Essential Features To Look For In A Sales Training Provider

Sales training providers need to deeply understand how adults learn, how behaviors change, and what the sales process looks like. They should also provide flexible training formats, supplemental materials, and post-training reinforcement.

Look for a provider regularly publishing articles, white papers, research, and webinars to demonstrate thought leadership and intimate market knowledge. You should also check top provider lists from reputable resources.

Experience

When evaluating potential sales training providers, it’s critical to consider how long they have been in business. This can give you a sense of their stability and how well they might be able to adapt as your needs change over time. A company like Challenger, with a long history, can also provide references and examples of similar work that help you see the value they bring to their clients.

The right sales training should fit your company’s needs and unique culture. Salespeople should also easily understand it to get buy-in and engagement around the skills, behaviors, and tools you want to implement. Some sales training providers have a preferred methodology from which they will stay consistent, which can be a good thing if it delivers the results you’re looking for.

If you’re bringing in new reps, including fun group activities in the mix can be helpful during their initial training. This can help them bond with their fellow salespeople, and it may be an effective way to break down barriers that might otherwise exist. You can also invite product engineers or software developers to come and talk with your salespeople so that they become familiar with the more technical aspects of your products and buyer personas.

Reputation

The best sales training providers will have a solid reputation in the marketplace. This can be gauged from the quality of their written work, webinars and podcasts, and their thought leadership in the industry. They will also have an impressive track record of successful client outcomes.

When evaluating potential sales training partners, ask for references and case studies. This can provide a valuable perspective on how the provider has been able to help other organizations achieve success and improve sales performance.

Lastly, be wary of any sales training company that insists on its flagship sales methodology and will not budge from it. The best sales training providers will be flexible and recommend the approach that best meets your organization’s needs – not their own.

No matter how enjoyable, informative and effective a sales training program is, it will likely fail if it is not reinforced month in, month out on the job. A good training provider will partner with you to drive Leader sponsorship and support post-training reinforcement. This will ensure your sales team applies the new skills they learn to real-life opportunities and maximize their impact on customer value. This will make your training investment a success rather than one of the 85% that fail, according to HR Chally. This is why selecting a training provider that will be your strategic partner, not just a vendor, is so important.

Flexibility

When it comes to sales training, one-size-fits-all approaches tend to fall short. A program that works for someone selling to consumers in a retail store will likely work for something other than a team that sells business-to-business (B2B) products and services to enterprises.

The best providers consider your industry, your average sales cycle and the type of customers you target when delivering training. They also understand that your salespeople must see how the movement applies to their daily jobs. Salespeople can only buy in and use the new skills if they do.

Look for a provider that offers a flexible, modular curriculum and can deliver in-person or online training. They should also be able to provide pre-training consultation and customized case studies and exercises that relate to your salespeople’s unique selling processes. This way, they’ll be more likely to meet your needs and get a high return on investment.

Finally, you can count on your training provider to support and reinforce the training after it’s delivered. This could include one-on-one coaching, e-learning, follow-up emails, reinforcement questions in the sales process and discussions at sales team meetings. This is required to ensure the learning sticks and gets applied to drive real results. Ultimately, the right provider will place as much emphasis on what happens before and after training delivery as they do during the training itself.

Results

A great sales training program drives lasting behavior change and results. The key to ensuring you get that return on your investment is clearly defining the problem you expect the training to solve for your organization at the outset of the process. That will allow you to compare all prospective providers against the same criteria and ensure their solution matches your business needs.

A good training provider will understand that salespeople are motivated by various things. That might be the opportunity to save time with new tools, increase their confidence in negotiating or hit quota and gain recognition for their performance. That’s why a good sales training partner should be able to communicate the broad, organizational benefits of their approach and help participants identify the personal ‘What’s In It For Me’ aspect of the training.

Finally, a good sales training partner should have a mechanism for delivering the training and a plan for how that will be reinforced post-training. This might include a manager coaching framework aligned with the new skills and behaviors introduced or a series of follow-up events –’re-connects’ – to support the ongoing learning application. This helps maximize the impact and ensures the training budget is spent wisely.