If there are no sales, despite having everything else – there is no business. So, companies continuously try to ensure that their salespeople are outstanding and have the proficiency needed to effectively execute each step in the selling process.
To a larger extent, success in sales depends upon effective sales training that prepares your winning sales team for the market. However, by the same logic, failure of sales efforts can be attributed to a large extent upon nonexistent, inefficient or poor training, or learning and development strategies that were either too little or too much for the needs at hand.
One of the most common drawbacks of amateur sales trainers lies in being unable to confine delivery of knowledge only to that which is required. It is common for them to try to over deliver by discussing topics that may seem illuminating and interesting, but in actuality overwhelm and confuse learners with unnecessary knowledge. While the sessions seem great, the sales training, as far as its objectives are concerned, results in failure. And that failure translates to loss of revenue and waste of resources.
Devising a sales training strategy for simple selling processes
Before jumping into sales training sessions with books, CDs and presentations, one needs to decide upon the nature, types, quality, and levels of content to deliver. The specific content delivered through sales training will depend upon the simplicity or complexity of your sales process. In sales training, less is more because salespeople are usually competent enough to make up for minor gaps and they will seek out knowledge and fill in gaps by themselves.
In a simple selling process – understanding the following is sufficient for salespeople:
• Knowing the selling process - according to the classic five step approach of opening a call, listening, handling objections, closing, and follow up.
• Product and company knowledge must be clearly understood, especially the product features,customer benefits and information regarding customer support.
• Knowledge of the market segment and targeted customers – salespeople need to understand the psychological demographics, habits, trends, likings and dislikes of the targeted customer segment. These include knowledge of customer value systems or belief systems and knowledge of how that market segment of customers arrives at purchase decisions.
• Skills needed to manage territories – salespeople need to be able to manage their time and maximize their efforts to remain in control of territories.
Sales training in simple sales processes should not go beyond the boundaries of these points unless extremely necessary.
In general, it can be said that as far as imparted knowledge is concerned, training in simple sales processes should be limited to products, company, customers and competition.
Sales training sessions in simple processes revolve around face-to-face selling and the steps of selling process execution. Other relevant knowledge would include facilitating time and territory management, knowledge about administrative procedures and knowledge about company culture. That by itself is a big list, and there's little need to veer into any other topic where training for simple sales processes is concerned.