Creating Sales Training Programs to Catalyze Profits – The Training Bootcamp Stage

Your sales manager has managed to book a meeting with that highly sought-after client. It is one of those make-or-break deals that could help the firm meet a quarter’s worth of the sales target. If all goes well, this may even become a dedicated account!

Are you sure your sales team can make that riveting impact to close this deal?

Are you confident your sales can sell, cross-sell, upsell and convert one-time, occasional clients to long-standing, profitable accounts?

And most importantly, is your sales team equipped to sell in a virtual setting, a new norm post-2020(as per this article by Deloitte consulting)?

If your answer to any of these questions is a NO…

Then it is time to empower your sales team through a customized sales training and enablement program to get the cash registers singing!

Our solutioning experts propose a program with:

• A Training Bootcamp Stage for the actual context and the overall ‘Big Picture’
• An Enablement Stage for Just-in-time support and facilitating additional on-the-job learning

In this article, we will only cover the Training Bootcamp stage.

Training Bootcamp stage:

If your Sales Training Bootcamp stage is a buffet, then macro learning is the main course (Based on this article by Patti Shank). Microlearning is the ‘spice’ or enabling component spread across crucial moments of need. Together they make the learning buffet nutritional and delicious.

To know and apply the what, why, and how of sales.

This stage comprises an experiential synchronous classroom or virtual instructor-led training by a sales expert facilitator, focusing on learner centricity.

In this stage, the facilitator is there to guide and enable the learners.

No preachy facilitators or hypothetical scenarios here!

Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping is used to select the must-know content and design the practice activities.

Learners need to own 95% of the Bootcamp by doing the realistic practice of the concepts learned.

Realistic practice activities, with realistic consequences, belong to the supporting principles in Clark Quinn’s Serious eLearning Manifesto. Our solution architects design realistic scenario-based learning, role-play, and real play to utilize these principles.

Training Bootcamp covers these crucial areas:

a)  Rapport Building: The relationship with the client needs to be personal, empathetic, and founded on mutual trust or emotional compatibility.

Rapport building is the secret ingredient that helped Joe Girard, one of the Business Insider’s top ten greatest salespersons of all time and Guinness Book of World Records’ greatest salesperson.

 Building rapport virtually, however, differs from rapport building during a face-to-face sales meeting.

Is your sales team trained in building rapport virtually?

b)  Need Analysis: Jane Hart, founder of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies and Modern Workplace Learning, shares one of her favorite articles on sales in Jane Hart’s pick of the year.

The article states that organizations have decided to focus on discovering and providing customer-wanted results rather than pushing solutions.

c)  Product or Service Demonstration: Features, advantages, benefits, and related tie-down questions to ‘rev’ the prospect’s interest. Virtual products and service demonstration tools assist in pitching the product. Simulations, videos, augmented and virtual reality technologies are being used liberally for these virtual sales demonstrations

Have you adapted your sales demonstration tools for Virtual Selling? Does your sales team know how to use these tools during a virtual sales interaction?

d)  Obstacle Training: The salesperson needs to manage obstacles to close the deal. The customer’s hesitations may not always be objections. They may be Skepticism, Misunderstandings, Apathy, or Drawbacks.

Is your sales team proficient in managing these different obstacles?

e)  Closing: This is the make-or-break step determining whether your prospect will sign the contract and hand over the check. A learning intervention on different closing techniques will help them seal the deal.

Is your sales team aware of how to use these techniques in a virtual setting?

Also, sales team leaders urgently need people management training to lead virtual teams. They need to be specially enabled to coach and mentor their team members virtually.

All these crucial steps of the sales process have changed post the COVID pandemic.

Is your sales team upskilled to meet these demands of Virtual Selling in the New Normal?

Let us connect over a call for your very own Sales Training Bootcamp that delivers the results your firm envisions!