How to Build the Foundation for Effective Sales Training€¦ · infographic will go here. Introduction: The Workforce is shifting | 4 In the beginnings of a great home, the right

Introduction: The Workforce is shifting | 1

How to Build the Foundation for Effective Sales Training


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A screenshot of Sales Training today (Infographic)

Introduction: the two core parts of today’s sales training foundation

Don’t destroy your home before it’s built: today’s top reasons sales training fails

Part One: Product Knowledge

Part Two: Don’t Forget the Soft Skills

Part Three: How to create effective Sales Training: Our 5 step approach

Step 1: Choose what to train by aligning with company goals

Step 2: Choose The Right Delivery Method

Step 3: Create Relevant And Engaging Content

Step 4: Provide Opportunity For Immediate Implementation

Step 5: Measure Training Results And Maintain Accountability

Case Study: TRAINING THE On-The-Go SALES REP AstroZeneca Applies eLearning as a Sales Training Strategy

Resources


infographicwill go here


In the beginnings of a great home, the right material that not only holds your home above the ground, but also keeps out the cold, water, and resists movement, is needed to build a proper foundation. The same applies to the foundation of highly effective sales training. Two core ingredients are needed to withstand the ever-changing outside elements, and set your sales hires up for the greatest success.

So what is it that transcends across every effective sales training program and every great sales professional?

Two types of skills are required: “Hard skills” and “Soft skills”

Hard skills involve knowing and having a deep understanding of things like product knowl-edge, industry knowledge, sales applications/procedures, and other information directly re-lated to sales.

Then you have soft skills, which take into account the intangible “people skills” including things like the way you communicate, empathy, and likeability.

The best sales training has a custom combination of both that is determined by the needs of the business they are in. With hard skills being much easier to train, soft skills have often been over-looked and undervalued. But with competition steadily rising across all industries, soft skills are being focused on more and more, and finally being recognized as crucial to any successful business.

A truly great foundation for a home requires more than digging and pouring in some con-crete. It requires customization to its unique conditions like the soil around it, weather condi-tions, and lay of the land. The same applies to epic sales training. It needs to be customized to the needs of the business and the sales team. This includes the sales process, the content of the training, how the training is delivered, and the types of skills taught, which will all be covered in this book.

So before we go into all of that, let’s cover the most common reasons customized sales training fails.

Introduction: The who core parts of today’s sales training foundation

the two core partsof today’s sales training foundation


Many companies sabotage their foundation right from the beginning, so we thought it would be a good idea to tell you what NOT to do before we talk about what you SHOULD do.

Here are the top mishaps to avoid in your sales training strategy:

Don’t destroy your home

before it’s builtToday’s Top Reasons Sales Training Fails

Don’t destroy your home before it’s built: today’s top reasons sales training fails


Most people think this is pretty straight forward: If you don’t know or understand your product well, then you can’t sell it. Seems simple right? Though the details of your product and features are important to know, as a salesperson you don’t want to fall into the trap of only talking on and on about how a product works and why it’s unique. To be quite candid, the majority of customers don’t care about your product features. If they wanted to know that, they could just as easily go to your website and read about it. What they do care about is how they will benefit from your product and each feature.

This why when training product knowledge, the training needs to help the salesperson learn how to talk about the product benefits for your target audience, and how the product will make their lives better or easier. A great trick to do this is to ask the question “So what?” after looking at a product feature. Have the salesperson think about why the customer would care about this feature, and how it will specifically impact them.

Here’s a great example of shifting from a “feature focused” to a “benefit focused” sales pitch.

A tire salesman named Tom continuously missed his quotas and didn’t understand why he was doing so much worse than his colleagues. He would talk about the amazing technology used, the type of rubber, and the long shelf life, but just couldn’t close a deal. He had a conversation with a friend who was breaking sales records at a large technology firm, and the friend immediately knew why Tom wasn’t able to sell even one tire. He told Tom to think about why a customer would buy his tire. He told him to talk about the scientific design of the tire, but to also add how the feature reduces skid rates and makes your car that much safer to drive. With just that one suggestion, Tom got his first sale.

