Today, hiring employees is less about looking for people with the longest list of skills on their resume and more about attracting the right type of folks to your company.
This is largely thanks to the ubiquity of sales training tools available to managers and teams. Modern employee training methods are changing the corporate landscape because creating an employee training plan now leans on online sales training that’s engaging and more accessible to sellers. Companies big and small are seeing a positive ROI on enablement and training because well-enabled reps work smarter, stay longer, and close more deals.
What is sales training software?
Sales training software is a tool revenue enablement professionals use with their sales teams to reduce the ramp time of new hires, equip existing sellers to grow and learn, and provide coaching based on past performance.
It’s no secret that sales is a competitive environment. To stay ahead of the competition, sales teams are turning to sales training software to reduce the ramp time of new hires, enable their current workforce, and increase performance. This is because sales training tools help new sellers learn the ins and outs of any new role. It also equips veteran sales reps with ongoing enablement and training to keep their skills and knowledge fresh. The result? One salesforce that marches to the same beat and is enabled for practically every angle of their job
So, if you’re still under the impression that spending money on sales training software isn’t a good investment, you may want to think again. The reality is that giving your sales reps the tools they need to succeed, like sales training programs with various sales training courses, is key to employee retention, engagement, and ultimately, revenue goals.
Now that you know why you should consider sales training software, let’s get practical and dig into its actual purpose and popular methods.
The purpose of bringing on the best sales training software
Hiring new sellers is daunting for several reasons. The sales team undeniably has the most contact with people and groups outside of your company. Said differently, they’re shaping the market’s perception of your brand. It’s a lot of pressure.
Ideally, new sales hires will have a baseline set of sales skills they can draw on, but if your business has specific selling methods or niche products and services — as most do — sales training is vital.
In its most simple form, sales training comes down to:
- Teaching your reps the most successful selling techniques
- Providing ample knowledge and information about what they’re selling
Training can vary in size, scope, and depth, but the right sales skills training makes sure sales reps know what they’re talking about when they interact with prospective customers.
As the sales industry evolves with a mix of in-person and dispersed teams, online sales training programs are becoming increasingly popular. Sales training software, like Seismic Learning, is more essential and prevalent than ever, thanks to its availability whenever and wherever reps need it. It also helps sales leaders easily create, update, manage, and track sales training.
Train reps 62% faster.
What’s the best method for training sales reps?
It’d be convenient if there were one definitive best way to train every sales rep at every company, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. If you’re a sales or enablement leader, it’s up to you to tailor the way you equip your team depending on key demographics about them. You’ll want to adjust your strategy by answering questions like:
- Am I training people to sell locally, regionally, nationally, or globally?
- Is my team in-person, hybrid, or fully remote?
- Are there 1-15 reps in my charge or more like 1,000-15,000 reps in my charge?
- Is this collective group of reps newer to sales or more seasoned?
- Are we selling B2C or B2B products and services?
Regardless of your answers to these questions, there are a handful of tried-and-true strategies that work well whether you’re rolling out B2B sales training for 800 reps who sell software or creating an onboarding experience for a few reps at a local bakery. Let’s look at four of these time-tested methods.
Personalized learning paths
If you’re like most people, your first few experiences with training and onboarding likely involved either a 150-slide PowerPoint Presentation or a generic binder with a printed manual or a list of to-dos. This approach is dated and impersonal. It might’ve flown in 2010, but today, there’s a better way.
Personalized learning paths consider each rep’s level of experience, learning style, and speed of comprehension. Training professionals can use online learning platforms with automation, quizzes, and AI to create triggered learning paths and certifications. These paths are suggested only when a sales rep’s behavior indicates they’re ready for the next step or need additional training.
Guided coaching
For too long, sales leaders have shadowed sellers in live customer interactions or watched meeting recordings to provide feedback and called it coaching.
With a robust sales learning and coaching tool, it’s possible to generate team and individual coaching plans based on aggregated data and analytics. No more ad-hoc comments and suggestions; there’s a way to streamline the creation of coaching plans and skills assessments in a way that feels genuinely personal and actionable to each rep.
