Revenue is the key to success for companies across the globe, and the sales team is on the front line every day competing for business against your rivals. Making sure your sales team is coming to the table prepared and knowledgeable isn’t just a nice to have, it’s a need to have.
Training your sales team using a Learning Management System (LMS) provides the opportunity, for example, to increase the product knowledge they need to do their jobs effectively and conduct regular performance assessments. With the Docebo platform, L&D professionals can provide sales staff a place where newer staff members can ask questions of experts within an organization using a social learning platform like Coach & Share.
Why Is Online Sales Training Important
Sales training in general has and will continue to be a key component to organizational success. Traditionally, sales training has taken the form of an annual kick-off meetings, followed by occasional formal in-classroom training sessions. The skills gained through traditional training provides your sales teams with product need-to-know, but the retention levels needed to be successful generally aren’t there. Articulating competitive advantages and having a pulse on the competition requires an ongoing approach to sales training. Providing your sales team with regular training opportunities and access to subject-matter experts gives them a tool that helps them always have a leg up on the competition.
Online sales training continues to provide the information that is critical to your sales teams success, but it provides the information to them when and where they need it, while also allowing a social experience with other employees within the company. The reality is, in the competitive environment your sales team works in, they need continuous training and are hungry to learn, with a desire to constantly improve their ability to sell.
Consider these four benefits of online sales training provided by eLearning Industry:
- Online sales training can increase confidence and job satisfaction while also improve knowledge and skills retention.
- Online learning can also help your sales teams stay up-to-date on products and procedures on an ongoing basis.
- Enabled by a robust learning platform, such as Docebo, sales training can also include opportunities to identify (and address) different strengths and weaknesses to further improve performance.
- Identifying areas for improvement can establishing opportunities to create the learning content necessary to close any gaps, while identifying various strengths give L&D a bounty of learning opportunities that can be shared across the wider sales team, aligning the entire sales organization.
Think about the last time you started a new job, how many questions did you have daily? This is especially true if you’re jumping in headfirst to a new sales team selling a new product. For the majority of companies, a traditional onboarding program is very costly and not always as effective as it probably should be. On the other hand, developing your sales training program through a LMS that provides specific information points, while also offering a social learning component allows your new hires to ask questions at the time-of-need to internal subject-matter experts, L&D departments can use their learning platform you can provide information they need, when they need it and more importantly on an ongoing basis that is relevant well beyond their first few weeks of employment.
Perhaps the biggest reason that online sales training is important is that your sales team is expecting it. The modern learner is used to having information available to them at their fingertips and by providing the information your teams need online through a robust learning platform you’re giving your sales team the information they need in the format they’ve come to expect. A recent Gallup poll found 87% of Millennials (compared with 69% of non-Millennials) approach jobs as development opportunities, providing ongoing training sets the stage for the opportunity.
Additionally, according to a Zenger/Folkman survey, 72% employees actively seek feedback to improve their performance. Your sales team wants feedback that is constructive, nearly 60% of respondents in that same poll indicated they wanted genuine corrective pointers. With online sales training, you have the power to provide the content your team is looking for to improve their sales performance, while increasing their knowledge and capabilities on an ongoing basis.
Online Sales Training Strategies
Research indicates that your sales teams are looking for training opportunities, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be engaged with the content. Online sales training still needs to be approached strategically with careful consideration of the how, the why and what will be measured.
Offer Your Teams Varying Training Options
Chances are, your team is full of a variety of different learners, all with their own unique learning styles. Learning content needs to be varied to ensure that it works for everyone. Some learners need to be served visual content, such as online presentations, videos, and virtual instructor-led courses. Other learners might be more auditory, so they’ll need to be given material that provides the information, but can also be presented with the opportunity to ask questions and hear the answers. An online learning platform gives them a way to record themselves, review material and listen to it together with different subject-matter experts or direct managers.
