A Step-by-Step Guideline of Sales Training Process

Sales training process is developed to enhance the skills in sales to develop the knowledge, experience, and ability of sales force. The process of sales training provides salespersons with certain skills to perform their tasks better and more effectively; not to mention, faciliting them to handle deficiencies in the sales performance. But many are still struggling with how to process sales training more effectively. 

Understanding the demand, we have researched and compiled helpful information related to this matter for those in need in today's article. If you are interested in knowing, check out the content below.

Overview of Sales Training

When new products are launched, the market undergoes the change in the introduction of new competitors or new technologies.

In that case, new products eith move across a life cycel or sales force needs to perform their job in the new way. The sales men need to be trained to meet the new situation. Training delivers an essential skills to salesmen to do their job better.

Training is the process closely serving certain goals in a business. Modern companies spend most of their revenue training their sales force. The goal is to motivate them to contribute towards the ultimate business goals achievement.

A typical sales training process includes two basic principles:

• The training process needs to be continuous.
• It needs to follow the conventional methods of teaching – testing – grading.

Current Sales Training Process among Businesses

Businesses are facing 4 main challenges in their sales training process as follows.

1. Low Visibility in Sales Training Purposes

Analyzing sales staff training needs helps businesses prioritize which actions over which actions. Based on the analysis results, managers can offer the most appropriate training program and bring the best results for the business.

However, many managers cannot determine the training needs of the business, so where to start. What are the necessary knowledge and skills for salespeople? Is that knowledge suitable for sales? These things cause businesses to launch wrong training programs, which wastes human resources.

Right training to avoid wasting human resources

2. No Standards in Processing the Training Courses

Building a professional sales staff training process is a long process demanding on many efforts in researching. Besides, sales training needs analysis to develop a specific lesson plan and roadmap. This is not something small and medium enterprises can do in a short term. Therefore, they often face many difficulties in the training process. 

The lack of standards in training process causes businesses to waste time and cost while not gaining the expected training outcome as planned.

3. There Is No Suitable Training Method

Most businesses today apply traditional training methods, causing employees to lose interest and create a lot of pressure for them. As the results, the performance in sales is not as high as expected. When employees have to absorb too much knowledge in a short time, it is easy to be overloaded.

This situation raises a demand on having a suitable training method to help sales force get the lessons well with a reasonable learning schedule.

Training plays an important role when managing employees

4. No Software Support Tools For Employees

Most small and medium enterprises in Vietnam have not applied professional software in the process of employee training.

When traditional training methods have become obsolete, your employees have too little time to attend lessons. Your business is not looking for a new, more flexible training method.

These create weak sales staff, lack of product knowledge, and skills to handle situations that seriously affect sales results. To solve this problem, businesses should consider applying technology software in employee training.

Online training methods on computers or mobile phones makes it easy for employees to choose a suitable study time. Besides, the leadership can also monitor the training progress and effectiveness of the enterprise.

Sales Training – Critical Principles

A greate sales training program has to include the principles below:

#1. Objective Principle

Training is a goal-oriented process; its objectives thus has to be defined clearly. As per Hagarty, the training objectives could be divided as objectives of trainees, training department objectives, and managerial objectives. This classification of training objectives might helps the employees understand the objectives of their training participation more clearly.

#2. Subject Matter Principle

When the businesses set up the training program plans, the matter of training subjects are better to be defined based on the business demand. Regularly, a good sales training program need to includes the following matter:

• The sales products and their essential details
• The objectives and policies
• The product information
• The psychology of consumers
• The behaviour of buyers
• Sales policy and selling process
• Credit policy
• Sales reports
• Distribution channels
• Government policies, pricing and billing

#3. Training Location, Period and Timing Priciple

While building a plan for sales training, it is advisable to clarify the timing, location and period of the training. Though the sales training is an activity of continuity, the periods for timing are better to be fixed remaining in view of the on-demand situation of products and the timing that all salesmen could join the training. The location of sales training could be in the company or outside.

#4. Training Scope Principle

A great sales training process scope needs to be extensive and be offered to each staff in different points of sales.

#5. Training Method Principle

If the sales training program is successful or not relies on the option of proper training methods. Thereby, the training methods are defined with intensive care in the view of the training program contents and objects. Regularly, the methods of training are categorized as team training and individual training methods.

That said, the selected methods for sales training are better not to be so pricey. They should be beneficial and affordable to sales force.

Steps in Sales Training Program

Below are 5 sales training process steps for your reference and consideration.

1. Provide Product Knowledge

The first step in the training process is to help the salesperson understand the product like the types of goods produced and distributed by enterprises, origin uses and benefits of each product.

What are the main ingredients of the product? Target customers of the product, contraindications, etc. Understanding product knowledge is the first factor to help staff consult well and confidently when selling.

