For any organisation, providing effective and practical sales training remains both, a top priority and a top challenge.
Sales people need to be especially equipped with the right knowledge and training to be able to crack sales in the modern, competitive business environment.
We’re living in the age of information and your potential customers do their homework before making a purchase. It is important that your sales team does the same, and is always prepared with the right answers and rebuttals to achieve and surpass their sales targets.
With that said, offering quality training to a modern sales team comes with its own challenges. From having a dispersed workforce to disinterested learners, business owners and training administrators must overcome several hurdles to ensure optimum performance of their sales teams.
Just as technology has made business environment more competitive, it has also made other aspects of running a business (read: sales training) easier.
Here’s how you can effectively overcome common sales training challenges with eLearning:
Enhancing Learner Engagement
Engaging learners is not a challenge that is unique to sales training. Trainers and organisations across industry verticals struggle with engaging learners and motivating them to complete their training courses.
However, between busy schedules, training inertial, and a repulsion of the traditional classroom-style training, most learners aren’t very excited when they get to know that they will have to attend a compulsory sales training. In such a scenario, motivating them to take voluntarily signup for upskilling courses seems like a far off goal.
The challenge of engaging learners can be effectively overcome with the right eLearning tools. For starters, by adopting an eLearning approach, you can enable your learners to consume training content anytime, anywhere. This will help them create a training path that is suited to their needs and goals.
Similarly, by delivering training through a Salesforce LMS (learning management system), you can ensure that they can consume the training content on a platform that they are already familiar with.
To further enhance the effectiveness of training, try microlearning. It is the practice of breaking down long-form lessons into smaller, bite-sized lessons that the learners can consume anywhere.
Standardisation Of Training
With a dispersed sales team, providing a standardised training experience is extremely important. After all, you cannot have different sales reps in different offices delivering different pitches to similar customers.
With eLearning, you can ensure all sales teams are given the same training material. At the same time, these teams will also be evaluated on the same standards and tests, which opens new doors for gamification of learning. Gamification, as the name suggests, is adding game-like elements like leaderboards to your training. In other words, once standardisation of training doesn’t only ensure that your sales team is equipped with the right information, it enables you to gamify your training content to further boost engagement levels.
Measuring Training Effectiveness
Finally, measuring effectiveness of training initiatives has always been a challenge with traditional learning approaches. With eLearning, tracking how learners interact with training material is easier than ever before.
With custom reporting features, you can view how learners are interacting with your learning material and assessments. These reports will enable you to identify quick learners that can be exposed to advanced courses, and under-performers that require special attention during training.
At the same time, these reports will also help you get a clearer picture of how your training aligns with your business objectives.
Conclusion
While eLearning can help you overcome many of the challenges associated with training your sales team, it cannot compensate for a subpar training program. Before you make the switch to eLearning in hopes of achieving higher learner engagement and improved effectiveness, make sure your training material and strategy are absolutely bulletproof.
