Sales training course materials whether video, PowerPoint slides or sales playbooks, are used to support the learning journey of salespeople. Every sales training course, whether online or delivered in classroom, is designed to improve the sales skills and knowledge of salespeople. The training materials used will cover most of the sales process from prospecting, handling inbound leads, value propositions, objection handling, sales conversations, closing the sale, etc. The important point is that sales training should provide the tools to any salesperson to empower them to have a successful sales career where the company also benefits. Sales Training Impact Too Much Training (or Not Enough) There is a fine line between having too much and too little sales training. If salespeople are required to attend endless training sessions, that seriously cuts into their time to sell. But if they aren’t offered anything at all, they may feel like they are floundering when it comes to the knowledge of the solution portfolio—how to sell it, how to identify the right target audience, and how to differentiate from the competition. Today, sales training programs have to cover more than just hard selling skills; they have to include topics and training on sales mindset, psychology of selling, soft sales skills, communication skills, person branding, and social media channels, among others. Every salesperson learns at a different pace. Some love reading an e-book or sales training course materials on a specific sales skill; others prefer online sales training with video content to learn in their own time. Others still prefer more traditional classroom learning. Whatever the delivery channel, the outcome is the same: to upskill the salesperson. The challenges in measuring the impact of sales training on an individual salesperson level may seem hard. However, numerous studies have pinpointed the impact of constant sales training mainly in areas of hitting targets (3–8% improvement), higher success in new custom acquisition (as much as 25% improvement), and improved close rates due to salespeople being skilled at matching customer needs (15% improvement). Maybe these are good starting measures for a salesperson or sales training department to measure over time. Buyers want value-added conversations. Buyers are smart; they read articles, source information, and trawl the web for insights without any sales help. What does this mean for a salesperson? It means that they must focus on adding value to the sales conversations. They must have the skill to increase buyer confidence and help the buyer prioritize the information that matters. Today, the most successful salespeople help their buyers simplify the endless amounts of information they are bombarded with, creating confidence and reducing scepticism. This customer-first approach builds a feeling of trust and control with the buyer, helping them with data, facts, or insights to make decisions. Know the buyer’s mindset. All of us like or love to buy things. The funny thing is that we don’t like to feel that we are being sold to. What does this mean? The feeling of being sold brings up emotions of being pressured or even manipulated into deciding on something that someone wants us to do. When, as buyers, we feel pressured or backed into a corner, we tend to tune out, disengage, or become angry. The end result is a breakdown in communication and participation in the sales process; we opt out or go cold!. When this happens during sales conversations, salespeople often sense this level of disengagement, but they are unsure what to do about it. Salespeople have to bring value to their buyers, so having a thorough understanding of how buyers think, how they behave, and how they buy is critical to building value in all selling efforts. Salespeople need to know buyers are usually conflicted about change because buying is a change management project. They identify reasons to change as well as reasons not to change. It is the role of the salesperson to move the dial in favor of change. This is where the magic happens in sales. The degree to which a salesperson motivates the buyer to move beyond the status quo and become active towards change will determine the success (or failure) of selling activities. The sales mindset. Selling is a producer’s game. Which means every salesperson has goals or targets to meet. The quickest way to fail in modern selling is to take the human element out of the sales equation. Our buyers are not statistics, data points, dollar signs, or forecast numbers. When the sales team or management is facing challenging situations, there’s something tangible about slicing and dicing the numbers. Analyzing data and forecasts is our comfort zone. Behind every data point is a story, a real customer with problems to solve or initiatives to implement. By accepting and embracing this concept, salespeople should approach the sales process with a more productive mindset. In other words, the objective shifts from an internal focus on “getting that deal” to an external focus on “helping the customer be successful.” Salespeople become less driven by their own internal goals in favor of helping customers meet theirs. Ask any customer, and they will tell you that this attitude can get their attention, build relationships, and make you a trusted resource (and a top-performing salesperson to boot). If salespeople adjust their mindsets to incorporate the human component of the sale, they will dig deeper during sales training and answer some additional questions: • Who is the customer, professionally and personally? • What role do they play in the organization? • What initiatives are they personally working on? • How can I partner with them to help them reach their goals? • What problems do they need to solve? • How can I help them be successful now and in the future? The insights they gain from those human-focused questions during training will give them a real edge in the sales process. Finding that human angle is definitely one of the competitive advantages a salesperson brings to the sale. Communication Skills. Effective communication happens when salespeople follow theSales Training Materials and Content