Have More than 100 Sales People? Try “Corporate” Sales Training

As your business grows in size, individual sales training and one-on-one coaching becomes too impractical and costly for sales managers to do themselves. If your business utilizes a large sales team, corporate sales training offers a format and structure more suitable for your situation.

Check Aptitude First

Corporate training is optimized for informing large numbers of people quickly and efficiently.  Before beginning a regimen, however, it is important to consider the strengths and weaknesses of individuals on your sales team. For this, the most effective tool I know is aptitude testing.

By testing for aptitude, you eliminate the expense of training people not suited for their jobs. This does not mean you have to offload them, it can simply mean shifting them around from an inside sales position to an outside one, or vice versa.

Once everyone is tested, you can find a program which improves the skills of the salespeople you have already, or decide that new ones should be hired to fill the roles necessitated by your overall corporate strategy. But without testing, you are hiring and training blind.

Corporate Sales Training Benefits

Corporate training is accomplished using a combination of seminars, in-depth discussions, role playing sessions and other interactive platforms. Training is usually done off-site in a large venue or by connecting multiple locations through video conferencing or other digital technologies. At Asher Strategies, we find that in-person training works best.

Here are some of the major benefits:

• Unify Your Sales Team: By training your entire team in the same sales “language,” you ensure that everyone operates with cohesion. It also makes it easier for team members to help each other and reinforce concepts, since everyone is on the same page.
• Develop Formal Sales Processes: When you conduct sales training individually, it is easy for sessions to differ greatly from person to person. By conducting sales training with your entire team, you can develop formal policies for use throughout the business while ensuring that everyone receives the same information and benefits.
• Improve Opportunities for Engagement: One-on-one training is good for addressing specific strengths and weakness. However, you must understand these issues before they can be addressed. Group training sessions offer greater opportunities for team members to share information through enhanced discussion and interaction. In fact, for some employees, this is the only opportunity for them to be heard and make a difference in how things are done.
• Improve Integration: Changes in your sales training and processes impact more than just your sales team. Sales training that includes executives and members from other departments allows you to consult all involved parties to see how existing sales processes could be improved and how to implement new strategies and techniques without causing disruption.

Asher Strategies is a leading corporate sales training firm. We have seen that by addressing the group as a whole, you can ensure that training is consistent, help to discover new strategies and opportunities, boost information retention and unify your sales approach for greater consistency and results across your business. Follow it up with individual coaching, and this combination is hard to beat!