What to Look for in an Online Sales Training Platform
Why Do You Need an Online Sales Training Platform?
Virtual, hybrid, and remote work impose new challenges for sales professionals across most industries. Companies are leveraging the benefits of their preferred online sales training and coaching platform to empower their staff and help them obtain better results. But, with so many options and even virtual reality coming into play, how can you choose the best option for you?
When everyone is working remotely, keeping each rep engaged, collaborative, positive and productive takes increased effort. There are many reasons you need tools to help your sales teams stay motivated and focused when they aren’t able to share praise, encouraging words or immediate feedback in the sales bullpen.
On the other hand, measuring their effectiveness and productivity has also changed. Tracking activity is not as important as whether this activity is effective. It’s essential to find a top solution that makes it easy for you to capture actual calls, investigate data, and analyze it using artificial intelligence to identify successful tactics proven to drive outcomes and scale these across the whole team. The ability to evaluate if salespeople establish solid relationships with customers or prospects quickly and demonstrate value to them is also essential.
As an addition to these challenges, there is a current trend of teams working towards collaborative goals rather than individual quotas. As organizations move toward integrated selling, they must develop more connections, more trust and more communication skills at every step of the process. With the right online sales coaching platform, you can achieve this easily, with precision and at scale.
Last but not least, in the new virtual world, measurement of remote presence-related variables is definitely a new unmet need. You must evaluate active listening capabilities, adaptability, thorough preparation and communication skills. This requires video recording, automation and a science-backed tool that enables you to capture these subtleties for you so your team can continually improve.
Now that you know some of the reasons you need to rely on an online sales training platform, let’s review some timeless training techniques that will never go out of style and help you build an effective growth program for your reps.
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The Best Sales Training Strategies
A recurring training and coaching schedule is an excellent way to keep your sales team up to date and at peak performance. But, before rushing into choosing any training solution, let’s review some of the quintessential strategies experts and other sales professionals recommend.
These methods will let you make sure your team learns and evolves from its past successes and failures, and you can leverage them with the best online sales training platform.
1. Make the Most of E-learning
Businesses worldwide are increasingly utilizing e-learning platforms to educate their teams about new products, procedures and company policies. Suppose you choose a modern online sales training platform. In this case, your employees can learn from anywhere, so they have immediate access to the necessary information. Only the most comprehensive one will take advantage of AI and offer a series of features to drive overall high performance.
2. Reduce Training Sessions’ Length
Despite providing interesting training material, there will always be times when trainees lose attention. Concentration spans are getting increasingly shorter. Therefore, sales coaching sessions should be brief and to the point. An engaging and easy-to-understand training program is the way to go.
A leading online sales training platform can effortlessly let you put this program together in a customized and realistic way, making it memorable and repeatable in business situations.
3. Bring Data into the Development Process
Every sales department should continually evaluate their achievements. You can encourage employees to take a moment to reflect on sales calls or meetings to determine how they went and what can be improved. Alternatively, finding an online sales training platform that collects all the relevant performance data is a more efficient and objective way to evaluate each sales rep.
4. Assess Client Needs and Areas of Concern
Sales representatives can become significantly more effective with coaching and training on diagnosing their customers’ problems so they can effectively solve them. A powerful online platform that uses behavioral science and other tools can provide insights and intelligence you likely can’t replicate. The system automatically evaluates speech, mannerisms and delivery to assess whether the rep was able to truly connect with the customer and then provides areas for improvement.
5. Customize Training Programs
Create individualized training and coaching through simulation scenarios which will help ensure real-world readiness. The opportunity for managers to provide immediate, data-based feedback as part of the training process facilitates open communication and enables them to act more like mentors.
Only the online sales training platforms that utilize science and technology will let you precisely assess the way each team member communicates. You will be able to measure and provide feedback not only on what they say but how they say it by tracking variables such as credibility, persuasiveness, clarity, trustworthiness and the ability to listen.
Related: The New Science of Training Sales Reps
6. Create Consistent Training Opportunities
Learning to sell is like learning any other skill in which practice makes perfect. Sales leadership needs to provide frequent and consistent guidance to their sales teams if you want them to remain on the same page. Keeping track of new developments, success stories and pipelines through a monthly or weekly training program can be an excellent approach to achieve this.
You can additionally incorporate short, frequent sessions into the sales team’s regular schedule, so they learn one or two skills a week, for example. In just a few minutes, your selling team will become more effective.
7. Deliver a Comprehensive Set of Tools
Providing a variety of sales tools during team training is crucial because not everyone learns the same way. Videos are more compelling to some people, as they are more visual. Alternatively, a program where you can watch top performers may be more effective for others.
The option of self-directed training is also effective for salespeople who like to explore the company’s requirements and their role independently. The ideal scenario would be for reps to take advantage of each of these options.
Choosing an Online Sales Training Platform
With all the best practices reviewed above, it is easy to conclude that, to boost sales performance in this virtual world, you need to offer customized coaching based on actual behavior.
Finding an online sales training platform capable of recording and analyzing interactions is ideal because it will help you measure beyond what good performance can look like. It will allow you to highlight effective phrases people are saying as well as positive behaviors.
An ideal tool can provide reps with insights into their performance data and the ability to take control over their learning through personalized dashboards. Look for a solution that will let them determine what they need to accomplish by studying data and taking the time to assess themselves.
We at Quantified are fueled by data-driven feedback. When sales teams utilize technology wisely and use data to improve operational excellence, the results will be greater than ever.
Through Quantified’s AI technology, sales reps are able to establish better human connections and close more deals. Our proprietary QC Score measures communication effectiveness in a single, definitive way. It will help you compare your skills against your peers, industry peers and aspirational benchmarks. Quantified delivers automated feedback, AI-powered coaching, and performance measurement to enhance sales results by assessing customer interactions and key behavioral dimensions. Request a demo now.