In addition to basic information, businesses also need to provide adequate information about competitors and competitive products when training sales staff and advantages of products compared to competitors, to name a few. All of these help staff to advise and convince customers better.

Product knowledge training for employees

2. Inspire Work Culture

Working culture training helps build a professional corporate image in customers' eyes. Thereby improving business efficiency and creating sustainable development.

Enterprises should develop cultural standards of behavior. At the same time, encourage employees to perform with honesty, enthusiasm, passion, thanks, apologies, help, enthusiasm, etc.

3. Boost Sales Skills

In the process of building sales training program, it is definitely important to pay attention in boosting the sales skills for sales force. A team of professional consultants should have the following skills:

• Greeting skills: Performed as soon as customers set foot in the store. The staff greets guests with a friendly and professional attitude. Don't forget to greet guests when they leave. This will help them feel better about your store.

Greetings are the most important skill to make a good impression on customers

• Ask smart questions: Smart questions help your staff understand customers' needs to advise the right product.
• Negotiation and persuasion skills: A professional salesperson needs to understand the product and its benefits to the customer. Combine with customers' specific needs to convince them to choose and trust the product.
• Handling smart situations: During the sales process, unexpected situations will happen. At this time, employees need to know how to handle situations intelligently and skillfully to satisfy customers and ignore the mistakes of the business.

4. Guide to Using Sales Tools

Additionally, the trainers are better to instruct salesmen to know how to use tools to help optimize their performance. The introduction of technology software in sales helps them save time and optimize resources.
When businesses use sales tools, managers need to train sales staff in the processes and operations. Support software can shorten sales time accurately and efficiently.

Use tools to help optimize your sales process

5. Building An Environment for Sharing Experiences

Working groups help employees unite, but through them, they can share documents and sales experiences.

The staff can also introduce sales seminars, organize offline meetings and online internal training, etc., to help the business achieve efficiency.

Benefits of Training Sales Staff

A professional sales staff training process will bring businesses many great benefits, such as:

• Owning a team of senior sales staff.
• Increasing revenue.
• Building a professional image.
• Unique selling point

1. Owning a Team of High-Quality Sales Staff

Train sales staff according to a systematic roadmap to help businesses own a strong, high-quality sales team. The sales team with rich experience, enthusiasm for the profession, and passion will pull the business to develop dramatically.

Normally, after being trained to understand products and practice skills, employees will become professional and unified, creating a breakthrough in revenue.

A strong sales team helps build a professional image for the store

2. Increase Sales Revenue

Professional sales staff training helps to increase the effectiveness of persuading customers. When closing a sale successfully, there are many loyal customers, which means increased revenue. The most obvious revenue effect is the number of products and order value sold.

3. Building Corporate Reputation

Besides good marketing, focusing on customer care and sales effectiveness is essential in a successful brand.

Quality products with good service will create sympathy for customers. This helps increase the purchase rate and refer friends and family to your brand.

4. Enhance Competitiveness

As competition between brands is increasingly fierce, your business is forced to have outstanding advantages to create an advantage. In particular, a team of professional sales staff is a formidable weapon that makes opponents afraid.

High-quality sales staff helps businesses expand market share, improve competitiveness and integrate easily for sustainable development.

Quality sales staff to help businesses develop sustainably

FieldCheck - The Ultimate Sales Training Solution For Businesses

Aiming to provide a one-stop application for businesses in executing and evaluating sales training programs, FieldCheck integrates various features essential for training. 

1. Provide a Tool to Share Documents with Ease

FieldCheck application in management and training, sales staff will no longer be limited in study time and space. At the same time, it helps businesses save on training costs offline and online, to name a few.

Because all documents are updated on the system and shared with employees with a few simple steps on mobile phones. Accordingly, employees can study anytime, anywhere without visiting the classes directly. Simultaneously, the documents are diverse, providing the most complete and intuitive product, corporate culture, and sales experience, thereby creating a quality and professional Sales team.

In addition, FieldCheck also facilitates face-to-face communication between employees. Thereby sharing experiences and learning from each other for better professional development.

FieldCheck supports employee training

2. FieldCheck Support Managers To Create Questionnaires To Quickly Test Each Employee's Knowledge

In addition to the basic knowledge, FieldCheck also helps managers create a set of questions to test employees' knowledge through application software on phones.

Through test questions and online assessments, employees will easily grasp their shortcomings. At the same time, managers can easily grasp the status of "understanding the lesson", the ability to analyze and handle situations of each person.

FieldCheck helps managers create quizzes to test employees' knowledge on mobile phones

FieldCheck also helps improve teamwork efficiency, communication with customers, etc. Accordingly, sales staff will be fully supported with knowledge and skills at all times.

Above is the suggested process of training professional salespeople and the benefits it brings. Hope the above knowledge will be useful to your business. If you want to make it easier to train employees, don't hesitate to get in touch with us to arrange a software experience as soon as possible.