Boosting the Skills of Your Corporate Sales Team

With the sheer scale of many B2B deals, even a single sale can make a huge difference in the bottom line. Corporate sales is a highly competitive field and constantly changing. Staying up to date on corporate sales skills and trends can be the difference between nailing down lucrative multi-year contracts and explaining to the board why numbers are down this quarter. Corporate sales training offers an effective framework for optimizing your sales teams and ensuring performance, even in the most competitive markets.

Focusing Your Efforts with Aptitude Testing

Natural sellers will always outperform the rest of the team. No amount of corporate training can shift this dynamic. Sales aptitude testing is a simple and proven way to discover your sales superstars and identify weak links. Using this information to power your corporate sales training efforts not only boosts the effectiveness of training but ensures that you’re covering the proper topics and focusing on the proper members of your team.

Tap Your Sales Superstars for Increased Corporate Sales Training Potential

While your top performers are always good for your bottom line, they are also some of your most powerful tools for improving the skills of the rest of your team as well. Talk with them and see how they reach their numbers. You might find they offer insight into the sales process and optimizations that your reports or workflows won’t uncover.

When it’s time to conduct training, use these sales leaders as part of your training team. They know how to communicate with your team, can relate to the daily struggles and offer a level of engagement and trust that you might not find with supervisors or outside training specialists.

Use Role playing to Boost Skills and Improve Confidence

Role playing is a powerful corporate sales training technique that is often overlooked. The key to effective role playing is accuracy and commitment to the scenario. If the process isn’t taken seriously, there is little to gain from the role playing session. Create complex scenarios and try to trip up your best sellers to create real discussion and out of the box thinking. For even greater impact, bring in volunteers from other departments or hire actors to play the role of the prospect.

Focus on Creating Partnerships Not on Closing Sales

With social selling and the digital economy, competition is fiercer than ever. These factors are also leading a shift in the sales dynamic. Empathy, communication and true connections are now leading factors in long-term sales success. Instead of focusing on closing the sale, focus your corporate sales training on building connections and creating solid partnerships. From repeat business to increased average purchase sizes, this approach can lead to huge boosts in bottom line performance.

With the ever-shifting face of corporate markets and trends, corporate sales training is an essential part of remaining competitive and maximizing team performance. For more ways that training can create lasting results for your business, check out our post on sales training and customer retention.