Category: Sales Training

Your organization could have the best sales strategy in the game. But without adequate training, no amount of planning, creativity or strategy will set you up for success. Make sure your sales reps have the coaching, resources, and support needed for success in an increasingly competitive marketplace. In this post, we’ll share some of the best ways to improve sales coaching in your organization.

HireDNA offers leading sales recruiting, evaluation, and training services to help you build a winning sales team. Contact us for more information.

What Is Sales Coaching?

Sales coaching is a process that sales managers follow to support and prepare every salesperson on their team for success in the field. The goal of coaching is to maximize the potential and effectiveness of every rep. It is personalized guidance meant to improve or reinforce skills and should occur on a weekly or even daily basis. While it does not need to be a formal process, managers should be regularly looking for ways to identify individual strengths and weaknesses and work closely with their team to improve.

Prioritize Your Focus

Rather than focus on improving the top- or bottom-performing reps, channel your coaching energy into the middle-of-the-road salespeople for the biggest return on investment (ROI). Chances are, the worst reps won’t improve enough, and the best reps don’t need as much coaching. The “middle 60%” will benefit the most from training. Focusing on this group helps equitably leverage time and training resources.

Motivation Matters

Sales coaching is all about finding ways to improve your sales team’s performance. Motivating them to do their best is essential. And believe it or not, motivation doesn’t always mean money. In fact, employee engagement firm TINYpulse found that money ranked seventh on the list of factors that motivate employees to go above and beyond. Only 7% of the 200,000 workers surveyed listed it as a motivating factor.

According to their study, the strongest motivators included:

• Camaraderie and peer motivation (20%)
• Intrinsic desire to do a good job (17%)
• Feeling encouraged and recognized (13%)
• Having a real impact (10%)
• Growing professionally (8%)
• Meeting client and customer needs (8%)

With this in mind, consider intrinsic incentives like friendly peer competition, awards, recognition or extra vacation time.

Be Flexible With Your Coaching Style

Just as sales requires a variety of skills, so too does sales coaching. It’s important to understand your coaching style and even more important to understand when it’s time to switch up your strategy. Consider the following styles:

• Strategic coaching and big-picture guidance are best for broad topics like navigating a complex buying process or selling into a specific market.
• Tactical coaching is ideal for more individualized interactions like building a relationship or navigating conflicts.
• Skills coaching helps salespeople improve in specific job function areas like communication, writing, rapport-building, etc.

Empower Your Reps

Sales managers should encourage their teams to be part of the learning and evaluation process. Get their input so you can help to work on key areas that are important to them. Start by asking some basic questions. What are they doing well? What skills do they need to work on to improve in the future? The more that sales managers can make their teams part of the coaching process, the more relevant and impactful coaching can be.

Create an Equitable Environment

Cultivating an environment where every sales member feels valued and heard helps to boost overall performance. Make equitable team decisions, such as rotating monthly meeting leaders, providing recognition for a job well done, and actively soliciting feedback on professional development topics.

Define The Gold Standard

Using standardized metrics to track sales helps determine what kinds of trainings were successful and informs sales strategy moving forward. But tracking is only helpful if all team members are being held to the same standard. It’s up to the sales manager to set objective, measurable goals and metrics to track against them.

Read our blog post on How to Set Measurable Sales Goals & Objectives to give your team a roadmap for success.

Turn Coaching into Culture

Embed coaching into team culture by providing ongoing opportunities and continuously evaluating performance. When training and learning are fundamental aspects of a sales team, members feel more invested in and engaged with the process, and they’re more motivated to succeed. Encourage your sales managers to hold monthly training round up that cover various topics be sure to benchmark success regularly.

Set Your Sales Managers Up For Success

There’s no magic bullet to sales coaching. Sales managers should be equipped with a variety of ideas, incentives and options for engaging their teams in conversations about improvement and learning. The more you can make training part of your organizational culture, the more seamless and successful it will be.

Get in touch to learn more about HireDNA sales recruiting, evaluation, and training services. Let us help you build an exceptional sales team!

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In today’s work environment, every employee seems to be looking for the next best thing. The sales industry in particular sees a turnover rate of nearly 12 percent! With competition for promotions, raises, deals, and more, it can be easy to forget about the glue that holds the workplace together: teamwork.

