A review of a sales training course from the perspective of a salesperson wishing to improve their sales skills. In many companies new salespeople begin their role with just some company centric basic training. This approach to sales training creates the impression that a salesperson should first prove themselves before any more investment in their training. Yes, we all know that selling is a producers role, and we are measured by the revenue we bring in. Like all professions the skills needed to sell successfully can be learned and mastered with training. A Sales Training Course Should Include The Following We emailed over 1000 salespeople and asked them questions on their sales training course criteria. Here is a summary of their answers in terms of popularity. The one thing to note is that no one single sales training course can cover all the skills you need to sell today. The reality is that you are the only one who can decide where gaps in your sales skills exist. So, explore different themes and course options to find the sales training courses that work best for your own unique situation. Sales Skills 101 The top reply from our survey was that a Sales Skills 101 is the entry point of sales training courses. Sales skills 101 type course is ideal for any level of salesperson, from those starting out, to those who want to refresh their sales knowledge. It should cover all the major sales steps and sales tactics that you will need in the sales process. Topics worth noting that you should look out for would include defining selling, the buyer whys, how to start a sales conversation, the steps in a typical sales process, understand the difference between roadblocks and objections, plus all the insight needed to close a sale. Did you know that according to Forbes magazine, 55% of salespeople lack basic sales skills. Many salespeople tend to forget about serving their customer’s needs first. Learning to handle rejection, identifying target customer profiles and mastering sales negotiations are vital skills you need to possess. Soft Sales Skills A good sales training course will also cover the soft skills. These are the sales skills for the way you think, the way you interact with others, how you manage yourself and how you communicate. The modern buyer is savvy and expect s more than the value that comes with the product. They want more than the value your company adds in. They want unique, relevant, personalized value. The only place they can get that is from you, the seller, human-to-human. They expect you to create value in every interaction with them. Your hard sales skills probably haven’t equipped you for value creation. Digital Selling Remote selling is here to stay. So digital selling has become an important aspect in the sales process. Sales is being fundamentally impacted as people and businesses change the way they buy. It’s time for a new approach to sales: to blend in digital selling to address this rapid and dramatic change in buying behavior. All of us will need to upskill in how we sell to attract and bring value to buyers across multiple channels including social media, video, etc. Broadly speaking, this means embracing the concept of digital selling. At its essence, digital selling empowers you to broaden your net, allowing you to gain appropriate insight on and relevance to customers — winning their trust and, ultimately, increasing revenue and reducing sales stress. According to an EY study, salespeople that utilize digital selling techniques are 5.7 times more likely to secure prospect meetings and hit 150 percent of their quotas on average. Customer Target Selection If you are to maximize your return on sales effort (ROSE), we need to understand your ideal customer profile and then which customer set you will target. Every sales training course should go into detail on this topic. Customer target selection solves who is your target customer(s), which will serve as a focus for your sales activities, decision making, and other sales tactics. Sales success is more likely to come from figuring out which businesses would understand your product or service and recognize the most value in using it. The typical output of a customer target selection is a customer persona, which outlines salient descriptors of your target customer, which are relevant and helpful in deciding where to spend your time. Rather than identifying the unique needs of one individual, you’ll need to identify the unique needs of multiple people along the purchase decision making line. Deciding on the right target customer is both art and science. The art is defining the target customer in a way that gives your value proposition a listening ear and allows you to differentiate versus competitors. Learn To Build Compelling Value Propositions Your value proposition, is the “what” and the core of your business activity, composed of your products, services, promises and pricing of the business. If customers believe they will get more value out of your value proposition than your competitors, over time you will win. Ultimately, every buyer opts to purchase products and services to improve their lives in some way, to extract value. Value equals the rational and emotional benefits customers get from selecting your product or service minus the price they pay. Learn to craft value propositions with clear statement that encapsulates three key criteria: Relevancy: Explains how your product improves a specific customers’ life or solves their problems Value: Deliver quantifiable concrete benefits Differentiation: Shows your ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition. To get buyers to listen to your sales conversations, you need to ensure that you have a value proposition(s) for your product or service that has both sufficient points-of-parity (POP) and points-of-difference (POD). Undertaking A Sales Training Course Online When it comes to selecting from the range of sales training courses you can find via online search, the considerations should be sales training course content and pricing. Your decision to upskill is anSales Training Course Criteria