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What does it take to sell a good product? Effective marketing, targeted messaging, a strong brand image… and an ace sales team to seal the deal! The more expensive and nuanced your product, the more competent your salespeople must be to get there.
Most salespeople say they’ve been born with a sales DNA. And maybe that’s true, up to point. But just like a talented athlete needs diligent practice to win the gold medal, your talented salespeople need training to hone their skills and perform at their best.
Sales training, of course, is largely practice-oriented and performed on the job. That said, a Learning Management System (LMS) can take your training initiatives up a notch or two. An LMS can help you standardize sales training across multiple locations while being that centralized knowledge hub your employees need.
👉 If you haven’t tried using an LMS for sales training yet, we’re here to show you why it’s important to make it part of your training initiative and what features you need to look for specifically for your sales training needs.
Here’s what we will be covering in this blog post:
The Power of Sales Training
Let’s begin by clarifying a crucial distinction: sales training and product training may seem similar at first glance, but they serve distinct purposes.
While product training primarily imparts knowledge about your offerings, sales training goes far beyond that. It not only equips your sales team with in-depth product knowledge but also hones their individual skills and fosters essential personality traits.
Through sales training, your employees gain actionable techniques that are indispensable for success in the sales field. If you’re still on the fence about incorporating sales training into your company culture, allow us to present you with compelling reasons to give it serious consideration:
Cultivate Soft Skills
Sales skills are multi-layered. They’re a combination of interpersonal and soft skills, including complicated ones like emotional intelligence.
That’s because a salesperson needs to be more than an effective communicator to be successful. To seal the deal, they must anticipate and handle objections, sympathize with their customers, and understand their pain points. Above all, they should be able to win their trust.
No matter how experienced or naturally gifted, there’s always room for improvement. Your sales team members might be great at some aspects but lacking in others, and sales training can successfully bridge such gaps.
Teach Technical Skills
Sales training has a technical aspect as well. With many sales being closed online, especially in industries like SaaS, employees need to get a hold of relevant tech, like video conferencing, CRM platforms like Salesforce, and email tools.
Apart from that, employees need to understand and know your product inside out to be able to sell it. They should be able to answer customer questions with confidence and come off as reliable. If they lose credibility, your product does too.
Explore Sales Techniques
The market changes constantly, and so do consumer needs and preferences. For instance, most consumers will now do thorough research online before visiting a physical store. Apart from staying informed about new insights into consumer behavior, you need to utilize this knowledge to improve not only your product but also your marketing and sales approach.
During sales training, you can share this knowledge and teach employees the most recent sales strategies. This is particularly important for inexperienced salespeople who will feel more confident entering the sales floor with a “playbook” in their hands. But it’s also useful for seasoned employees as these are often stuck in their ways and will benefit from exploring new, modern options.
Boost Employee Morale
Sales is a demanding, high-pressure job. It’s not just the monthly targets that put pressure on your sales employees. Like everyone doing a customer-facing job, sales representatives have to deal with different sorts of people every day – always with a smile and patience.
Sales training can help sales employees feel more confident, understand and handle customers better, and alleviate some of the stress involved in the sales process.
Maintain a Consistent Brand Image
Your salespeople are your reflection. Whether they come off as professional, salesy, knowledgable, or confident directly impacts how customers perceive your brand. Apart from that, salespeople must all have a similar approach depending on your industry, target market, and the image you want to build for your company.
The only way to ensure that happens is to demonstrate to employees how you expect them to behave. This can be done through job shadowing, real-world examples, and role-play but also by teaching employees about company values and mission statement.
Enhance Customer Experience
Every interaction with your brand is an important part of the overall customer experience and shapes how your customers feel about your brand. You want your customers to have a positive encounter with a knowledgeable, trustworthy salesperson who makes them feel excited about their purchase.
A positive customer experience is essential to increasing customer satisfaction and building customer loyalty which, in the long term, is the cornerstone of a healthy, profitable company. Loyal customers spend more per purchase, buy more often from you, and recommend your products.
Increase Employee Retention
According to Hubspot research, in 2021 and 2022, sales employee turnover was roughly 35%. Among other reasons that include insufficient compensation and a toxic culture, salespeople cited a lack of a career growth plan as a reason for leaving their jobs. In fact, 94% of survey participants said they’d be willing to stay at the job if the company invested in their career.
Offering training opportunities that will hone their skills is the most tangible way to show sales employees that you are indeed investing in their careers. Sales training can also be linked to improved sales performance and, therefore, better compensation, which is another significant reason behind turnover.
Boost the Company’s Bottom Line
From all the above, it’s easy to see how sales training is a huge part of sales enablement and can, therefore, have a significant impact on the company’s bottom line. Higher sales and more satisfied customers translate into more revenue and long-term financial stability for the company.
Why You Should Choose an LMS to Deliver Sales Training
Sales training should be action-oriented and filled with opportunities for practice. On that front, nothing beats the real-life experience of the sales floor. But sales training should also be continuous, flexible, and budget-friendly.
