Sales training: Create the perfect training program for your team
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Sales training can help your sales team exceed their targets and skyrocket revenue. If you do it poorly (or not at all), however, you risk leaving that revenue on the table.
What does it take to do sales training the right way?
In this article, we show you how to lay the groundwork for a rock-solid sales training program. We’ll tackle the challenges involved with training your entire sales team and your sales managers, and help you pick the right sales training ideas to ensure your training plan sticks.
The foundation of a sales training program
The best sales training program is the one created with your unique sales team in mind. No two sales teams are the same. Your reps bring different selling skills, personality traits and experiences to the table. They also have diverse strengths and weaknesses.
Before you start building a training program for your sales team, it’s essential to deeply understand your starting point. No matter how hungry for learning your reps are, they’ll receive zero benefits if all they get is a poorly structured training program.
If you get it right, however, the benefits will compound for months and years to come.
To lay your sales training foundation, here are the three questions to ask in advance.
How much time and budget can you invest?
Your bandwidth is a crucial consideration when starting your sales training program planning. You may want to get your team into a 10-day training program, but if you can’t afford to miss making sales for that long, it’s not the best approach.
You can always add more training to your team’s plans later but start with a training scope that will fulfill your team’s needs in the near future.
Do you have a defined sales process?
A repeatable, clear sales process outlines everything that needs to happen to close a sale. It typically includes:
Contacting leads
Customer retention
Before you work on a sales training plan, make sure you know your sales process inside out. Document it in a way that’s easy to understand and reference later on.
Our guide to creating a sales process will help.
What makes a successful sales rep in your company?
This is about knowing which of your sales reps’ skills are the most valuable to your company and your company’s unique position in the industry, in your local market and so on.
These questions will help you identify the essential skills and traits you want to cultivate your sales training:
How does the majority of the sales process happen? Remotely (e.g. phone, email, chat), in person or a combination?
How long is the sales cycle? How many touchpoints does it take on average to close a deal?
Who are you selling to? (e.g. C-suite executives, managers, consumers or other roles)
What is the price tier of your products or services?
What are the sales objections that the highest performing sales reps can handle?
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How to create a sales training program for new sales reps
If you can onboard your new sales reps in a way that gets them up to speed and lets them hit the ground running quickly, they’re more likely to succeed. As it turns out, companies with efficient sales rep onboarding have a 10% greater sales growth and hit 14% more sales and profit goals.
The idea is to train your new reps efficiently and get them in the field as soon as possible. They’ll get all the theoretical knowledge they need quickly and learn the practical aspects of the job in the best way possible: by doing the job.
Here are the building blocks of your new sales rep training and onboarding plan.
Homework for your new sales rep before their first day
The biggest time-wasting mistake you can make when training and onboarding new reps is spending weeks making them familiar with your company.
Instead, prepare a simple document with resources and links on your:
Company’s values and mission
Products/services and pricing
Best customers and their stories
Ideal customer profile
Main differentiating points from competitors
Tools they’ll be using
Their responsibilities, KPIs and targets and the company’s
Advise your new sales rep to get familiar with the information in this document. Check in with them on their first day for any questions they may have.
In-depth product or service training
Your new reps know the basics of the offerings they’ll be selling based on their homework. The next step is to take them deeper into the value of your product or service and its real-life use cases.
The ultimate goal is for your sales rep to know your offerings inside out so they can overcome sales objections and discuss details with confidence and clarity.
However, a lot of that confidence and deep knowledge will come with experience and hundreds of conversations with prospects. To get them started, they don’t need to know everything there is to know.
Instead, use this training to lay a strong foundation and empower your new reps to look for information they need as they go.
Product or service sales training should cover:
The how-to of using your product. How does your product work in the real world? Show your sales reps how to use it as if they were the customer.
The implications of using your product. What does it feel like to use it as the end client or customer? What are the immediate and long-term benefits? What difference does it make?
The background knowledge that goes with your product. For example, if you sell video editing software, your reps need to understand video marketing and confidently use industry-specific terms and phrases in their conversations.
Introduction to your sales strategy and process
If your new sales hire is coming from a sales role in a different company, it means they’re used to someone else’s sales strategy and process. If this is their first sales role, it’s also their first time following a sales strategy or even a sales methodology.
In both scenarios, introducing and clarifying the sales process steps as early as possible is crucial.