Provide Assessment Opportunities
It is extremely important to provide opportunities for assessment. Even if the content is ongoing, there needs to be touch points with superiors during the process to make sure the learner knows how they’re progressing and feel a sense of accountability. Assessment is a critical step in the learning process both in formal and online settings. Carefully consider the frequency of assessments, and ensure experts and admins are giving actionable feedback to the learner to encourage them to continue completing assessments and finding enjoyment in the material they’re learning.
Utilize Real World Situations and Value
Providing context for why learners are expected to take a course is critical to the usefulness of any learning program. Through the implementation of an online sales training initiative, look to indicate why particular modules and courses exist and what it applies to in the salesperson’s’ day-to-day activities. Often times, content will be self-indicative of the value, such as a successful demo call, but other times further context will be necessary to ensure learners have a complete grasp on why they’re learning a new skill or piece of knowledge.
Create a Cycle of Feedback and Collaboration
Online learning cannot be static and ensuring your sales team are getting the most useful information in the best possible way, always look to receive feedback and improve your content accordingly. From the outset, establish a forum for your sales teams to provide feedback on the learning material. You should also use your learning platform as a venue to answer and address questions and challenges faced by your sales team on an ongoing basis. Utilizing Docebo’s Coach & Share, for example, allows newer employees to ask questions and be notified when the expert posts an answer, the entire team can benefit and learn from these types of interactions.
Identify Your Skills Gaps
Docebo Perform helps learning and development professionals identify the specific skills that are missing within a sales team. Mapping out the skills and competencies of your team is critical to providing the right learning material the right format to enhance your team. By identify the skill gaps you’ll also be creating new opportunities and strategies for your sales teams to leverage, which will lead to more closed deals and increase the bottom line.
How to Track Your Online Sales Training Strategies
Boosting your revenue through a LMS or online sales training strategy requires a well thought-out measurement regime. In order to prove that a sales training strategy is working, there are steps that an L&D pro can take early on in order to measure, quantify and report on the success of the training initiative.
Measuring Lift
Setting sales-based benchmarks from the outset can help to identify the success and revenue boosts that can be attributed to your learning platform strategy. Keep in mind that there are multiple factors that can contribute to revenue shifts, including market or competitor changes. If you keep those factors in mind, you can begin to establish benchmarks that indicate exactly how much additional revenue being generated by enhanced online sales training.
Start by tracking the success of prospect calls performed by your sales team, the win rates of your sales teams, ability to hit quotas and the dollars sold per client. You can then take a monthly, quarterly and annual assessment to see the lift and attribute that lift to the sales training through qualitative analysis and conversations with your sales team and managers.
According to Louis Efron, there are five additional measurements that are needed to effectively gauge the ROI your teams are receiving from your sales training.
- Pre-Training Assessments
- Post-Training Assessments
- Training Content Application
- Training Content Retention
- Sales Revenue Correlation
Using these five measurements can help L&D professionals to appropriate attribute boosted revenue to the sales training in place.
An additional strategy is particularly useful for organizations with sales team in multiple regions and offices. If possible, for a period of time, provide the sales training to a specific segment of your total sales team while withholding it from another. Creating a control group will help to measure if the online sales training effectively makes a difference in the performance of your sales team. An A/B test scenario will provide valuable information on the success and usefulness to your teams specifically and can help to avoid some of the market factors that could contribute to revenue changes.
Establishing benchmarks from the outset can help to set ROI expectations what success looks like in the context of your sales training initiative.
Remember to carefully consider what business results are important to your strategy. Is it market share, total revenue, revenue per deal or a combination. Thoroughly examine the objectives that your sales team and expected to meet and ensure that your sales training specifically address and assist in improving team members to achieve those objective.
And finally, take a close look at the sales activities of your sales teams are currently utilizing and have training content that enhancing those activities and generates compelling and useful knowledge centres that can utilized on an ongoing basis by your teams.
You sales teams are critical to boosting your organization’s revenue and ensuring that they’re equipped with the best tools and access to subject-matter experts can help to boost your overall revenue. Help your sales team hit their targets and measure the success of your L&D strategies with next-generation learning technology.
Learn how Docebo can boost your revenue through more effective sales training.
