. As well as ensuring you keep hold of top talent, it also means you don’t have to pay to recruit a new AE.

 

4 – Identify improvements

One of the great things about sales training is that it gets reps and leaders together, talking about how they sell, getting deep into the weeds. 

When reps have a dedicated time to share stories and give each other advice, they often discover ways to improve. Listening to recordings of live calls provides coaching opportunities, which can be incredibly effective.

On some training programmes, your reps may even be able to get together with reps from other organisations. Hearing different perspectives on sales can often plant new ideas in their minds, which could also be effective at your company.

 

5 – Consistency

The goal of any B2B organisation is to build a successful, predictable sales machine. It makes it easy for leadership to forecast, delights investors and makes it simpler to scale. However, to achieve this, you need consistency, where all your salespeople know their role and sell in the same way. This requires training.

Training is the only way to make sure your reps sell your product in the way you want them to. It’s where you show them the best practices in your organisation and the correct way to represent your company.

When you have that consistency, with everyone selling in the right way, success will follow.

 

Training tips

Now you know why you need to invest in training for your team, here’s how you make it work:

• When designing your training programme, look at your sales process and your results to pinpoint where you need training. For example, is there a stage in your sales funnel where conversion rates are lower than they should be?
• You don’t have to train everyone in the same way. If your individual reps need training on a specific area, it’s OK to get granular
• Learning by doing always produces better retention results than training in a classroom-style setting
• Training should never be one-and-done. Make sure you revisit training topics regularly to reinforce the learnings
• Measure the impact of training by taking before-and-after revenue snapshots. This will be your return on investment

 

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