For this part of the sales training, outline the sales process steps you’ve listed in an earlier section with activities that go into each. Here’s an example:
Lead generation. Our leads are generated by our inbound marketing team (~60%) through cold prospecting (~25%) and partnerships (~15%).
Making contact. We use these cold calling scripts and cold emails to make initial contact with leads.
Lead qualification. We qualify all of our leads using a checklist that identifies our lead’s needs, budget, authority and urgency to solve their challenge.
Proposing a solution. We use emails, phone calls and in-person meetings to deliver a sales proposal for our offering based on the pains we uncovered in the lead qualification process.
Handling objections. These are the most common objections we hear after our proposal, and this is how we handle them.
Close. We mark successful deals as closed in our CRM and onboard the new customer; we mark the unsuccessful deals as lost in our CRM along with the reason for not closing it.
Customer retention. Together with the customer success team, we maintain customer relationships and make sure they’re experiencing the benefits of our offering and help them with any issues they may be experiencing.
Next to each sales process step, you can add data on how long it usually takes to move a prospect forward. This will give your new sales rep an idea of what a healthy sales pipeline looks like for your company.
A note on industry specifics
Remember, it’s your job to ensure your sales process reflects industry requirements.
For example, real estate, investment or pharmaceutical sales training involves additional regulatory steps that need to be explicitly mentioned, including contracts, due diligence, codes of practice and more.
Make sure you make these obvious in your sales process when onboarding new reps. Train your new reps on the technicalities, as well as potential fears and uncertainties, that your prospects go through if you’re in a highly regulated industry.
Michael Fletcher, practice enablement manager at FreeAgent, explains how they deal with this issue as an accounting software:
Shadowing and getting started with real-life sales
The final step before your reps start selling is exposing them to the work of your already successful reps.
This can take many forms:
Listening to recordings of calls
Reading notes from various prospect meetings and calls, including those where the sale was lost
Shadowing your experienced sales reps for a day
Exposure to your team’s work should fire up your new sales rep to get started with their own sales conversations.
Their timeline for getting started will depend entirely on you and your company’s circumstances. Many companies get their new reps on the phone by the end of their first week.
Of course, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule – especially for high-ticket items. If you’re selling a $15,000 product with a long sales process, you might want to give it a bit more time.
Create a learning environment that celebrates action-taking
Sales can be challenging because success relies on decision-making by the potential customer, which is out of your control.
This is why it’s important to create a space where taking action and progress are praised just as highly as outcomes. Here are two reasons why encouraging action is helpful:
It allows your new reps to make mistakes and fail forward, learning and growing from the experience without fear of reprimand
It promotes activity-based selling, which puts the salespeople in control, instead of at the mercy of their prospects
As FreeAgent’s Michael Fletcher put it:
Create a timeline for checking in with your new salesperson. Set their goals and milestones for the 30-, 60- and 90-day mark. Then, check in with them on a weekly basis to track their progress towards those goals and maintain an open space for them to ask for help, resources and additional training in areas they feel they need it.
Always keep in mind that each sales professional will bring their own strengths and experience their own challenges.
If they’re totally new to the sales world, they may take six months or more to fully master the role, while sales pros may only need a couple of months to get up to speed with your company’s processes.
Be open to that and adjust for each new rep.
Connect your sales training to your company goals
Align your sales training with the wider business strategy and company goals. Sales managers may see skills gaps and jump to training, but if it’s not a skill directly tied to your company goals, it’s not likely to be worth the investment.
For example, if your company is moving all field teams to inside sales, it won’t make sense to continue training team members in uniquely field sales-related topics.
On this subject, Andrea Grodnitzky, CMO at Richardson, says:
A potential sales training structure
Looking for real-life examples of sales training for new reps? Check out the sales training program that the sales team at Referral Rock implemented.
Mica Longanecker, director of sales at Referral Rock, shared with us the steps new reps go through when they join the company.
Referral Rock runs intensive training for three weeks, followed by several weeks of shadowing. They also run monthly office hours for additional training and sharing learnings. They’ve broken their training into these key areas:
Intro to company. Go over the company’s values, culture, team, view on the world, etc.
Broader industry. For Referral Rock, this is referral marketing – what is it, why is it important, how does it add value, etc.
Position and market. Who their customers are – review ideal customer profiles and personas, how their customers see us, what’s their unique value proposition and positioning, where do they fit in the competitive landscape, etc.
