8 Training Tips to Spark Confidence within Your Sales Teams

Few and far between are the sales professionals that can’t improve. We can all benefit from a little corporate training and encouragement from time to time. This is why sales training is of crucial importance.

Whatever the level of sales acumen, staff greatly benefit from sales training. By teaching techniques and by improving confidence (which is often the key to great selling), sales training can revolutionize team success.

Why Invest in Sales Training?

Putting funds and effort into sales training can deliver some very impressive results. It can boost the ability to establish rapport with the customer, enhance the capacity for ingesting product knowledge, and hone persuasive techniques for better and swifter closing. 

Sales training comes at a cost because of the need either to involve external expertise, or to devote internal hours. But just like any expenditure, including product development and tech acquisition, you should see it as an investment which will pay off in a remarkably short period of time. 

8 Training Tips to Spark Confidence Within your Sales Teams

Here are eight training tips that will fill your team with flair and self-assuredness. 

Encourage role-playing exercises to practice sales pitches

Role-playing can be hugely effective. This is because sales is, at the base, a practical skill. You can read up about showing a prospective sell around your customer onboarding software all day long, but you might not assimilate the essential skill required. 

There’s no substitute for getting out there and doing the deed. This is what role-playing will deliver. It’ll also flag up likely scenarios and conversational developments that might otherwise be difficult to predict. 

Foster a collaborative and open team environment

Your sales team works as a cohesive unit. Sure, they’re all individuals, but they tend to work in a group environment, especially if they all sit in the same room. 

Even if only virtually connected, they benefit from learning from each other and discussing experiences. Encourage this. Underline that a win for one is a win for all. And preach positivity, always.

Done right, this approach will boost results and motivate your employees to achieve bigger and better successes.

Provide on-demand and continuous mentorship

A key point in sales training is that it shouldn’t be a one-off or even an annual checklist to go through and then forget about. It has to be ongoing, so that there’s continual improvement, no matter what the level of ability on display. 

Having an accessible and inspirational mentor is a big help here, as is the ability to attend frequent and well-crafted training sessions whenever needed. 

Conduct regular and comprehensive product training

When products are being developed or completely new items brought to market, it can be quite a task to keep the sales team on top of details. Spec lists can be tricky to master, but changes in cost considerations and contractual arrangements also need to be covered. 

For instance, if you’re an SaaS business involved in SEO, your staff need not just to be aware of what you offer, but also key matters like SEO services pricing.

Implement regular performance reviews and feedback sessions

Sales professionals often rate their success in terms of sales achieved. This is a great KPI, but it’s not sufficient by itself. On top of this, supervisors and team leaders should provide guidance on possible improvements. 

Perhaps some qualitative observations can be deployed on the salesperson’s customer interactions. A sale may occur, but there might be ways that the customer can go away from the interaction having had an even more positive experience. 

But it can go both ways. It’s not just about instructing and encouraging sales staff. Training can also be the environment in which salespeople can communicate issues and events to team leaders. This is essential for organizational effectiveness and may even prove useful to other areas of the business. Who knows, maybe your software sales rep has some great web app ideas up their sleeve that can be passed on to your dev team!

This kind of feedback can issue conversationally as part of the session, or it can be more formalized, such as via an engagement survey.

Utilize sales analytics to identify improvement areas

Sometimes, an objective empirical insight will be useful. It can flag up where things might be slightly suboptimal so that you can focus on possible improvements. 

One of the key advantages to using sales analytics is that the insights thrown up are impersonal. In other words, they’re not dependent on the perspective of the trainer. This means that the salesperson will be less likely to take issue with the appraisal they’re given.

It’s also useful for cross-team comparisons to have a standardized measure that can apply to many different salespeople. Team leaders and trainers can then clearly see who’s flourishing and who might benefit from extra support. 

Organize workshops on effective communication techniques

Just like with role-playing, workshops can be enormously useful because of their practical nature. If you’re trying to encourage better communication techniques, these techniques should be experienced in some way for the team to understand them. 

So, they need to hear the techniques in operation, and then, crucially, they need to enjoy the opportunity of practicing these techniques for themselves. 

You should then give your team ample chance to air and resolve any concerns they have. This will enable your staff to approach these sales techniques with more confidence. That’s the surest way to see them happy to develop improved communication techniques. 

Introduce incentives and rewards for top performers

Your top salesperson may have smashed it in all manner of areas. This should be celebrated and rewarded. This way, you incentivize the others in the team. 

They may have sold the most VoIP systems, or shifted a record-breaking number of smart doorbells. Or they may have managed to become an expert in how to do B2B link building and thus established an extensive network of sales contacts as a result. Whatever they’ve managed to do, get it out there for all to praise.

Conclusion

Sales success is often fundamentally about confidence. If a salesperson is unsure about what they’re doing, the customer can feel doubtful about the whole offer, too. Getting your sales team full of confidence is key to great sales performance. 

So, it makes sense to invest in training and to use as many of these tips as you have time and resources for. Give your sales team some real attention and they’ll repay your investment in short order. They’ll be so much happier with what they can accomplish, and you will, too.

Author Bio

Nick Brown – Founder and CEO

Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA. This is his LinkedIn.