Almost every executive eventually asks how a sales team's training system should be organised. The question is justified. For a business owner or leader, company growth and profit are central concerns, and both depend heavily on the skills of the sales team.
Most companies also experience employee turnover in sales roles and must continually train new hires in both the offer and the sales method, even when the HR team conducts a rigorous candidate-selection process.
There are several ways to organise training. An owner may conduct it personally, add it to the head of sales's workload, hire an internal or external trainer, or engage a specialist company focused on sales capability development. Making the head of sales carry the entire training burden is usually undesirable because that role already has operational responsibilities on which the department's performance depends.
Consistency is as important as ownership. The intervals between training sessions should not be excessive. Training should take place at least monthly and, ideally, every week.
Sales training should cover three areas:
- Product knowledge.
- Sales techniques and customer communication skills.
- Correct management and documentation of opportunities in the CRM.
Together, these areas cover the knowledge and skills required for successful sales performance.
Stage 1: product knowledge
The purpose of product training is to give the salesperson a detailed understanding of the product or service the company sells. Only someone who understands the offer well can explain its advantages and the value the customer can obtain from using it.
Customers also need the sense that they are dealing with a professional who understands the problem and can help solve it. Product training may be delivered by the head of sales when a new employee enters the role or when a new offer is introduced to the entire team.
Every product-training programme should end with a mandatory oral and/or written assessment. An employee should be permitted to sell only after demonstrating sufficient knowledge.
Stage 3: correct CRM practice
Employees can learn part of the CRM process independently from instructions and procedures, but opportunity documentation requires particular attention.
When a salesperson records opportunities correctly, the head of sales can monitor the portfolio and each opportunity's current stage more easily. The company also gains reliable reporting. If an employee leaves, opportunities can be transferred to a replacement with minimal disruption, making the handover and onboarding process significantly easier.
This training can be delivered by the employee's direct manager. It should include an assessment before the employee receives full CRM access, followed by continuing oversight from the head of sales.
Stage 2: sales techniques and customer communication
General training based on a standard programme can be useful, but a stronger approach is to identify the sales team's actual weaknesses. Training should then address the patterns that affect the department as a whole, while individual problems are handled directly with the relevant employee.
This is where a sales quality-control function becomes valuable. To identify weaknesses in salesperson behaviour, customer conversations should be reviewed and structured scorecards completed with observations and recommendations for each employee. The quality-control team can also recommend changes to operating processes that improve loyalty and repeat purchasing.
The head of sales may work individually with employees on specific problems. The wider process, from call review and preparation of scorecards and dashboards through to the training itself, is often better entrusted to an external specialist organisation with the necessary people and resources.
The reviewers should not know the salespeople personally. Keeping the assessment depersonalised supports objectivity. The trainer or quality-control representative can then design and deliver training based on the review findings.
Every training session should be followed by an assessment of the material covered. This may take the form of a test with an explicit pass or fail decision and, where appropriate, permission or refusal to return to the relevant work.
An assessment barrier is a powerful incentive for salespeople to learn the material. It also gives management confidence that the employees calling customers or answering calls in the company's name are sufficiently qualified and understand the offer.
Expert comment
Olga Ilyina, consultant and expert
The starting point for sales training is the recognition that it must be a coherent system supported by annual, monthly and, where useful, weekly planning. That does not remove the need to adjust the plan. The pace of change in many fields can be startling, and plans written a year earlier will often need revision.
Some companies believe that rapid change makes long-term training planning unnecessary and prepare plans for only one or two months. That is a mistake because it gives the head of sales no view of where the team should develop next. Planning at least one year ahead helps the manager understand the capabilities employees need to build and prepare the appropriate learning activities.
The plan should specify not only the topics and timing but also the format of each activity. This may be a one- or two-day programme with an external trainer or a sequence of five to seven short training sessions.
