Today’s sales training is rapidly moving away from live on-site seminars and classes. Online sales training eliminates the need to gather your sales team in one place. Training materials can be delivered to your sales reps directly on their computers and mobile devices. If your company is looking at investing in an online sales training platform, here are four things that you should consider.
Does the online sales training support diverse sales training formats?
People learn differently so the training material should be available in a number of different formats.
Online video lectures and narrated slide presentation are great for communicating with your sales reps. Videos can also be used to present sale situation role-plays.
Audio recordings are great for sales reps who want to listen to training while driving their car or doing some other activity that does not demand their complete attention.
Some people want to review and study written material. This printed material can be delivered as a PDF file. This is a great way to distribute review sheets and study guides for any assessments and tests.
Does your sales training platform support different instructional modalities?
Your company may want to offer a variety of training options. It is important that the online sales training platform that you select support these different instructional modalities.
On-demand training is great for on-the-go sales reps. The platform should provide the ability for your reps to download and stream training seminars to their mobile devices.
Live online lectures are a great way to get your team together all at once. Your online platform should support virtual conferences where everyone can watch and participate in the same live lecture. This captures the benefits of attending a class without the need have everyone in the same geographic location.
The platform should also support social learning by having discussion forums, chat capabilities and other ways that your sales reps can connect with each other to discuss what they are learning. This kind of social interaction is essential for online sales training.
Is the sales training platform customizable?
Most online sales training comes with a set of off-the-shelf training modules. These modules are great for the basics, but you will most likely want to be able to add your own content to the learning platform. You may have specific techniques that work well with your market or product specific information that you want to communicate. The learning platform should allow you to easily create and post your own training content.
Does your sales training platform have tracking and metrics?
You want to make sure that your reps are actually using and benefiting from the training program that you put together.
A learning platform should track the progress of each sales rep and record the training that he or she has gone through. It should also be able to assess the rep’s mastery of the content through quizzes, test, and other assessments.
The training platform should integrate with other performance metrics. In this way, you can see if increased training leads to increased performance from your team.
Choosing an online sales training platform is an important decision. These are just a few of the factors that you can look at to guide your choice.
Anticipation abounds as the new hires come through the door. This is not only on the part of the new hires as they entertain thoughts of fitting in, and measuring up to, and perhaps exceeding expectations but also on current employees. Their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors may run the gamut from effusive expressions of welcome to subtle coldness. (The latter to be avoided at all cost.)
The use of employees’ work stories is not just a “fluffy” thing to try. The use of employee work stories such as ones demonstrating integrity related to business practices, engagement with local, national, or international community organizations (service, charity, health fairs, athletic events), and employee assistance are all indicative of organizational culture.
Research indicates that culture is considered one of the most powerful and stable forces operating within an organization. It really is a no brainer for human resources and training departments to include stories as much as possible but rather it is a tactical, creative, and authentic way to enrich onboarding initiatives. Everything from lectures to online-based orientations is made better with stories.
Definitions vary but include concepts such as shared beliefs, values, and assumptions that are reflected in attitudes and behavior. What better way to acclimatize new hires to become productive and effective organizational members than through the judicious, and timely use of employees’ stories at all levels of the organization. In addition, research also shows that engaging new hires in a positive manner will prevent costly staff turnover, burnout, and improve quality of service (all good for the bottom line.)
So What Stories Should Employees Tell in New Hire Orientation?
I am proud to work here – because of the quality of our product, give details such as usability, durability.
Outstanding service record – related to the impact on the lives/ businesses of customers, use examples of customer satisfaction responses such as personal messages, recommendations, going the proverbial extra mile, and satisfaction surveys statistics.
Community Engagement – employee mobilization efforts in time of community crises such as natural disasters Sandy, Katrina. ‘Team Organization’ for breast cancer walk, drunk driving, hunger walk, mentoring/tutoring at local schools.
Employee Satisfaction – really expound on this facet. Stories should illustrate the value placed on mentoring, competence, respect, integrity, ideas.
Ready, Set, Go – The Ways and Means of Employees’ Stories
Have employees collect and document success stories that illustrate organizational culture.
Create a database with searchable keywords featuring employee stories that tie in with the keywords. This will clarify your messaging.
Disseminate these employee stories – take them for a spin, not only in orientation but at job fairs, brochures, interviews, college campus recruitment.
Identifying key personnel to tell these stories through creative orientations is solid strategy companies are using to make training new hires more personal and memorable! So….What’s your story?
Companies that implement ongoing education for their employees are setting the stage for long-term success. Your employees need to upgrade and broaden their skills periodically as well as stay familiar with the latest industry trends, technology, and practices.
