Sales training is not going to disappear – in fact as the market becomes more complex and competition more virulent salespeople will need more, not less training. Salespeople will also have less time to be trained due to increased costs, less sales people, more complex sales, longer sales cycles and so on.
Those two forces – increased competition with the need to up skill salespeople and less time for training – will make identifying different and effective training methods key to success.
Organizations must utilize online sales training so that they can cost effectively provide sales training for ALL of the sales training needs of the organization. Whether you need sales meetings, sales training and sales coaching your people must be able to access the information online quickly and easily and this should not be limited to sales training and sales motivation but sales solutions.
Virtual online web based interactive sales training is taking off because it is affordable, available 24/7 and doesn’t require your people miss sales opportunities because they are out of town.
Companies are facing the high cost of training their sales force at every level – from the inexperienced salesperson to strategic accounts management. The Sales Trend in 2014 will be for companies to reduce the cost whilst still developing their salespeople – as you cannot live without training. Blending e-learning with classroom work and in-field coaching is going to become the focal point of sales training moving forward.
This sales trend will see smart companies move beyond event style training (1-3 days in the classroom) to creating what we have termed Perpetual Learning Environments (PLE). These companies will work out ways to use best practice learning principles including models like the powerful 70-20-10 development model, which includes interval training (mini sessions schedule a regular intervals) and discovery learning (interactive, hands on sessions with lots of questions to get people discovering the answers themselves) as well as knowledge, skills and behaviour transfer methods across many facets. Combining classroom training, using well structured materials with in-field coaching and reinforcement, supplemented with user friendly practical online learning resources is happening now and is slowly becoming the norm.
We have invested heavily in developing www.salesessentials .com, our online sales resource and e-learning platform. For a number of years we have been getting a steady stream of calls and emails from people telling us they want training courses, tools, assessments and resources they can access in many forms any time anywhere to help them achieve their sales goals and objectives. That is why we took our highly regarded, university grade, sales education materials, publications, tools and resources and put them into an online education platform. It can be accessed independently by self-driven learners or form part of a blended learning approach to ensure focused learning experiences that sustain continuous reinforcement for sales teams.
More information:
- Our online training courses
- Background to Online Sales Training
- Benefits on Online Sales Training