Introduction to the product. Basic understanding of how the product works, actual usage of the product – for Referral Rock, this is focused on building your own referral program, advanced use cases and reference material.
Sales concepts. How inside sales works, how to conduct discovery, closing techniques, etc.
Sales calls and demos. Recorded walkthroughs and examples, call scripts/flow, hands-on practicing (ideally with another rep), etc.
Sales process. Day-to-day management, use of the CRM, pipeline reviews, etc.
Training feedback. What worked well and what can be improved.
Get inspired by this sales training program and start developing your own.
How to skyrocket performance across the board with the right sales training
Your sales development programs shouldn’t stop at bringing new hires up to speed.
High-performing sales teams are twice as likely to provide ongoing training as low-performing ones. In other words, your sales force should never stop improving.
Ongoing learning and improvement are important, but you also don’t want to distract your sales reps from their work when they’re in the flow and hyper-focused.
You can handle this challenge by creating and cultivating a company culture that encourages learning and plans for it ahead of time.
Don’t force a learning methodology on your reps or ask them to commit to an arbitrary schedule for it. Instead, make it a regular habit to use your one-on-one meetings with them to ask if they’ve noticed a gap in their knowledge or skill set that’s limiting their potential and that they want to work on.
With these insights, go ahead and work out a convenient training schedule with them, with a methodology that suits their schedule and learning preferences.
Here are some sales training programs and learning techniques you can organize for all your reps.
Peer-to-peer training
Effective sales training doesn’t need to be expensive or complicated. You can get your reps with the best sales results to share their skills with other reps in a structured way.
For example, they may focus on how they create sales opportunities, what sales call strategies led to closing deals or how they handled a tough sales objection successfully.
Self-starter training
You can provide your reps with the time and budget to find the training solutions themselves. These can be in-person sales courses, online courses, full-day workshops and anything else that will help them fill skills gaps efficiently.
Encouraging each member of your sales team to take responsibility for their own training will give your reps a feeling of control.
Dena Bakr, Inside Sales Team Lead at Gett, shares her recommendation:
An in-house training manager
Depending on how big your sales force is (and how fast your company is growing), there might come a time when you won’t be the best person to manage your reps’ learning anymore.
This is when you can hire an in-house specialist to handle the learning and development of your team. Once you do, they’ll handle your training budget, monitor your team’s need for knowledge, research training solutions, book sales training courses and more.
Workshops and sales speakers
Bringing in a great sales trainer to hold a workshop or a longer training session for your team is the least flexible of all the options – it usually requires your entire team to step away from selling for the day.
However, there are cases when this type of interactive training is the best option. Some examples include new legislation that affects your sales process or a growing trend in your industry (like a new technology).
Training your whole team at once is an effective way to get everyone on the same page fast and turn the new industry development into selling power.
Free learning resources
Give your reps the green light to seek out free online sales training resources from trusted experts. These could come in the form of:
Videos and video series
Ebooks
Email series
Webinars
Tutorials
Whichever format they choose, it’s important to help them identify the one area they want to improve so they can focus on it in their search.
For example, we built a huge library of videos with tips on selling, key selling concepts and tutorials on CRM features. But if your rep wants to get better at handling sales objections, we’d direct them to these two videos:
“It’s too expensive”
“I’m not interested”
You can also direct reps to our Pipedrive Academy.
Our courses are separated into bite-sized, easily digestible themes and segments, so your reps can focus on the exact sales techniques they’re struggling with.
Looking to do better follow-ups? Automating manual work? Something else? There’s a free resource for it in the Academy.
The checklist for selecting the right sales training course for your reps
If you’re the one picking the provider for your team’s sales training, start by making a list of available and highly rated training providers and then vet them based on your requirements.
Here are the boxes you should make sure to tick:
The program fits your team’s current and specific needs to upskill
Your team can devote the necessary time to learning, exercises and revision
The program’s location is suitable for your team (if in person)
The program aligns with your sales methodology and values
New learnings are actionable, easy to implement and measurable
Most effective sales training programs for your team are those that pass all the above criteria.
On top of that, don’t forget to let your team in on making this decision and respecting their learning goals in the process. The results will be much better than if you force your choice on them.
How to choose the right sales tools and train your reps to use them
Even if you hire and train top performers, everyone will struggle if there isn’t an easy way to track and report their activities and results.
