Training is an essential feature of employee development.
It provides staff with the opportunity to expand knowledge base and enhance skills.
It aims to elevate morale and boost performance.
In the case of sales training, associates receive training to become familiar with products and services.
Workshops provide skills that enhance marketing strategies for employees to reach their quotas and close their deals in the least possible time.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has changed the way businesses conduct their day-to-day operations, shifting from office-based to a remote workforce.
It has also altered the way training is delivered, migrating it from face-to-face interactions to teleconferences and webinars.
Sales training has become all the more challenging, as business owners grapple with techniques and technologies to provide remote sales teams with essential knowledge and capabilities.
Remote sales training functions to address this concern for employee development.
Sales training in the virtual setting is an essential tool in the post-Covid work environment.
It prepares sales personnel to take on the challenge of remote sales and online selling by providing them with appropriate skill sets suitable to the virtual environment and the new normal.
Common Challenges to Remote Sales Training
Oftentimes, sales personnel are busy perfecting their sales pitch or fulfilling their duty to do sales calls that they don’t pay attention to training.
They may even be tired from trying to reach their quota for the day that the thought of attending remote sales training can entirely drain them.
Such low engagement and low scheduling are a common challenge for training personnel.
Being aware of these issues within the salesforce compels sales enablers and coaches to come up with appropriate tools and technologies that can revive enthusiasm in sales reps.
Training can also become a venue for collaboration between learners and facilitators.
Tips for Remote Sales Training
Here are some of the tips remote sales trainers, coaches and even business owners need to keep in mind when conducting remote sales training:
Prioritize Training Requests
Sending salespeople into training is a must, but sales enablers need to know how to handle requests from staff and multiple departments.
To do this, they would need to communicate a standard procedure for training requests and cascade the information to everyone concerned.
Next, trainers need to prioritize which of these requests are immediate and impactful so that they can talk to subject matter experts and prepare the required material for a specific course.
For sales companies these days, courses on remote selling offered by sites like Winning By Design should sell like hotcakes.
Ensure Sales Reps Dedicate Time To Training
Another issue that needs to be addressed is how coaches can encourage sales personnel to participate in remote sales training.
While it’s mandatory, facilitators should clearly explain the importance of the said training by directly tying it to employee goals such as effective sales pitches and closed deals.
Sales reps must discover that they will benefit from the training and that its outcomes will transform them into effective employees.
This realization can help them realize that such is the ultimate goal of remote sales training.
Maintain Engagement: during training
Perhaps maintaining attention and ensuring participation is the most challenging aspect of remote sales training. It’s easy to zone out of a meeting by turning your camera off or get distracted by other concerns.
It’s, therefore, crucial to make remote sales training more enjoyable for everyone in attendance.
You can use micro–learning to deliver training into bite-sized pieces that sales reps can access anytime and anywhere.
Enhance their learning experience by creating pre-recorded videos and offer simulations that allow them to gauge their performance against their peers.
Follow up on their training with quizzes or games. You can even make it a team effort and start a competition as to which team can finish their learning modules first then reward them with simple tokens or dinner treats.
Provide Appropriate Tools
Training is not only a one-sided process as it requires interaction between participants and facilitators.
As a business owner, you need to provide for appropriate tools to ensure that each and every session of remote sales training is successful.
Your company may need to formulate content, employ a collaborative training platform, and use video analytics to measure the learning outcomes of participants.
This may come at a cost to you, but it will surely translate into a knowledgeable and empowered salesforce in time.
Build on Coaching Sessions
It’s also helpful to remember that imparting knowledge and skills is not done overnight.
Gaining new skills and applying them into remote sales settings can take some time to manifest.
Apart from self-paced training, coaching and mentoring can help accelerate skills development.
Coaching can reinforce insights gained from training, and encourage sales reps to transform such knowledge into actual sales scenarios.
It’s vital that mentors and managers offer support to sales teams not only for training purposes, but also to foster meaningful relationships with them.
Measure KPIs To Evaluate Training Initiatives
As a business owner, you want to make sure that all the expenses in procuring materials and developing content can yield a significant ROI for your company.
You can achieve this by ensuring that metrics are in place to measure the efficacy of remote sales training.
You can establish KPIs such as quota attainment and first deal success. These metrics can be used to determine salesforce performance before and after the training sessions.
Once the results are out, you can communicate them to the concerned teams for continuation or alteration in training modality and content to achieve desired goals.
Conclusion
Remote sales training seeks to address the challenges of performing sales calls in the realm of the new normal.
It aims to equip sales personnel with the desired skill required to address changing customer preferences and buying attitudes.
Its purpose is to keep sales personnel engaged through the use of micro-learning modality, asynchronous communication, and enjoyable training sessions.
The knowledge they acquire from remote sales training is best measured through KPIs that provide information on the efficacy of training or the need for modifications.
In essence, the purpose of remote sales training is to shape sales associates into trusted sales advisors who guide customers as they explore your products and attach to your brand.
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