How to Get the Most Out of Your B2B Sales Training

Although B2B Sales Training will help any sales team boost acquisitions, speed up the sales cycle and improve add-on business, maximizing the ROI of your training investment is all about boosting training effectiveness. Failure to optimize your sales training approach leads to wasted money and a team of salespeople who think training is a big waste of time.

These five tips offer proven ways to boost the benefits of training for your sales team.

Make a Plan and Build a Framework

Sales training works best when it’s organized around the specific needs of your company and industry. Without a plan, it is too easy for training efforts to stray off track.

Things to consider:

• Will everyone go at once or will you rotate your salespeople throughout the year?
• What specific weaknesses do you need the trainers to address?
• How will you reinforce what was learned in the coming months?
• What metrics will you use to judge the effectiveness of the program?

One excellent point to begin the process is to use aptitude assessments. They are a great way to analyze the strengths of your sales team, identify natural sales stars and formulate a plan that addresses the specific strengths and weaknesses of your team.

Campaign in Advance

With a plan in place, it is time to get the team on board. Build up hype surrounding your training program. Explain your plan, sell the benefits and get them excited to participate. This can also help encourage the competitive nature of your sales leaders. No one wants to fall down the rankings. Promise results and explain the value of training—the strongest sellers will get behind you and the rest of the sales team will follow.

Tap the Potential of Sales Superstars

Get your sales leaders involved in your sales training as mentors. While you don’t want to burden them with too many responsibilities along this line, they might offer unique insights and communicate with other team members in ways that your executive teams or managers cannot.

As these are highly competitive people, provide a reward or some form of recognition for their help. This can be as easy as giving a couple of tips at sales meetings or sharing how they closed one of their deals.

Reinforce Training with Role Play and Drills

Role-playing and drills are two of the most effective ways to reinforce training and boost retention. Have your salespeople take turns presenting difficult sales scenarios and place other salespeople on the spot. Analyze their responses and let the team brainstorm ways to improve without being critical.

Bring in staff from other departments or actors to portray prospects. This is a great way to improve realism and add a little pressure to the situation.

Improve Performance through One-on-One Sales Coaching

Even your strongest sales leaders can get better, but your sales managers might not have the expertise needed to help them. From the elevator pitch to customer follow-up and account management, it is useful to analyze and hone every aspect of the sales process with another set of eyes. External sales coaches can help here, and add an additional level of insight and expertise due to working with so many different companies.

From reinforcing existing skills to providing new and effective ways to acquire leads and close sales, B2B sales training gives sales teams the tools to reach new levels of performance. Use these tips to help you get the most out of your training efforts, and contact us for more advice.