The Lesson?

People don’t buy products, they buy the benefits of those products to make their lives a little easier or better in some way. Product knowledge is only half of the story, and the other half is to be able to translate that knowledge into key benefits that are important to your customer base.

part one:Product Knowledge

Part One: Product Knowledge


We all know that a doctor needs to have the training to diagnose patients and secretaries need to have fantastic organizational skills. But beyond just getting a diagnosis, why do you go to your current physician? Do you choose a doctor that listens and takes time to answer your questions, or do you go to the one who treats you like another dollar sign? Do you keep the secretary who is always positive and smiling, or the one who can bring your mood down with just a glance? These and many other situations prove that it’s truly the soft skills that lead to long term success.

Nine times out 10, an unsuccessful hire fails due to a lack of soft skills. If you want to reverse those odds, then making soft skills a top priority in both your hiring process and training is key. Technical skills might get you in the door, but it’s soft skills that keep the opportunities flowing.

So what do you mean by “soft skills”?

These are things like your attitude, your people skills, your emotional intelligence, your per-sonality, your communications, and a whole bunch of other personal attributes. These are skills you need to be a true leader, manager, or salesperson. Things like problem solving, motivating a team, getting along with people, and building relationships are much easier if you have an arsenal of soft skills built up.

Unfortunately, soft skills until recently have been grossly undervalued, which in turn, has led to a significant lack of training solutions to grow and foster these skillsets in comparison to hard skills like product knowledge. Many companies have made the wrong choice in as-suming that soft skills are universal, but as of late, that assumption has been dissipating, and companies are implementing soft skills training in equivalence with their hard skills training.

part two:Don’t Forget The Soft Skills



If you do have one, the first step to solving the problem, like any other problem, is realizing and admitting that you have one. And while you should be implementing training to grow and foster soft skills, you should also be thinking about these skills from the very begin-ning of the hiring process, and bring in people that already have some natural abilities in these areas.

So what kind of skills should you be looking and training for? We’ve put together a list of soft skills the best salespeople have, and a list of the top soft skills to include in your training to skyrocket the effectiveness of your sales staff.

So how do you tell if you have a soft skills gap at your company? To find out, honestly ask yourself the following questions:



When you are hiring for your sales team, keep an eye out for candidates who naturally embody these top soft skills.

keep an eye out...



With the millennial generation taking over the job market with a resume full of hard skills, but a lacking list of soft skills, adding the following skills training to your internal learning and de-velopment will help fill those gaps, and grow your entire sales force effectiveness as a whole.



How to create effective Sales Training: Our 5 Step Approach

part three:So now that you have an understanding of the types of skills that need to be included in your sales training content, it’s time to dive into our 5 step approach to creating sales training that ACTUALLY WORKS.

Disclaimer: We didn’t just come up with this stuff out of thin air. It actually works, and we’ve seen the results over and over again through implementing these same principles in train-ings we create.

The secret sauce behind our approach comes from lessons from our own methodology cre-ated to help learners experience information in a cognitively engaging way we call Neurole-arning. Cognitive engagement is the key to information retention, and is the reason you can remember every character’s name from a movie, or every line in a song. This type of “ultimate learning” experience happens when visual storytelling is combined with relevant recall chal-lenges. The combination results in knowledge transfer to long term memory.

Okay… so we threw just a bit of science at you, but it’s important for you to know that the next very important pages in this eBook are the key to helping you create the most effective sales training you can, and in turn, driving your sales goals through the roof this year.

The five steps we are about to cover include:

How to align your training with company goals

How to choose the right delivery method

What type of content to include

How to test your learner’s knowledge

And finally, how to properly measure your training results

Let’s start with getting your training started off in the right direction, by making sure they actually serve a purpose that will lead to an impact on your business goals.