This is where choosing the right tools comes in. In sales, a CRM software is a pretty standard tool across the board. Inside or outside sales, hot or cold leads, two sales conversations or dozens; a CRM is the central home of everything going on.
A CRM should house your sales enablement content and help your reps sell better, not take them away from their most meaningful work.
In our State of Sales Report, 16% of salespeople reported spending most of their day on administrative tasks. Instead of making their jobs easier, tools like spreadsheets and bulky data management systems are adding to the already full plates of sales teams.
The right CRM tool will:
Reduce admin work, not increase it
Centralize all sales tasks and processes
Provide full visibility into the sales pipeline, including the number of deals in each stage and their dollar value
Allow you to run custom reports fast
Be accessible on the go
There are more sales tools you can integrate with your CRM to fuel efficiency and action-taking. Consider adding these tools to your team’s sales workflow:
Cold outreach and lead generation, like LeadBooster, to save time on research, data entry and cold emailing. You can also integrate Pipedrive with outreach tool Overloop in our Marketplace.
Phone solution and call tracking tools, like Aircall. Streamline your call workflows by pulling the right lead information at the right time and adding notes and tags to contacts. Integrate Aircall with Pipedrive in our Marketplace.
Marketing automation tools, like Ortto and Campaigns. Integrating marketing tools with a CRM like Pipedrive enables you to nurture the right leads based on their status in Pipedrive.
When selecting your sales tools, getting your team involved and hearing their needs is key. Then, as you introduce a certain tool, make sure to showcase its value and lead by example by using it regularly.
The tools you select should be intuitive to use instead of requiring a two-day training course just to get started. The idea is to have tools that make selling to the right leads easy. The result? A productive sales team and a revenue boost.
Remember, it’s your job to check in with your reps and look for potential gaps in their use of sales tools. Here are some ideas for tool adoption and regular training:
Create sales training games around tool adoption
Role-play different workflow scenarios to see how your reps use a CRM and other tools in their day-to-day setup
Make it easy to reference your CRM’s knowledge base and build an internal one if you need to cover additional, unique scenarios.
Sales management training tips
Your sales managers are the drivers of your sales force. They’re planners, motivators, analysts, mentors and so much more. They hire sales talent and set their goals, getting them started with a sales strategy and course-correcting when necessary.
Yet, many companies neglect to train their sales managers to a high extent and some don’t train them at all. In reality, training just one sales manager can improve an entire team of sales reps.
Sales managers have a mountain of responsibilities to their team, as well as to their own bosses. Without training exercises, they have to figure out both all on their own.
Using the same approach as earlier, look for the type of learning they prefer and enjoy the most, such as in-house workshops or a mix of in-person and self-guided learning.
Then, work with them to find learning resources so they can upskill on:
Providing effective feedback
Motivating the team, especially when morale is low and targets are missed
Setting priorities, time management and planning across the team
Running efficient meetings and one-on-one sessions with their reps
Setting quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily goals
Selecting, interviewing and hiring sales reps
Assessing their team’s performance and taking action on it
Build a document for each sales manager that will act as a central hub for all the learning resources you’ve found, including those that aren’t an immediate priority. Make this document easy to update and come back to regularly.
Making your sales training programs a reality
Your sales training program is ready. From new hires to sales managers, there’s a plan that will help you create sales success time and time again.
What happens next? How can you make sure these training plans are implemented and your reps don’t forget about them in a week?
Here are some steps you can take:
Transparency is essential. Everyone involved should know that training is in place for their own benefit, as well as how meaningful their own success is to the company as a whole.
Assign timelines to each training plan and make sure that the time to execute each training plan has its spot on the calendar.
Set a recurring task for yourself to bring up training goals and progress during one-on-one meetings on a regular basis. This can be once a month or more or less frequent, based on your unique situation.
Communicate an open and safe space for reps and managers to identify gaps in their own knowledge so they can ask for additional training when they need it.
Final thoughts
When you’re deep into the day-to-day routine with your sales team, all you can see are the deals you closed and lost and the targets you’ve hit or missed.
That makes it hard to see why certain things are happening, especially when your team is missing their quota. If you don’t step back, you can’t see the gaps in negotiation skills, objection handling or even a simple lack of systems to follow.
Luckily, these gaps are easy to bridge with the right sales training. It doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Work together with your reps to build a training program that addresses their learning needs and style.
You’ll be able to measure your reps’ progress and see how this investment helped you and your team hit and exceed your goals.
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