Sales training course

Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion and conflicting information about sales training and how it’s supposed to help sales professionals. We believe that sales training isn’t just making an investment in the performance of the salespeople in an organisation. It’s also an investment in the future of the organisation and its brand, and how customers perceive it.

So, sales training is really the process of improving the skills, knowledge, and attributes of sales professionals to facilitate their behavioural change and increase sales success. To be most effective, sales training should be viewed, designed, and executed as a change management initiative.

Sales training used to be just about developing specific skills, including closing, negotiating, questioning, objection handling etc. The delegates were then expected to immediately apply those skills to their jobs and sell more. Sadly the old sales training model did not always produce the desired results over the long term.

Our sales training model does focus on the development of key selling skills. But, it also includes working on the salesperson. It drills down to explore issues such as their beliefs and values as a salesperson and their motivations.

There are many sales training programmes, each with slightly different content; and different degrees of success. Most focus on traditional sales skills such as questioning, handling objections and closing. These are obviously important, but selling in the 21st Century calls for more as customers become more sophisticated and informed.

Our sales training programmes go beyond sales skills and helps our delegates to develop and demonstrate their understanding of their customers’ businesses, trends, best practice and provide useful expertise and creative thinking.

If it is designed and delivered effectively, there are many benefits of a sales training programme. Obviously the first is that by applying their new skills and knowledge the delegates increase their sales volumes. In the past many salespeople have wasted time and energy on strategies that are either inefficient or are just not suited for them. Sales training not only equips you with more effective and efficient sales techniques, it can also help you understand which techniques are right for you and which aren’t.

A comprehensive 21st Century sales training programme will go beyond the traditional to assist delegates to clarify their purpose and significance and how they might apply in their particular setting. In this way training can leads to a much better integration of best practices in sales performance.

Attending a sales training programme will also help the sales professional to become adept at engaging in meaningful conversations with prospects and asking insightful questions. Providing professional sales training ensures that salespeople are able to conduct any conversation with the depth of knowledge they need to be effective.

For us, effective sales training should be about teaching salespeople the key elements of ethical sales and the processes that can enable them to be successful in their specific industry. It should enhance not only their competence as a sales professional, but also the delegates’ confidence to use the new skills that they learn to engage with prospects and customers, and shift focus toward being of service to them, rather than focusing on yourself and their own needs.

There are as many types of sales training as there are sales environments. These classically include general sales, telesales and field sales. Within these, there are obviously overlaps in the skills required.

However, within these generic sales environments there are some key differences in sales training programmes. These differences are in the areas that the training and the trainers focus. Even in 2020 there are still sales trainers who use the old adversarial sales model where the salesperson has to almost beat the customer into submission to get the sale. Their entire focus is on the salesperson making their numbers.

In my opinion more enlightened salespeople focus on helping the buyer to buy. More than that, they help to buy in a way that they want to buy. Historically, sales training focused on the unique sales proposition (USP) of the product. 21st Century selling is a more facilitative process that focuses as much on the customer’s UBP; their unique buying preference.

Again, that’s a tough question because to some extent it does depend on the sales environment. However I think that there are some key skills that any sales professional does need to develop. These include the ability to build strong relationships, building rapport, communication skills, asking insightful questions to help identify the customer’s needs, creative problem solving, presentation skills, negotiation skills based on mutually beneficial and collaborative outcomes, to elicit the customer’s unique buying preferences, handling objections and (yes), closing skills. This is not an exhaustive list and needs to be augmented by working with the salesperson as an individual to ensure sales integrity.

Our sales training is always designed and delivered with our client’s specific requirements in mind; whether that be in the automotive or logistics sector. We undertake a diagnosis phase so that we really understand what the client is looking for from their investment in sales training so that when we deliver the training we know that it will be relevant for the people attending, rather than just some theory from a sales book or downloaded from the internet. We like to work with smaller groups to enable us to really get to know the delegates personally rather than sit 30 or more people in a hotel room somewhere.

We are proud to say that our training is both highly challenging and, at the same time, highly supportive of our delegates.

Finally, the facilitation team at Eagle Training are all experienced sales professionals, so when we deliver our sales training it is done from a background of people who have actually been at the sharp end!!