sales training online Archives - Kona - Sales and Management Training

the thinker statue posing, also wearing a surgical pandemic mask for covid safety

It has been just over 12 months since the powers that be declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic. And even a year on, despite Australia’s pandemic position compared to the rest of the world, we are still feeling the shock waves. Whether your company is large or small, whether you have experienced serious disruptions in your business or managed to avoid them, if you are a company leader, it is likely that the last year has taken a lot out of you. And, it is okay to acknowledge that. It is also okay to congratulate your team – and yourself – for still being in the game. Once you have acknowledged reality and issued those congratulations, take the time to address three powerful questions. These three questions are inspiring, motivating, and transforming. We know this because they are the same questions we have asked a multitude of teams we work with delivering tailored Sales training across APAC. Consequently, it is these three questions that have resulted in a mindset shift in Sales teams, and in turn smashing their KPIs. The answers you give to the three questions will help you maintain momentum as you emerge from these challenging times.

Doers Vs Thinkers and how that affects Efficiency

Stay Ahead of Your Competition with Tailored Sales Training

Question 1: How Healthy are Your Pipelines, and What Can You Do to Make Them Healthier?

Because of the pandemic, many Sales teams are still finding online lead-generation efforts difficult. As a result, teams are struggling to strengthen their prospecting muscle. Consequently, the skill of maintaining customer rapport has diminished. Never has it been so important to teach your Salespeople how to develop stronger relationship-creation behaviours. This performance gap may have emerged after a long period of time when the prospecting process was minimal or even dormant. Alternatively, they may have gone unnoticed while the pipeline was still plentiful. However, the longer the problem remains unaddressed, the more serious the consequences for your team’s KPI – and yours!

Question 2: Has Your Organisation Turned the Corner on Remote Selling?

Is your Sales team still struggling to maintain mojo? Are they struggling to sell on a virtual platform still? Or worse yet, are they falling victim to work from home distractions?

5 Questions to Assess Sales Pipeline Health

Virtual and digital selling are here to stay. However, many Salespeople are not equipped to succeed in this new environment. Without the right training, reinforcement, and tools, they are finding that access and engagement with buyers is more and more challenging. If there are skill gaps in this area you are in trouble. Moreover, if the resources and strategies you are sharing with your Sales team are basically the same as the ones you had at the start of 2019, then you are officially at a competitive disadvantage. A lot of Sales has moved to online platforms, is your team up-to-date?

Stay Ahead of Your Competition with Tailored Sales Training

Question 3: What are you, Personally, Doing to Help Protect Key Customer Relationships?

Pay close attention. Your key customers are seeing more of your competitors these days! And your competitors, in the current environment, are pulling out all the stops to secure their business. Contact with key relationships needs to be nurtured and secured. And ultimately, a C-level to C-level contact is one of the best ways to secure them. You personally need to be close to your most precious accounts. It should be a top priority to work with your Sales team’s pipeline. Also, consider taking part in regular business-review meetings with key relationships.

6 Techniques To Improve How You Sell To C-Level Executives | C-Level

Put simply, keep working on that emotional connection with your client – you know your competition is!

To Stay Ahead of Your Competition and Update Your Team’s Selling Behaviour contact KONA for Tailored Sales Training on 1300 611 288 for a confidential conversation, or email info@kona.com.au anytime.

LAURETTE WITH HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY ON IT FOR KONA GROUP SALES TRAINING SALES HEALTH CHECK

An astonishing 85% of sales training falls short of delivering on its ROI. Additionally, approximately 80% of new skills are lost within one week of training if they are not used, and about 87% of skills are lost within a month of training if they are not used regularly. Sales is the lifeblood of a company. Therefore, without steady sales, companies fail. Yet, some sales teams receive little, if any, training. Others receive inadequate one-hour seminars and are told they have just completed sales training. Is it any wonder why sales training doesn’t work? The best salespeople in the world are akin to Olympic-level athletes. However, companies treat them as if they can simply hit the ground running and sell, sell, sell without any training at all.