Creating a positive, team-oriented workplace helps to improve employee retention, morale, collaboration and sense of self-worth. But how can you cultivate that environment in a market dominated by constant innovation, fast-paced growth and the sustained demand for more, better, and faster?

The answer is that you make team building a top priority and get all of your salespeople involved. Here are some of the top team building activities for sales reps.

HireDNA® offers leading sales evaluation and recruiting services to help you build a winning sales team. Contact us for more information.

Great Team-Building Activities

Some well-thought-out and intentional team building activities can break the ice and unlock positive conversations and momentum for your sales team. Here, we’ve broken down the team building process to identify key skills and strategies along with some activities to help you improve each area. Try out some of these ideas to get the ball rolling.

To Improve Communication…

Clear communication is crucial for a positive team environment. It helps everyone feel on the same page, ensures all members are working toward a common goal, and helps prevent confusion and stress.

Activity: Telephone

A good, old-fashioned game of telephone doesn’t just lighten the mood and bring you back to summer camp days. It can also help to drive home the importance of clear communication and the consequences of misconstruing messages.

To get started, line your teams up, give the first person in line a phrase to say, and have them whisper it in the next person’s ear. Participants should continue whispering the message down the line, all the way until the last person repeats the phrase aloud.

Often times, the original phrase morphs as the message gets passed along the chain. This sort of process and outcome provides a great opportunity to talk about how directions, feedback, and information get distorted when people don’t communicate clearly.

To Improve Listening…

Active listening is not only a major part of communication and teamwork, it’s essential to an effective consultative sales process. Especially during contentious encounters, people tend to talk past one another, so wrapped up in thinking about what they want to say that they don’t even listen to the other person’s point of view. Employing active listening skills helps team members become more empathetic and generate collaborative, innovative ideas with full input.

Activity: Pair Up & Practice

Partner up different team members for a conversation, and every five minutes rotate partners. Think of this activity as speed-dating, but for active listening. When in pairs, advise participants to employ the following active listening rules: 1) Pay attention, 2) Show you’re listening, 3) Paraphrase and repeat back what you hear, 4) Provide feedback, and 5) Defer judgment.

To test listening skills, have the listener repeat back to the room the key points of the speaker. After the activity is over, gather the group back together to reflect on how it went, how each active listening rule was used in conversation, and how the use of these rules changed the conversation for both participants.

To Improve Presentations…

Presentation skills factor heavily into team dynamics. The ability to distill ideas and craft a compelling argument is an essential skill for salespeople. Encouraging presentation practice helps to improve this skill and boost overall team morale.

Activity: Create a Pitch Challenge

Create teams of 3-4 people and challenge each member to create a sales pitch for an office supply on their desk—in five minutes. This is a quick game that challenges creativity and requires everyone to think on their feet, deliver with confidence, and hone their sales skills.

Performing these rapid-fire pitches can help to get everyone comfortable with presenting while providing opportunity for feedback and improvement.

To Improve Teamwork…

Underlining all of these skills is a fundamental sense of team camaraderie. Respect, understanding, and appreciation of teammates helps everyone work toward common goals. In a sales team, reps will have individual quotas, but they also need to be aware of overall team goals. Building teamwork can help to foster a sense of accountability while providing opportunities for higher performing reps to train others.

Working together on a project for a good cause is a great way to remind team members that they are part of something bigger than themselves, driving home the necessity of everyone’s individual contribution.

Activity: Get Involved in your Community

To build general teamwork and goodwill, consider scheduling quarterly team volunteer outings. These can involve anything from building a home to working in a community garden or volunteering at a homeless shelter. These sorts of experiences highlight what’s possible when a whole team comes together, and they can be a great way to build friendship and respect outside of the work setting.

The Short of It?

In the end, the activities that improve team morale can also improve the skills needed for successful sales. If your employees can master these fundamentals, that success will translate to your bottom line. Improving your teamwork can result in wins for your salespeople, your clients, your workplace culture, and your organization at large.

Train Your Sales Reps for Success

Is your sales team falling behind performance expectations? HireDNA offer sales performance evaluations to uncover skills gaps in your team, and we deliver advanced training through a customizable cloud-based learning platform to improve performance.

Get in touch to learn more about our sales recruiting, evaluation, and training services. Let us help you build an exceptional sales team!

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The modern business world is an ever-changing environment with continuous shifts in buyer behavior propelled by technological advances. This presents a challenge for even the most successful salespeople. To keep up, it’s essential to stay up to date on the latest selling practices and be open to learning new strategies. Here are some top inside sales training ideas to help you keep your team performing at a high-level.