Enter an LMS. See why an online learning platform is the best option to deliver effective sales training either exclusively online or to complement on-the-job training.
1. Beat Time Constraints
Sales employees are a “tough crowd” to train. Not because they’re difficult people but because they often work unconventional or not fixed hours, especially when they have to accommodate client appointments. Therefore, a fixed training schedule might interfere with their work.
Elearning, specifically using an LMS, allows for self-paced learning or a combination of real-time sessions with self-paced learning. For instance, you can record a series of videos to demonstrate sales techniques and throw some live sessions into the mix for clarifications and practice through role-playing.
2. Cover Diverse Training Needs
An LMS for sales training enables you to build a flexible training strategy. For starters, sales managers and trainers can use the built-in assessment tool that most LMSs offer to conduct skills assessments and see what your training needs are before you can strategize accordingly.
Then, you can deliver your sales program as you need to: host live sessions and offer sales coaching in groups or in person, build a knowledge repository, enable hybrid learning with some employees attending on-site and others joining online, launch a mobile app, complement in-person training with online resources… the options are plenty!
3. Keep Sales Employees Engaged
An LMS supports diverse types of training content for every learning preference. Upload microlearning videos and infographics for learning on the go, eBooks and videos if you want to discuss something in detail, share videos, articles, and slideshows from external resources, or create quizzes that serve as quick knowledge checks and memory boosters.
On top of that, with an LMS for sales training, you can incorporate gamification elements, like leaderboards and badges, to initiate some friendly (hopefully!) competition among your sales reps.
4. Offer Learning On The Go
Sales employees are often deskless, that is, they don’t have a dedicated workspace. And yet, they might need support when they’re on the job – especially your new sales hires. Luckily, all modern LMSs are mobile-friendly and usually have a mobile app where employees can access training resources when, for example, they need to check product features before meeting a client.
5. Ensure Consistency
If you need to deliver sales training across multiple branches, an LMS is your best bet. Whether you prefer to conduct real-time online sessions or offer self-paced courses, an LMS enables you to offer the same quality training to every employee, ensure everyone is on the same page and trained to the same standards. This is especially important when onboarding new employees, as you need everyone to start on the right foot.
6. Address Budget Concerns
Budget constraints are perhaps the most common reason why companies are reluctant to offer sales training. In reality, online training is cheaper than on-site for large-scale training as it eliminates venue, transportation, and accommodation costs; plus, it doesn’t cut into your employees’ work day.
Another thing to consider is that an online course is built once and can be used and updated unlimited times. Forget about organizing training sessions from scratch every time a new employee joins the team or to communicate new information, like product releases. With an LMS, training becomes much simpler.
How to Select an LMS for Sales Training: 11 Features to Look For
With so many platforms in the market, how do you pick one? Let’s see how you can choose the best sales training platform for your needs with these 11 must-have LMS features as your guide.
1. Training Delivery Methods
One key reason you should switch to a sales training LMS is to have more flexibility and options in how you deliver training. In this spirit, your LMS should support diverse training delivery methods, so you can offer learning experiences that have it all: real-time online sessions, self-paced learning, or even hybrid learning with some employees attending on-site and some joining from their computers. You can even use your LMS as a repository of learning material to complement on-site training.
2. White-Label Mobile App
Still on the training delivery subject, mobile learning is a category on its own. A mobile app will take your sales training to the next level, especially if your sales team is often on the move rather than pinned to a desk making calls and product demos. For those types of sales teams, a mobile app is a game changer as it’s undoubtedly much easier to open the app and access their training on the spot instead of typing the address on the browser.
Even more importantly, a mobile app is fully optimized for mobile consumption – the text and video size adapt better, and navigation is more intuitive. With an app, learners receive notifications and reminders and are able to download content and view it without an internet connection too.
Most LMSs offer their own mobile apps through which your employees will access their sales training courses. A selected few will allow you to launch your own white-label mobile app without a trace of their branding. If establishing your brand is important to you, look for this option and don’t settle for less!
3. AI & Automations
A sales training platform powered with AI will help you develop a course plan, breaking down your course into modules and suggesting the best learning content. It can even create some of the training content For example, it can help you write an eBook or build assessments. This is all the more important when you want to create original content from scratch and not just put together ready-made material.
Automations and bulk actions can help with admin tasks and user management, like learner enrolment/unenrolment, tagging, user import, and more. These functionalities can save you tons of time and mistakes, so double check the available capabilities of your LMS vendor.
4. Multitenancy & Access Controls
Multiple audiences? Multiple learning academies! If you’re training your sales team, you might wish to extend training to customers and business partners as well. Or, you might have diverse products you launch under different brands, so you need to build different learning academies and training materials for each brand.
Look for an LMS that enables you to build separate training environments, each one with its own look & feel depending on the audience and type of training. The system should also enable you to set different access controls based on the user’s role to ensure data privacy and easier course and user management.
