13 Winning Sales Training Techniques

With 40% of sales representatives saying that prospecting is the hardest part of their job, the training you provide in this area can help them get over this obstacle. It can be difficult for any sales team to make cold calls and close sales with prospects that they haven’t developed a relationship with. It is your job to help them overcome their fears and reach the pinnacle of success you hired them for.

 As a sales manager, your sales team needs constant training to perfect their sales strategy and warm up to the idea of prospecting. With the right training techniques, you can elevate your sales staff to smash the goals that you have set for them and grow the revenue of your business with ease.

Below, 13 members of Forbes Business Development Council provide the most effective sales training techniques to use in business. Here is what they had to say:

1. Explain, Immerse, Reflect

With a new hire, explain the program and expectations, train them on product, process and company knowledge. Once that’s done, immerse them in your sales floor or on the road. Shadow calls, play calls back or have them ride along. Then reflect — what did they learn, what did they hear? Be sure to have materials outlining what good looks like, and talking points for discussion. – Christopher Kingman, TransUnion

2. Invest More Time Early For Faster Return On Investment (ROI)

Sales hires are eager to start selling. Yet every product/market is different and as the sales VP/CEO you need to make sure your sales team can articulate the value and sell the story. A well-trained sales team can navigate the customer to realize your product value faster plus shorten the sales cycle. What’s worked best for us was pairing a new hire with a fully ramped account executive. Training, practice demos and mock calls must be followed by ride alongs to deliver the best training impact. – Tushar Makhija, helpshift.com

3. Go With On-The-Job Training

It is great to have a formal onboarding plan for your new hires that covers the expectations, culture and resources for success. However, let’s not forget that the best salespeople are resourceful and often do their best work under pressure. I’m a firm believer in a quick move to on-the-job training with supervision and coaching. See what they can do right out of the gate and work backward from there. – Jen Tadin, Gallagher

 4. Shift To Assessment-Based Learning

When it comes to ensuring reps are ready to engage with buyers, sales training/readiness leaders need to shift their mindset from “consumption” of learning (e.g., “Did reps take it?”) to “assessment” (“Can they do it?”). When reps understand that they will be assessed for mastery of a new skill or knowledge, you get a better commitment to learning and improved rep effectiveness. – Jim Ninivaggi, Brainshark

5. Focus On Coaching Rather Than Training

There is a big difference between training a sales hire and coaching a sales hire. During training, they are learning and absorbing knowledge you offer them. During one-on-one coaching and role-playing, on the other hand, they are putting into practice the knowledge you’ve imparted to them. The key difference is that through coaching, they are learning it, practicing it and competing with it. – Christian Valiulis, Automatic Payroll Systems

6. Be A Daily Active User

Companies should require new sales team members to actually use the product or service on a daily basis. Your team won’t truly understand the pain points the customer is experiencing, how your product solves those problems and how to discuss the product on a deep level without being a daily active user. It’ll improve client conversations and result in good feedback for the product team, too. – Colin McIntosh, Sheets & Giggles

7. Offer Mentorship

A great way to shorten the learning curve timeline is mentorship. A new hire will scale up more quickly when someone experienced is working with them and helping pull them up. The mentor can be incentivized in multiple ways, including monetary bonuses tied to the new trainee, giving them a vested interest in their success. – Robin Farmanfarmaian, Invicta Medical

8. Emphasize Common Sense

There is no trick in the book as important or valuable as having common sense. If salespeople understand people and how to interact with them, they can be effective in the field. The sales training technique that I most heavily emphasize is to simply try to understand what the person you are selling to wants by putting yourself in his or her shoes. Ask yourself, “What would make me want to buy?” – Adam Mendler, Custom Tobacco

9. Have Them Shadow The Current Salesman

In my opinion, there is no office prepping for sales that will ever take the place of a live sales call. I would invite the new hire to meetings so they can see how things are done in real time and as they progress, bring them along to bigger customers, showing the confidence I have that they’ll be able to handle the anchor accounts of the company in the future. – Craig McGraw, Trans American Trucking & Warehouse

10. Incorporate Self-Training Tasks

Our training approach starts as a hands-on effort, establishing a foundation in how we operate. This process fortifies the experience our new hires bring to the table, and allows us to then incorporate self-training tasks, such as scripting. Challenging new hires to develop their own pitches based on the knowledge they’ve already accrued tests their preparedness and confidence level along the way. – Bill Chemero, Wayback Burgers

11. Offer Digital Access And Training Videos

While face-to-face or field training may be necessary, creating digital access to training can streamline this process. We have created an online share drive with categories of topics. This training includes digital sales materials, screen recordings within our CRM software, as well as training videos with product how to’s, industry-specific topics and company-specific training and knowledge. – Emily Hauptvogel, H&H Products Company

12. Enable Peer-To-Peer Role Play

Managing “difficult conversations” with a prospect is something that we work on within a peer-to-peer environment at our organization, this has proved to be extremely effective since we introduced these exercises to our team. In role-playing sessions, each salesperson plays both parts, the seller and the prospect — this way we start to understand the thought process of a prospect next time we pick up the phone. – Jason Shuttleworth, Woodland Group Ltd

13. Use Video Role Plays

Early in my career, having to watch myself on video performing a sales role play was the worst experience ever. I had to face the truth of how I really sounded. But, it was the best training ever and it is something I advise many leaders I work with to do the same. I encourage salespeople to use their cell phone camera to video themselves in a practice role play so as to constantly find ways to improve. – Casey Jacox, Kforce