B2B Sales Training – 5 Keys to Make It Work for Your Medium Sized Business

When a firm “graduates” from a small business to a midsized one, a lot of new challenges arise — including the fact that sales training must usually become formalized to meet the demands of a larger staff and a bigger competitive landscape. One problem with this is that the “personal touch” is often lost, and B2B sales training can become boring and impersonal. Here are a few tips for making it work for your medium sized business. 1. Get Interactive Once a training class gets above a certain size, interaction, and therefore attention and retention start to diminish naturally. Role playing, moderated discussions and sales-related games can all add back some of the spark and improve results. Inc recently highlighted the value of role playing for sales training in their guide to improving cold-call skills, and I have used this tool in my training classes for years. By combining action, practice and discussion into the training process, attendees achieve a higher level of comfort and confidence with new tactics before they have to put them into action. If this is not done, you will find that they simply don’t apply these things in real life. 2. Clearly Define Goals for Any Sales Training Sessions For your top performing sales reps, sales training might seem like a fruitless effort. Time spent in training classes could be time spent closing sales and earning money. However, these people are some of your most valuable assets when it comes to improving the benefits of your B2B sales training efforts, because they help you define the goals for your sessions with a real world viewpoint. Ask your top reps what needs to be improved the most in the sales organization, and incorporate those as goals for your training sessions. 3. Brief Team Members on Training Topics and Approaches before Implementing Training Much like warming up a cold call can help to improve the chances of success, providing information to your sales team about what to expect from training sessions can help to improve the benefits obtained by training. Provide documentation and information a few days prior to the start of training. This allows students to identify areas of interest, become familiar with the topics covered and build a plan for how to make the most of the training experience. It also provides an opportunity to check who is truly invested in their skills and your business. 4. Bring Real Deals to Training When feasible, have your salespeople write out exactly how they are going to apply the concepts being taught to real-life deals they are working on right now. After all, if the training is any good, it should be able to solve a few impasses on current deals and bring them closer to fruition, right? Even if they don’t close the sale, the fact that they are applying the material to real-world scenarios makes for more effective B2B sales training, and ensures they will use their new skills on future deals. 5. Measure Results and Reinforce Skills From analyzing improvements in sales metrics to discussing past training sessions during sales meetings and finding out what worked for your sales teams, it is important to follow up on any B2B sales training sessions. The most effective training is a cyclical process of “learn it – do it – and refine/reinforce it”.  You cannot do the last part if you don’t know what worked to improve sales and what didn’t. When it comes to making the most of your sales training investment, your approach to training is as important as the skills being taught. These 5 key considerations above should help improve your B2B sales training efforts. For further information, consider this list of SCORE’s Top Training Tips from Entrepreneur or contact us here.