Microlearning
During onboarding, continuous education, or upskilling courses, no one likes to feel like they’re drinking from a firehose. Instead, consider microlearning — learning presented in short, bite-sized formats — to bolster rep satisfaction and information retention.
With shorter, self-guided lessons, leaders enable reps to complete training between customer interactions or other tasks instead of blocking off an entire afternoon for training that’ll go in one ear and out the other. They can be given all of the content and a deadline, and then learn the information, bit by bit, on their own time.
Blended learning
Lastly, all great sales training methods include blended learning, where there’s a mix of in-person (or virtual) instructor-led training and self-paced e-learning. This style accommodates a variety of learning styles — visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and more. To figure out which content should be presented live versus with self-paced lessons, consider both the complexity of the content you’re presenting and your reps’ preferences to determine the most effective and efficient training format.
Benefits of a sales training platform
“Are sales training programs worth it?” Every so often, we hear this question, and the short answer is yes. If they’re rolled out and well-sustained, they generate more ROI for businesses than most other GTM motions.
At the very basic level, training exists to help people — inside and outside of work — be the best that they can be. There’s a sense of comfort employees feel when they’re confident and competent. Bringing in sales training programs for your employees takes away the anxiety of not knowing what to do when they’re face-to-face with a client.
With tailored sales training courses, employees can:
- Understand and speak knowledgeably about the latest products
- Know what SPIFFs are happening when
- Educate themselves on ways their product beats the competition,
- Stay more engaged with the company and know what’s coming down the pike
To use a metaphor, sales training courses are the oil that makes sales teams run more smoothly and efficiently. By offering sales training courses online, your employees have the freedom to soak up information where they do it best. Not all learning situations work for everyone’s knowledge retention, so by giving people the choice to learn and grow on their terms, there’s a greater chance that your sales skills training is going to stick.
Plus, when you can create, assign, and track lessons and training for your sales team, you as a leader have more visibility into what training is working and what training is not. For all the benefits the learners receive, sales training software allows administrators and managers to measure the progress of their employees and adjust learning paths accordingly.
In addition, centralized software keeps entire teams on the same page without forcing everyone to be in conference rooms, on airplanes, or the road, pulling them away from their actual job: selling. E-learning provides efficiency that in-person sales training seminars could never provide, along with boosted tracking, monitoring, and implementation of learning around the globe.
Making the move to online sales training tools
It may seem like there’s a ton of work involved with implementing sales training software, but the reality is that online sales training software can help your sales reps learn, practice, and perform more than ever before. When it comes to moving your offline sales training into an online environment, there are a few things you’ll want to consider. We’ve seen that the companies with the best sales training programs do these six things:
1
Assess your training efforts
2
Make a plan
3
Work with subject matter experts
4
Maximize training impact
5
Reinforce skills and deliver feedback
6
Measure results
Seismic Learning bolsters any sales training program
If you take nothing else with you from this guide, we hope you’ve learned this: All GTM teams, specifically sales teams, need excellent training. They need onboarding, coaching, product knowledge updates, and ongoing skill development.
While traditional sales training materials and methods were once the industry norm, today’s best-in-class sales teams rely on sales training that’s easy to access when and where they need it. They use software.
When sellers can find all of their onboarding, sales content, coaching, and sales training courses online and in one place, they spend more time with buyers and less time searching for answers. This results in an engaging and effective sales training program that gets — and keeps — sellers ready for the field. All of this is possible with Seismic Learning, the all-so-simple training and coaching solution for sales teams.
Interested in learning more? Learn how one customer reduced new hire ramp time by 58% while increasing pipeline generation by 3x with our sales learning platform. Or, jump into this free lesson to see why sellers love Seismic Learning.
The top choice for sales training
See why Seismic Learning has earned a 4.7 out of 5-star rating with over 550 customer reviews on G2.
Lessonly is scaleable, easy to use, intuitive, and built with an eye for engagement.
Lessonly has fundamentally changed our onboarding process.
Lessonly is very straightforward and easy to use. It’s a pretty no frills solution that does what you need it to.
Lessonly has provided me and my organization the tools to easily train new hires, new products, and new ideas to our team.
Lessonly is very user friendly and is a great way to train new employees and reinforce training of current employees.
A tool like this helps learners embrace learning instead of resisting it.