Part Three: How to create effective Sales Training: Our 5 Step Approach


Choose What To Train By Aligning With Company Goals

step one:It’s possible to have learning facets and programs, but without executive buy-in, efforts can fall flat. This is why the most effective sales training is inextricably linked to overall strategic goals of a company. If your organization has specific goals–improve sales by 30 percent or improve customer satisfaction, for instance–then everyone from your team to your vendors should understand the significance of those goals, and how your training will help employ-ees achieve it. If your CEO is embracing the training, and your employees understand why they are taking it, and how the training will help them do their job better and contribute to company wide goals, the success rate of the training program actually doing what you need it to do significantly increases.

So the first step is to choose one or two goals for the training to serve. (Don’t choose too many because you want to avoid information overload, and set up your training with a clear, solid focus.)

Next, when it comes to sales training, it is critical for the training content to align with and fo-cus on the skills that are most crucial to a specific sales function needed to achieve the goal. So the next step is to choose no more than a few key skills to build with the training program.

Finally, think about the key behaviors you want your employees to adopt as a result of the training. Break this down by each, separate skill, and the key behaviors needed to really master each skill.

If you follow these steps, you will avoid having a generic, “off-the-shelf” sales training pro-gram that offers little to no motivation to learn. Instead, you will end up with a hyper focused, results generating sales training program that everyone in the company is on-board with.

Step One: Choose What To Train By Aligning With Company Goals


Choose the right delivery method

step two:Team “Instructor Led Training” and Team “eLearning” have been in back and forth battle for years over who is more effective. But why does it have to be one or the other?

Sometimes though, pairing two things together just makes them both better – peanut butter and chocolate, for example.

That’s how we feel about ILT and eLearning. By incorporating a “blend” of both into your training curriculum, you get the best of both worlds – high-tech delivery paired with face-to-face education to ensure the best outcome.

With that being said, here are several highly effective delivery methods we suggest incorpo-rating into your training program.

1. Use E-Learning to Educate

Constant traveling, increased remote work, and distractions like frequent sales calls make it nearly impossible to get your entire sales force in one room for an in-person training. That’s why eLearning is a great way for your team to learn both product knowledge and build skills, at their own pace, when it makes sense in their day.

eLearning is great for explaining terms, concepts, models, skills, and providing scenarios and simulations where learners can use their own judgement to select appropriate responses (to develop skills) while also teaching them them the how. The real power of eLearning for sales training happens when visual storytelling through videos, simulations, and scenarios comes into play by giving the learner a chance to apply what they’ve learned both in the training and in the “real world”, and also providing the learner timely and constructive feedback.

2. Use Micro-Learning to Avoid Information Overload

Did you ever think to yourself, “I wish I had more things to remember thrown at me today?” We are guessing that’s a big NO! Your sales staff already has a million details to remember and adding sales training on top of it all isn’t always embraced with welcoming arms.

To avoid overwhelming your sales team with loads of information, microlearning was devel-oped as an instructional design strategy where the learning module presents small, bite-sized units of focused information into an easily digestible whole learning. It’s also backed by neuroscience, because when it comes to memory it is widely agreed upon that your brain-

Step two: Choose the right delivery method


can roughly hold 3 to 5 pieces of data before it transfers it to short-term memory or com-pletely discards it. Microlearning allows the brain to determine if it’s important and if it should be transferred to long-term memory. This is why the art of “chunking”–breaking information up into smaller pieces–is used in microlearning which mimics what the brain does naturally to allow for better information retention.

Whether it’s delivered via mobile phone or part of a team instant messaging platform, you don’t need information to be substantial for it to be significant to the learner–and the learn-er’s brain. The mobility factor of microlearning also allows for reps who are constantly on-the-go, making training accessible when they have the time to be fully attentive to what they are learning. Incorporating this method to train salespeople in easily manageable intervals will keep them engaged and help you deliver new information they’ll actually retain.