5. Interactive Content
If you decide to deliver employee training asynchronously, know that you need interactive elements to facilitate learning and make the process fun. Imagine a quiz that suddenly pops up in a video – it helps learners come out of a passive state and take action. More interactive activities to add are quizzes, eBooks (where learners can take notes or highlight parts), and, of course, any real-time sessions you hold.
6. Social Learning
In the spirit of creating interactive learning experiences, interactions among learners should be part of your employees’ learning paths. Collaborative learning is the most effective way to spark engagement with the course while improving its effectiveness. So check if your LMS supports the formation of a built-in community with features like groups, learner profiles, newsfeeds, and messaging.
7. Assessment & Certificate Builder
No matter how you look at it, assessments are an integral part of learning. Be it to help learners refresh their memory or to help educators and trainers monitor learner progress, assessment shouldn’t miss from any training program. A certificate at the end of the course will further motivate learners to give their best selves during the course.
The more options and variety in assessments, the better. Assessments play an important role in keeping learners hooked, so make sure you surprise them with more than multiple-choice questions. Some nice options include video/audio recordings, match & ordering, and open-ended questions.
Depending on the gravity and the nature of the subject matter and the learning objectives, you should be able to create the right type of assessment – and a multiple-choice quiz is not always the solution. If you want to test your learners’ presentation skills, for instance, there’s no better way than to submit a video recording.
8. Reporting & Analytics
Choose an LMS that offers you in-depth insights into learner behavior and course performance. Some reports that should not miss from your LMS are completion rates, average score, certificates issued, time spent on activity, and top-performing courses.
This is critical in order to meet learner expectations, verify the effectiveness of your programs, and improve them in the future. Reports should be easy to pull and export, customizable with filters, and scheduled for delivery.
9. Customization & Scalability
No one is perfect – similarly, your LMS might not come just as you want it to be right out of the box.
You should be able to make some tweaks and bring it where you want to: customize the learning environment to match your branding (if you can have access to the code and APIs, even better) and integrate your LMS with tools you’re already using or ones that will boost its existing functionalities to meet your standards.
Or maybe our needs change over time as your company grows. In this case, your LMS platform should also be able to scale with you. Make sure your tool of choice supports a growing number of users and courses with minimum downtimes and glitches for an uninterrupted user experience.
10. White Labeling
White labelling enables you to remove the vendor’s branding altogether and have a custom URL and a fully branded learning environment. So that’s another feature you should look for, especially if you’re considering extending your training programs to customers and partners.
11. Ease of Use
As is the case with every tool you incorporate into your workplace, your sales training software should also be intuitive and easy to use.
Some LMS platforms are not complete products but require “assembling” a suite of tools. Even if your development team manages to overcome implementation hurdles, it surely is deferring to work with a platform that you know will give you a headache every time you need to update something.
Intuitive navigation is even more important for your end users, who should be able to easily pick up where they left off, view their progress and learning status, and access additional features like their course group.
3 Quick LMS Implementation Tips
In this last section, we want to leave you with some quick advice that will help you successfully incorporate an LMS for sales training into your company.
1. Ensure Everyone Knows How to Use the LMS
Of course, you shouldn’t have to provide training for the LMS itself – that’s why it’s important to choose an intuitive platform that’s easy to get a hold of. However, you should at least hold a session to take a virtual tour around the platform and demonstrate to employees how to navigate their courses and profiles and how to utilize key features, like the course’s discussion board, or join a live session.
2. Create Compelling and Diverse Content
A sales training platform gives you the flexibility to build a training course as you like. Leverage this option and put together different learning resources, even from external sources, like YouTube videos. Offer a mix of visual and auditory content to satisfy every learning preference – build quizzes, create eBooks and infographics, embed podcasts and Slideshows.
3. Offer a Feedback Mechanism
It’s important to create feedback loops to gauge the effectiveness of your online sales training program. See what your employees are saying about the course: Did they find it useful? Was the content satisfactory? What would they like to learn next?
Conduct surveys and one-to-one or group interviews to find out. Your LMS reports will also give you an accurate picture of learner engagement and performance, which are strong indicators of your course’s appeal.
You can also set and measure key KPIs before and after the sales training – over time, you should be able to see an upward trend in sales numbers and metrics like your customer satisfaction score.
In Sales Training, It’s LMS for the Win
In an industry with high turnover rates and high competitiveness, sales training can make a huge difference, equipping sales professionals with skills and confidence to win your customers’ trust and conquer the sales floor.
The most modern approach in sales training is an LMS – a flexible solution for offering training resources on demand and at the point of need. Our lightweight LMS, LearnWorlds, ticks all the boxes for your sales training needs:
And much more that we’d love you to explore for yourself! Sign up for your 30-day free trial today and prepare to be amazed at how easy it is to build training courses that unlock the full potential of your sales employees.
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Androniki Koumadoraki
Androniki is a Content Writer at LearnWorlds sharing Instructional Design and marketing tips. With solid experience in B2B writing and technical translation, she is passionate about learning and spreading knowledge. She is also an aspiring yogi, a book nerd, and a talented transponster.
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