Consider how many hours go into training for the Olympics. Ultimately, an Olympic gymnast trains for years before hitting the mat with her teammates. So, we should do no less for our sales leaders! There are many reasons why sales training doesn’t work. The right sales training techniques, however, can help your sales team train for their own unique “Sales Olympics.”

Sales Training Not Working? Here are Five Reasons Why Your Training Fails

A typical sales training scenario is a one-day, half-day or even shorter training session. That involves, an expert, consultant or high-producing salesperson to be invited into a company to speak to their sales team. The expert may hand out books or binders, encourage team members to participate in team-building exercises and listen to plenty of motivational speeches. After a day of receiving exhaustive knowledge on communications, persuasion, prospecting and follow-up, the sales team is told they have successfully completed training. They return to their regular work the following day, and soon the old habits return.

There are many reasons why some sales training sessions fail and others succeed.

Here are five common reasons why sales training often fails.

1. Activities are not tailored to adults. Considering the typical sales training model, it is unsurprising that companies fail to achieve their training ROI. KONA Group CEO Garret Norris, an expert in adult education, identified several key factors for best practices for adult learning. Adults need training that speaks to their learning needs, not training modelled after typical university classroom practices.

KONA Group CEO Garret Norris on Why Training Does Not Work

Adults engaged in learning activities need to:

Know why they are participating in an activity.
Feel invested in the outcome — “What’s in this for me?”
Learn through doing. Newly learned activities must be practised to become second-nature.
Solve problems. Solving problems helps place a new activity into an adult’s long-term memory.
Learn in a social setting. Adults, even more than children, prefer to learn while among peers.
Tap into their life experience. That is, so they forge connections between what they have just learned and real-life scenarios and situations they remember.
Integrate new knowledge with existing information. They like to see a connection between what they have just learned with things they have previously learned.

Assuming adults who attend a one-day seminar will become exceptional salespeople the following day is an unreasonable expectation. Sales training issues aren’t problems with salespeople — they are problems with the model used to train adult learners, whose needs remain unmet by lecture-style workshops.

2. Not enough time allowed for results.

Another factor often overlooked in why sales training doesn’t work is leadership. Companies may invest in sales training, but if the company’s leadership team doesn’t support the time required to learn new skills, sales training may fail. Companies often seek immediate ROI for investing in sales training, but as we have seen, this is an unrealistic expectation. Failing to give the participants enough time to learn, practice and perfect new skills is like asking an out-of-shape adult to run a 10K next week — you can ask, but the person is likely to fail (never mind get hurt!). To truly enact a culture of continuous learning in your organisation, you must “put your money where your mouth is” and pay more than lip service to sales training. Corporate leaders must be willing to allow salespeople to attend training. They must be patient while new skills are learned. Systems must be set up to monitor, measure and report on sales results, with the data used not to punish low performance, but instead to coach and train for improvement.

3. Lack of leadership buy-in and participation.

Can you imagine a NRL team coach who never attends practice? Or the captain of the AFL team telling his players he’s too busy practising his surfing to attend team practice? The same thing happens with many sales managers: they assign personnel to training without attending training themselves. When sales managers fail to attend training, it leads to a big disconnect between “Do as I say” and “Do as I do.” They give mixed messages about the importance of training. Perhaps more importantly, they cannot model the appropriate behaviours because they haven’t learned alongside their staff what’s important.

Managers must be willing to commit the time and effort to sales training alongside their team members. Actively participating in sales training not only encourages team members but demonstrates support for the key concepts being taught. Whether it’s participating in classroom activities alongside trainees or role playing along with them, when the manager participates, training is more effective.

4. Start With the End in Sight: Set Goals

The first step to creating an ideal sales training model is to begin with the end goal in mind. Establish key goals, metrics and measurements first, before creating your training.

Identify what you would like the sales team to learn, know and do after the training is completed. The goals for product knowledge sales training may be quite different from the goals for sales skills training. Identifying which skills to focus on first, and the desired outcomes, will have the most impact. Additionally, practising in a safe, supportive training environment takes much of the risk out of trying new activities. A supportive and encouraging coach ensures people know when they have demonstrated a new skill successfully.