Real world example: One of the best examples of the power of microlearning is TED Talks. Industry professionals and thought leaders discuss a variety of topics to teach and inspire in digestible 15-minute increments.

3. Implement Field Training Combined With Detailed Feedback

“When I was in finance, everything that happened was situational. You can craft the most elegant and persuasive “elevator pitch,” but what happens when you get thrown a curveball? Salespeople have to be comfortable with getting uncomfortable, and sales training needs to train them for what they don’t know.”

-Simon Casuto, Co-founder and President of eLearning Mind

Let’s face it, you can only learn so much with simulations and online training. The true de-velopment happens when you apply that knowledge in the field, in the real-world. You can practice a pitch 1,000 times, but you also have to prepare your staff for the unexpected. This is done through applying what you learned and getting clear and detailed feedback of how to improve the next time. This portion of the training requires a commitment from the sales manager. They need to listen in on sales calls, review recordings, and analyze the learner’s performance in real sales situations in a timely manner with very specific feedback. In an ideal world, feedback happens within hours of the experience so it is fresh and top of mind for the salesperson to reflect.

All of the discussed delivery methods are effective, but ultimately, to determine the best choice for your company, you want to conduct a needs analysis for your specific sales training to determine the most effective delivery method.

Step two: Choose the right delivery method


Create Relevant And Engaging Content

step three:In general, you will find most sales people to be what behavioral psychology calls a “Type A” personality. This means that you are working with a highly competitive, time sensitive learner. To break that down, they will make a very quick decision about whether your training is valuable or a big waste of their time. To get them to buy into the benefits of your training program, you need to keep your content short, to the point, and 100% customized to your salesperson’s specific role, industry, and situations. Getting their buy in is key, otherwise no matter what kind of content you have, your training won’t have any effect.

How do you get buy in? At the very beginning of your training, immediately talk about the impact the skills and knowledge learned will have on things they care about like their sales numbers, overall company-wide sales goals, and fostering client relationships.

So now that you’ve convinced them it’s worth their time. What’s next?

At the beginning of this book we discussed the two major elements of every great sales train-ing program: Product Knowledge and Soft Skills

You want to make sure the right combination of both are included in the content of your training program, but most importantly, you want to make sure this content is engaging and meaningful to your sales staff. To help you do this we are going to give you a variety of ways to present content that effectively delivers product knowledge and soft skills. But first, we are going to throw just a tinsy-winsy bit of science at you to explain what makes content en-gaging and why the subsequent content strategies are highly effective.

Let’s make this fun by starting with a question!

Why do gamers have greater cognitive function and more grey matter in their brains than the rest of us?

It’s because the content they are interacting with is high quality, which keeps them cogni-tively engaged. When someone is cognitively engaged in an experience, they are at their optimal level to retain the information and apply what they’ve learned. The experience ac-tually has a physical effect and rewires the neural pathways in their brain to reflect the new learnings, and hence, that is why gamers have such high cognitive functioning.

Step three: Create relevant and engaging content


Because content that keeps your sales staff cognitively engaged will maximize the chances of them retaining and using the information. So now let’s go into what high quality content looks like.

Here’s our secret recipe to high quality content:

So let’s talk about how to deploy this recipe into your sales training. Here are 6 content strat-egies used in the most effective sales training programs.

1. Simulate Real World Sales Scenarios

This involves creating eLearning modules that allow your sales team to practice pitches and answer questions in a low-stress environment to prep them for the real world of sales. Take a typical sales cycle: First, it starts with learning more about the potential customer. The would-be salesperson can do some research on the customer or organization, gather general intel or check out the latest news. When ready to move onto the customer outreach or meeting, a simulation allows trainees to practice common questions and even learn to read-

PHEW! Okay, so...Why are we telling you this?



verbal and physical cues, all while receiving real-time feedback from trainers and instructors.Simulations offer the best of both worlds for those hoping to learn to be one of the greats: The ability to practice in realistic situations without the high stakes of actually working with a customer. 2. Supplementary Training

No one can successfully cram everything into a short eLearning module, so including supple-mentary trainings the learner can do on their own time helps to delve deeper into concepts and skills. These include things like webinars, eBooks, and Ted Talks that are relevant to the core training topic.