This can’t be understated. Technology evolves rapidly in most industries. Failure to maintain the skills needed to succeed, makes it challenging for employees to perform their duties with any degree of productivity.
The reality of implementing ongoing training consistently with sales reps in the field, customer service agents on the go and busy remote employees, is an entirely different story altogether…
The flipped classroom approach presents a highly scalable way of making an ongoing training program a reality for any business that needs to keep employees up to date. The premise behind the flipped classroom is to create an environment where the lecture and homework aspects of your course are reversed. Today’s employee, more tech-savvy than ever before, is used to consuming learning content online. This enables trainers or managers to spend time in class engaging in discussion, applying concepts and answering employee questions.
In 4 Signs You Should Invest in a Flipped Classroom, we gave you a few questions to consider for an investment in the flipped classroom approach. Here is step by step tips on how to develop and implement the flipped classroom for your organization.
Action Plan for Developing Your Flipped Classroom Training
Start By Setting Objectives – It’s important to know your objectives before you start designing a plan. Set the end objectives you want to achieve with your training program. For example, assume a bunch of new sales hires are joining soon. Objectives of the training could be focused on getting the sales reps prepared on buyer personas, buying habits, customer pain points and how your product addresses the customer’s needs. In addition, objectives could also cover how your product solves the customer’s problem and the positive impact.
Develop a Training Plan – Once you identify what outcomes are needed from the learning activity, decide on the optimal mix of training content for your organization and develop an outline. Create a training structure based on your objectives and priorities. Then, identify topics that go inside each of the training elements.
Mindtickle Sales Onboarding Course Example
Note that there is no one size fits all solution. Instead, customize your approach to every topic keeping in mind the opportunity for pre-work. You want to first have employees experience the learning activity on their own, then come to the classroom prepared for discussion. 3. Prepare Content for the Training – Video is an excellent medium for delivering the flipped classroom approach and preparation will reduce the amount of time it takes to produce the videos. (Unless you are an improv whiz!). For example in sales onboarding, simply record your “A player pitch” for a highly engaging demo to use in your training.
As you review content, look at your objectives and include data that makes for a good introductory overview along with seminal concepts. Every topic in the Analytically evaluate if your training content will meet the objectives.
Repurpose PowerPoint presentations into smaller presentations covering the topics. Script out your presentations from slide notes. Make sure each topic is a bite-sized one so that you don’t overwhelm your employees!
Recording video is much easier than you may think. You can use your mobile phone to record videos and use simple tools to do basic editing. A parting thought on video – resist the urge to be a perfectionist when recording or editing. When delivering live training there are bound to be mistaken here and there. It’s no different with video so don’t worry about small errors! 4. Implement the Flipped Classroom – When your employees go through the course online and come back to the classroom for an effective face-to-face session, it is even more critical to foster a team of intrinsically motivated employees. Having the right incentives in place will allow you to run a successful training with enthusiastic employees. Deliver the in-class discussion questions for each topic ahead of time. Let your employees know that they should prepare for in-class conversation and questions by sharing a structured learning plan with them upfront and explaining your ground rules and expectations about participation. It is critical that they understand that those who come to training having completed the lesson, engaged and ready to ask questions to get far more out of the experience those are unprepared. 5. Evaluate Training Results – The next step is to evaluate (through an assessment) the efficiency of the training. The analysis of the training report will give you information on knowledge gaps on which your employees can be coached in the face to face session. It is important to seek feedback from your employees and deliver quizzes and assessments to ensure that you are on track to meet objectives. If some videos are not effective, find out what is effective! Finding out what works may take some time. Once the flipped training is complete deliver a final assessment to evaluate knowledge. Now your employees are prepared to do their job efficiently!
With the flipped classroom it is important to remember that the experience can be as much of a learning experience for you as a trainer as it is for your trainees. No doubt there is a learning curve and there may also be some resistance as you make the shift away from more traditional approaches to the flipped classroom model. Give the flipped classroom a chance and keep iterating to meet your organization’s goals!
What do you think about the flipped classroom approach?
So you just hired a new salesperson? For many businesses, the ramp-up time for new sales reps is typically six months or more. With turnover being slightly less than two years for most reps, companies need to have a solid onboarding plan in order to realize a return on their investment. An outdated or overly labor-intensive sales onboarding program leads to increased turnover and wasted company resources.
