Confession time! I’m a little bit of a quality snob. And when I say “quality snob,” I mean that I buy the name-brand oreos, splurge on the occasional fine leather goods inspired by Donna Meagle, and buy my fruits and veggies in-season—thank you very much.
My buying philosophy is pretty simple really. I’d rather have fewer, better things—and I’m going to venture a bet that your sales team might feel the same way about online sales training. While it is an investment in your time and energy, high quality content is the “treat yo’ self” of training.
Companies with the best sales training plans know not to make their sales reps sift through stale content or lackluster training courses. It’s a waste of their time—and yours—to create anything less than the best. Only the best quality for your best reps, right?
Here are a few tips and tricks for delivering high quality training to your top-notch teams.
Read your content out loud.
Let’s start with a little tip for quickly upping the quality of your content—and this one’s relevant for all types of sales training programs, online or otherwise. Read it out loud.
There’s nothing quite like a typo or a tongue-twisty run-on sentence that screams “low quality.” One of the best ways to avoid making those silly mistakes is to read your content closely. It’s natural to skim and skip when reading silently, so speak it out into the universe. Sure, it feels a little strange to speak to yourself sometimes, but the payoff is so worth it.
Personalize it.
One size fits all sweaters rarely look great on “all,” and one size fits all training rarely works for “all” either.
The best online sales courses allow for customization. I know that sounds a bit overwhelming—training plans for each and every employee? There are only so many hours in a day!
Here’s a rule of thumb we like to use here at Lessonly by Seismic—if you’ve got more than a handful of employees in a similar role, it’s time to build a learning path for them. Don’t hesitate to lean on your existing learners to inform what that path should look like.
If that still sounds like too much work, you probably don’t have the right tools in your training arsenal. We like to keep things powerfully simple, so just about anybody can create high quality training. If you can write an email, you can create a lesson.
Pepper in your personality.
It just so happens that one of the things I’m a quality snob about is fresh ground black pepper—it’s just miles better than the basic stuff. Your charming personality is the fresh ground pepper of great training content.
Even B2B sales training programs can benefit from a healthy sprinkling of personality. Why? Because bored people aren’t engaged. Only 15% of employees are actually engaged at work, according to a Gallup study, so we’ve got our work cut out for us.
People connect with people—not things. So it’s not filler or fluff if you share a personal story, include anecdotes about your favorite TV show, or throw a few of your favorite gifs into your training content. The little things truly matter.
Link business objectives to content.
Can you actually tell if your training is moving the needle for your sales team? If not, it’s time to reevaluate how you’re measuring the best online sales courses in your organization.
Start by throwing everything you know about metrics out the window—what actual problems are you trying to solve? After you’ve prioritized the problems most important to you, you can tackle the challenge of tying metrics to them. Then, build specific content to bridge the gaps you’re seeing on your staff.
Completion rates are great and all, but they don’t tell the full story. What’s happening after the sales training certification is over? Are your reps closing deals faster? Are they onboarded quicker? Are deals worth more than before? Have retention rates risen? These questions are all objectives-based and, speaking objectively, we think they’re awesome things to track.
Keep training bite-sized.
There’s something about a tiny portion that just makes things feel fancier, right? While I’m not sure I would go so far to say that microtraining is “fancier,” it certainly is more effective.
Research shows that the best way to study is something called “distributed practice.” That means that if you want to master a new concept, the best sales training courses allow learners to study hard for a short period of time, take a break, and then have another go at it—spreading intense bursts of learning over a longer period of time.
If you’re building sales training programs for companies’ success, that’s worth keeping that philosophy in mind. Create short and sweet sales training courses for beginners and more experienced folks alike. That way, they’ll be able to intensely focus on the task at hand, without being bogged down by competing focuses, long to-do lists, and other distractions.