3. Product Information Flash Cards

Your sales team always needs to be up to date on product developments, which makes prod-uct introduction and education an important facet of training. This is the perfect time to uti-lize mLearning, since product specs can be condensed into flash card-like learning materials for quick reference.

4. Roleplaying For Skills Development

Don’t waste precious training time reading through material. Instead, try a flipped classroom model, where learners read up on skills and technique at home, and are given a few scenarios that can link back to scenarios and emotions they can relate to from past experience. Have them come ready to practice what they’ve learned during a training meeting. Roleplaying helps sharpen skills and acclimates your sales team to new techniques.

5. Reframe the Goal

Instead of framing the goal broadly—’teach our salespeople to sell better’—narrow the view to the individual skills and concepts that build sales competency. Reframing narrowly sets up a fast-paced, engaging module instead of a never-ending eLearning session, and the sales team accrues a number of small wins over the series of modules. By swapping out traditional training for simulation-based learning scenarios, you offer sales training that gives employ-ees a chance to sharpen their skills and hone their natural sales instincts to create a sales team that is seriously a force to be reckoned with.

6. Smart Assessments and Feedback

Gameplay training is a fun way to have employees actively retrieve the information they just learned in the module. Quizzes can help you assess where some of your people currently are, and provide continuous recall during the entire training session. It’s also highly important to make sure managers are giving constant feedback to sales people after they apply new learnings to their work.

By harnessing the power of high quality content, you can ditch the boring training and give your sales team something they can really get behind and sink their teeth into.



Provide Opportunity For Immediate Implementation

step four:The real key to an effective sales training program, or any training program for that matter, is what we call “Smart Challenges”. Basically, this means that you test the learner right after they receive the new information as quickly as possible. The challenges need to be relevant to the information from the training content, and be fun and thought provoking. Things like quizzes, simulations, games, and in-person feedback are great examples of smart challenges.

Smart challenges are also NOT redundant, and they force you to have highly focused atten-tion which is the key to learning and retention. This means that if you have a quiz after one module, you don’t want to have a similar style quiz after the next module.

The secret to recall engagement is mixing it up! Use a short quiz, then throw in a mini game, then toss in a real world simulation. Variety is the key to engagement.

Finally, remember to space out your recall methods. This could mean giving a quick quiz immediately after the module, then a follow up quiz a week later, and an in-person recall session two weeks later.

Step four: Provide opportunity for immediate implementation


Measure Training Results And Maintain Accountability

step five:We have made it to the final step! If you’ve been paying attention, and following the process completely, this step should be an easy one for you. You are going to want to see if your training is working, and what can be improved, and the only way to do that is by measuring the results of your training.

The only true way to effectively measure your sales training ROI is to physically observe be-havior changes in pre and post training. This will be a much easier task if you followed one of the very beginning steps, which was to align your training with a very specific result and identified the behavior changes necessary to get there.

When the training program is over, do learners amend their behavior to match what they’ve learned, or do they go back to the same behavior they exhibited before?

Did the training have an impact? And does that impact positively benefit your organization?

Don’t be afraid to ask your learners about their thoughts. They’re the key source of infor-mation as to whether or not their behavior has changed due to training and if training has positively affected their work and results.

It’s also important to know how the employees felt about the training. Do they love the train-ing or are they just clicking through to get it over with? It gives you a chance to solicit opin-ions from learners, so you can improve future training.

Finally, it’s crucial to hold the learner accountable to apply their training in their work. Man-agers can do this by telling the salesperson they are going to sit in on a few calls to examine how they are using the new knowledge, or set up an in-person meeting to go over how they are using the training materials.

