Online Sales Training Can Free Up Time Online sales training can free up a sales professionals time during peak selling periods which reduces any impact on productivity. Every sales person thrives to be successful, part of this success is to learn what it takes to engage customers and close more sales. We all want to be masters of our own destination, to learn the art of persuasion, how to be really effective at lead generation, how to do sales prospecting really well and how to maximize the return on every sales call and gain more meetings with qualified buyers. Anyone with even the minimum exposure to selling already knows that there is allot that goes into sales success. Everyday tasks like filling the pipeline, driving conversations, using sales intelligence to better engage buyers, planning on how to win that important customer or growing existing accounts need to be learnt and improved. The Digital Sales Institute has created a business school level online sale training solution that is assisting progressive sales professionals and sales managers to build new skills and significantly increase sales in the world of the digitally connected buyer. The reality is that both the B2B and B2C buyer’s journey is changing how we sell and attract their attention. How to engage buyers using social media as a sales technique has been around for over five years now however lots of sales people still struggle to master it. Without sounding fatalistic Forester projects that over the next four years, 1 million B2B sales people will be replaced by self-service e-commerce. Those of us who plan on having a long term career in sales will have to up-skill and move away from “push selling” and learn to embrace new approaches and sales processes that add real value to today’s social engaged buyer. Online Sales Training Works Online sales training will show you how to interact with the ever increasing number of B2B buyers who prefer to research solutions online prior to ever engaging with a sales person or process. How many of us sales people still focus on interruption sales meaning have to do cold calling or other low returning sales activities. Survey after survey shows that the Number.1 challenge in the sales engine is lead generation yet we are taught the same old sales tactics. Here at The Digital Sales Institute, we believe it is about time that sales leaders transform the old historical sales models to one which facilitates a highly social, intelligence lead buyer engagement strategy which puts the individual sales person back into the heart of attracting buyers. Sales teams need to learn where and how to add value in the buying process, when and with what should they engage buyers so it improves their journey. As buyers self educate and self discover there are lots of critical questions coming down the line in how in win more business. Sole reliance on “Inbound Marketing” to bring in leads for the sales teams, where we then commence the process to qualify the prospects (a cold call or email) based on some internal criteria in order to narrow down to the most likely converting customers is disappearing fast. If we have better sales training, we will sell more We have to wake up and smell the coffee as it just simply does not work like that anymore. Buyers are not taking a journey prescribed in some sales manual written about 10 years ago; thanks to social media information they are plotting their own buying journey and leaving outdated sales models in the rear view mirror. The key message I wish to convey is not about sales catching up (more vanilla sales training anyone) with the buyer’s journey but where along the road can sales people add real value. New age selling is about understanding that the buyer needs information, resources, guidance, advice and help before any selling happens. Don not worry, the sales event has to happen, but intelligent high performing sales people now know when how to socially engage the buyer prior to triggering the sales process. Online Sales training is also not about an outbound V inbound argument, outbound sales will always have a critical place in selling, but smart sales leaders know it is about where to place it! The time when cold calling and mass interruption tactics were the only way for sales to talk to buyers is long gone. The advent of Sales 2.0 along with social media has flipped this on its head. To put this article into perspective, an Aberdeen Group report, they found that on average, the most successful sales firms got 60% of leads from outbound activity, while forty percent came through inbound efforts. However the inbound leads converted at a higher rate. The lesson here is these firms invested in sales training for their sales people to use the digital channels, social selling and digitally connected sales prospecting to attract the buyer, regardless of whether it was outbound (proactive selling activity) or inbound (SEO, article sharing etc). The real lesson for online sales training is for sales professionals to focus on becoming a trusted, helpful resource to the buyer along the journey and not interrupting them is the way to get the attention of the modern buyer. Ongoing and regular online sales training builds the knowledge and skills that when combined with other sales enablement initiatives help build really effective sales people. So without the access to ongoing sales training programs, I believe any strategic sales initiative is likely to end up another top down directed activity with limited sales improvement and no free time for the sales teams to learn.