Your sales team is one of your most important assets in business. To achieve your company objectives, you need to invest in ways to help them grow and succeed. Companies choose to invest in product development, marketing, and recruitment but too often sales training is overlooked.
An effective training program or sales course is a quick and low-cost solution that can help increase results in a short period of time – whether you are looking to improve your mindset, advance your processes, or increase your skills. Unfortunately, anyone can put out content these days, so there’s a lot of bad sales advice.
The right sales course is an investment in your overall lead generation strategy. To help you find the right program for your company’s needs and budget, we’ve compiled a list of the top pieces of training rated by sales professionals like us.
Why Invest in a Sales Training Course?
Sales training is one of the most important competitive advantages your company or team can have. Studies on high-performing sales cultures show that following training provided clear expectations and kept the team motivated and moving in the same direction, more than teams who did not use training. Sales training also helped provide those teams with a standard of measurement to help improve their performance quarter over quarter.
A well-trained sales team can:
- outsell your competitors
- build stronger relationships
- scope out better opportunities
- quickly navigate customer interactions
- close more sales
Motivated sales professionals want to stay on top. If you don’t make employee retention a part of your strategy, you’ll spend more on high turnover and burnout from not performing well. The right development opportunities show you are invested in their success. If you are looking to increase revenue and have a more satisfied team, you’ll need to fully tap into their expertise and talent.
So, why aren’t more companies investing in sales training?
For most sales managers, it’s not for a lack of trying. Inadequate use of the training materials or a lack of commitment from sales reps lower success rates – causing blame to be put on the sales training, instead of the strategy. Too many companies choose the wrong programs to invest in or don’t follow through with them properly.
Tip #1- When it comes to choosing the right sales training, you need reliable information from professionals in the industry with a proven track record. It’s easy to get caught up on the profile of a fancy-looking sales consultant, but if they aren’t working with clients in your industry or don’t have a real feel for the market, chances are you won’t find much success.
Tip #2 – It’s a huge mistake to jump head-first into training without a plan in place for testing and practicing what you’ve learned. Sales trainings are more than just an hourly time commitment sprinkled throughout the year – skills need to be reinforced through continuous coaching, observation, practice, and feedback.
Tip #3 – Before choosing a training initiative or sales course, sales managers should make an objective evaluation of what is already working and what areas needs to be strengthened or improved. Depending on your size and budget, different courses can offer more or less guidance and testing. Self-paced courses are now extremely popular but require more self-discipline.
Hubspot recommends looking over your criteria in the following ways:
- Location: Is the training delivered virtually, or will the trainer come to you?
- Length: How will you fit training into your and/or your sales team’s schedule?
- Focus: Does the theme address a challenge you or your reps are facing?
- Price: Can you anticipate the return of the training will be at least five times its price?
- Intended audience: Are you in the relevant industry, market, or role for the specific training you’re after?
Tip #4 – While you can just pick and choose different courses on different lessons, sales trainers often recommend starting at the top of your funnel and working your way down through the processes on a singular methodology.
Tip #5 – Don’t listen to bad sales advice! Your sales team needs to know “what to do” and “how to do it” successfully and in alignment with your company values and standards.
Tip #6 – And while solid advice never goes out of style, we’ve found that most materials before 2020 won’t have as high success rates due to the changing nature in which B2B companies buy and sell.
Top Rated Sales Courses for Your Sales Team
With so many options in the market, it can be difficult to find the right training for your sales team. To help, we rounded up some of the most valuable sales courses through a wide variety of methodologies and price points to get your team closing deals with speed and confidence.