“Count what is countable, measure what is measurable, and what is not measurable, Make Measurable.” -Galileo Galilei

Step five: Measure training results and maintain accountability


Pharmaceutical companies spend significant amounts of revenues to train newly hired sales reps, and those costs can add up really quick. It’s typical for most pharma companies to send their reps to get in-person training where they sit for a few days, and sometimes even a whole week, to get piles of information, a handbook, and then are immediately sent into the field to use what they’ve learned. Most reps are overwhelmed, and aren’t given the proper time to practice what they’ve learned, which leads to higher turnover, and wasted revenues on training that is ineffective. Astra-Zeneca saw the problem with the old methods of training and decided to implement an eLearning strategy in their sales training. Here’s what happened.

The Challenge: We are all aware that pharmaceutical sales representatives spend most of their time on the road, and talking with pharmacists convince them to carry and promote their latest product. The reps have to know every single aspect of their products from the anatomy to what the competition is doing. This makes sales training one of the most critical factors of long term sales success for pharma companies. The problem is, traditional forms of training are not living up to the work style of on-the-go reps (including methods like paper-based training material and live event training which are costly). The reps are frustrated with this type of training, which is highly inconvenient to their workflow and busy schedules, so AstraZeneca needed a new way to make training convenient, engaging, and impactful for their sales reps.

The Solution: AstroZeneca launched an eLearning strategy that allowed sales reps to take their training on tablet PCs, incorporating mobile learning, simulations, virtual worlds, and social media. Instead of overwhelming the reps with a standard 30-60 minute module, they have implemented a microlearning strategy that breaks down those modules into smaller pieces they call “Learning Bites”. This has allowed for more direct and individualized learning experiences for reps, that allows them to take training when they are waiting for the doctors, or in transit to their next appointment.

The sales reps are also given the opportunity to practice what they’ve learned in “virtual worlds”. In these simulations, sales reps can visit and interact in a virtual community including doctors’ offices, clinics, hospitals, and pharmacies, depending on their product. They are able to click on case stud-ies where they are given different scenarios they have to solve. They are also given the opportunity to improve soft skills in simulated environments where they are given the chance to interact with physicians outside of the field

The Results: The newly deployed eLearning strategy has allowed AstraZeneca to be more re-sponsive to their customer needs and to incorporate the input they receive. The training has also cut the reps’ time in half to achieve a much higher proficiency level, which allows them to detail physicians more quickly and much more effectively. The sales reps themselves feel much more confident, and have stated that the interactive eLearning removes the nervousness.

Training the On-The-Go Sales Rep AstroZeneca Applies eLearning as a Sales Training Strategy

case study

Case Study: Training the On-The-Go Sales Rep


Resources:

http://elearningindustry.com/elearning-statistics-and-facts-for-2015

https://www.td.org/Publications/Research-Reports/2013/2013-State-of-the-Industry

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCDV_34.htm

http://firstround.com/review/the-anatomy-of-the-perfect-sales-hiring-process/

http://salestrainingconnection.com/2014/11/21/sales-success-dont-forget-the-soft-skills/

http://sales.linkedin.com/blog/sales-tips-focusing-on-soft-skills-for-sales-breakthroughs/

http://www.salesreadinessgroup.com/blog/bid/391572/6-Requirements-to-Running-an-Effective-Sales-Training-Program

http://www.yesware.com/blog/sales-training/

At ELM, we believe in better ideas created around even better solutions. It’s part of our culture. We are an eLearning design agency that helps companies transform existing learning material into memorable eLearning experienc-es that engage learners. Our approach is a blend of modern UX principles and our NeuroLearning methodology.

We’re disrupting the eLearning industry with true innovation and ideas based around modern brain science, neuroplastici-ty, user experience and stunning design.


Contact Us:

www.elmlearning.com

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How to Build the Foundation for Effective Sales Training€¦ · infographic will go here. Introduction: The Workforce is shifting | 4 In the beginnings of a great home, the right