Source: via Mike Kunkle, Sales Onboarding: Twice as Good, Half the Time
Sales onboarding isn’t just about going through pitch videos or having new reps shadow tenured sales reps. Not only should your sales onboarding have a clearly defined objective and end goal, your sales reps also need to know the milestones that they need to achieve to be successful. Your new salesperson has potential, but that potential is only unlocked with a structured onboarding program. For advice on what excellence in sales onboarding looks like, we turn to Mike Kunkle, a recognized leader in sales training and organizational effectiveness. Mike shares actionable steps you can take to help accelerate ramp-up times and reduce turnover.
What are the pressures and trends that sales managers must contend with today?
Mike Kunkle: The pressure is still all about the number… making your sales quota. It’s the environment that’s changed. Due to information available online, with a few clicks, today’s buyers are doing their own research before reaching out to suppliers. Buyers are more informed than ever – although not always more accurately informed.
Along with these changes in buyer behavior, there are more RFPs than ever before and more decision-makers involved. For instance, the average number of buyers involved in a complex sale is 5.4 (according to CEB). If that’s the average, there are some that have even more buyers involved.
Tweet This: “The pressure is still all about the number… making your sales quota.”
Then there are factors like corporate cost reductions that result in shrinking training departments and budgets, making it more difficult to serve our sales forces. To further complicate things, even in this day and age of big data, many still roll the dice when we hire and select sales reps on gut feel.
Bottom line is that the expectations placed on sales managers are enormous, and often organizations pull them in far too many directions, rather than removing obstacles to allow them to focus on hiring, training, coaching, and managing their teams as effectively as possible.
You said: “It takes many companies from 7 to 12 months to ramp-up their new sales reps.” Why is sales reps ramp time moving in the wrong direction?
Mike Kunkle: If you look as far back as 2003, which I did recently for an article I was writing, ramp-up times were shorter. “Ramp up times have generally gotten longer over the years. There’s variance, but if you trend-line the data, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. There could be quite a few reasons for that, though, including a more complex, competitive business environment, a shift toward the buyer’s market, and/or an increase in complexity of problems, opportunities, and solutions to address them, or even some year-to-year difference in research protocol or other speculative reasons.”
Selling was a lot less complex than it is today, and to a large degree, it’s because there wasn’t a proliferation of information on the Internet. It was before buyers were doing so much research on their own.
Combine that with a drain on training department budgets and sizes, in comparison to the early 2000’s, and how much new reps need to learn to be productive, and it’s not hard to imagine why onboarding remains a sales challenge.
Question: What can be done to accelerate sales rep ramp time?
Mike Kunkle: I’d start by defining outcomes. When you say accelerate, is that just a faster time, or is it higher productivity in the same time, or both shorter ramp-up time with higher productivity? The first thing is to get clarity around what you want and benchmark where you are, so you have a measuring stick to gauge your progress. Put a stake in the ground saying, “This is where we are today.” Then ask yourself: “where are we aiming and what are we trying to do?”
When companies actually try to shorten their ramp up time, many of them are actually deterring productivity as opposed to enhancing it. There’s an awful lot of five days of death by PowerPoint in orientation and onboarding.
Tweet This: “The sales job has become increasingly complex.”
We need to step back and apply some sound instructional design thinking, stuff that has been around since the dawn of time. Analyze top producer practices and really try to understand what are the differentiating factors between top and mid producers. Then document the best practices in your organization.
The best practices give you a real focus on what are the things that are making a difference. When you’re developing content or teaching content to new people, you know what you’re teaching gets results. This is where hard core prioritization and decisions need to be made. What are the absolute need-to-know and need-to-do things to achieve sales rep productivity?
For example, three common goals I’ve used in some businesses include:
making their first sale,
achieving their first monthly quota,
and then making quota 3 months in a row.
These goals won’t work for every business. They have to match reality, and when achieved, they signify that the employee is truly ramped-up and a fully-productive sales rep. The concept sounds simple but it is far from easy… People struggle most with the NEED to know vs. NICE to know piece.
You also want to have ways to reinforce what is taught such as job aids, places to get answers, buddies or mentors, and plenty of follow-up and coaching from either specialized onboarding coaches or sales managers.
Check back for part 2 of our interview on sales onboarding with Mike Kunkle. We’ll cover common mistakes training managers make in sales onboarding as well as actionable advice and best practices.
Mike is a training and organizational effectiveness leader with special expertise in sales force transformation.
After his initial years on the frontline in sales and sales management, he spent the next 21 years as a corporate manager or consultant, leading departments and projects with one purpose – improve sales results.
Today, in his role as commercial training & development leader for a Fortune 10 corporation, Mike uses his in expertise in best-in-class learning strategies, methods, processes, and change leadership to develop the capabilities of sales representatives and sales managers to drive business results.
Mike is a training and organizational effectiveness leader with special expertise in sales force transformation.