HireDNA provides sales evaluations and training to Identify reps’ learning needs and empower them to sell effectively. Talk to an expert today.

Sales Rep Training Strategies

The modern sales environment is entirely different from what the industry looked like a decade ago. The dynamic nature of modern-day sales requires salespeople to be at the forefront of any development that can help them assess their prospects better and deliver a more customized experience.

This can only be achieved by implementing a thorough training program designed to address their specific strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few training tips that can help improve your sales team:

Start With A Sales Force Evaluation

To get the most value from your sales training program, you need to identify the areas that will be the most beneficial to target. A comprehensive sales force evaluation is essential to pinpoint performance gaps and limitations in your people, processes, systems, and management. With this knowledge, you can then build a custom training program to address those unique needs and your specific growth objectives.

HireDNA uses the Objective Management Group (OMG) Sales Effectiveness And Improvement Analysis (SEIA) for sales assessment, which has been used to evaluate over 1 million sales people. Results have included:

• 33% boost in sales productivity
• 33% more sales opportunities
• 25% top-line revenue growth

Learn more about our sales force evaluations.

Modernize Your Training Methods

Your sales reps are busy people. When they are not glued to their phones talking to clients, they are prospecting leads, running demos and closing deals. Expecting them to take time out for mundane classroom training sessions will adversely affect their schedule and more importantly, their productivity. Coupled with how ineffective conventional training methods are, there is a need to modernize your approach to training and upgrade to an eLearning system.

There are various advantages to this. For one, eLearning has been proven to increase retention rates by as much as 60%. It also allows your team to consume training content according to their own schedule. Add in the ability to check-in on their progress, and eLearning emerges as the best way to train your salespeople.

At HireDNA, we offer clients access to the Rapid Learning Institute Micro-Learning Platform, which includes a digital library with over 100 modules focused on 10 key consultative selling strategies combined with real-world application,  role play, quizzes, and more. Learn more.

Focus On Your Target Audience

Most organizations design their training programs to enhance a salesperson’s selling skills instead of helping them develop a deeper understanding of your target audience and buyer journey. While improving individual skills is important, understanding prospects’ pain points, triggers, and how your product can help them is absolutely essential to closing more deals.

This is a crucial component of your sales strategy, as buyers are more likely to convert when their pain points are addressed. In fact, a Deloitte study discovered that 38% of consumers showed an instant desire to buy products that were personalized to address their issues, instead of generic sales pitches.

When designing your training programs, outline the key business challenges and highlight successful strategies for engaging with buyers. This will allow your sales reps to think like your buyer and help them to optimize their strategies.

Add Training Incentives

Adding an incentive is a great way to make sure your sales reps complete their training modules and make an effort to learn and apply new concepts. According to Harvard Business Review, incentives positively affect an employee’s decision to work harder in order to obtain an individual reward.

Increased concentration during training will not only help them become better, but by rewarding them with incentives, you will set a precedent for every sales rep to take their training seriously.

Emphasize On Demo Training

One key area that many sales reps need training on is the product demonstration stage. It’s important to tailor your entire presentation to fit the prospect’s business model and organizational needs, effectively highlighting your product as the solution to the obstacles they face.

Prepare your training sessions with success stories from outsiders, provide template slide decks to help them get started, and show them sample demos from successful sales reps.

After a few training sessions, you can even organize a test where you provide reps with a buyer profile and let them create a custom demo. This will give you a clear idea of how much they have picked up, while also allowing you to tweak your training strategy as needed.

Train Your Sales Reps For Increased Efficiency

Conventional training methods are ineffective and time-consuming. That’s where HireDNA comes in. We provide training content that is customized according to individual skill gaps for maximum increase in your reps’ strengths and productivity. Training is delivered through a proven micro-learning structure platform to help ensure your sales reps retain what they learn.

With implementation guides, personalized action plans, quizzes, analytics, and more, HireDNA provides comprehensive training programs that can help increase the quality of your sales team.

Why Choose Us?

• Our training methods result in 50% faster new hire ramp-up
• By identifying and rectifying skills gap, we can help you increase top-line revenue by as much as 25%
• Once equipped with the right skills, HireDNA trained reps find more sales opportunities by as much as 33%

Are you ready to train your sales team for enhanced productivity?

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