person taking a sales training course | Funnel Clarity

Sales training courses can help your sales team perform at their best. Sales is a skill and just like any other skill, it can be taught and honed. A good sales training curriculum can elevate your team’s performance and also have a massive return on investment. For most sales forces, even one additional closed deal as a result of training can help pay for the cost of training and much more.

There can be a lot to consider when choosing a sales training partner. The method for training is a critical component. Most companies can provide online sales training courses or live training. The content is the other critical component when it comes to finalizing the courses that your team should take. Here is a list of 6 different types of courses that you should know about for 2022. You will also learn what to look for when searching for these types of courses.

Account Manager Sales Training

It is vital to retain your clients, especially for companies with a subscription model. This is only possible with a well functioning and well trained team of Account Managers or Client Success Managers. These individuals need to do more than just respond to problems as they arise. Successful client success managers will be able to upsell and cross-sell within the organization.

These skills however, are not intuitive and need to be taught. Look for an Account Manager training course that teaches how to be proactive in a client’s account. This means knowing all the decision makers, their priorities and changes in their business objectives. If your Account Managers are not paying attention to this, your competitor’s Account Executives probably are.

Make sure your Account Managers have the skills they need to outperform any potential competitor. You can find more details on Funnel Clarity’s Account Manager training program here.

Sales Development Training

Prospecting or Sales Development is considered to be one of the hardest parts of the job by most sales people. This is due to the fact that sales people rarely get trained on the proper skills needed to be a highly successful prospector.

Most people know that being a successful SDR means doing your homework on the prospects you are calling. Unfortunately, most cold calling training courses do not teach how to properly execute on that research. When searching for a prospecting or sales development training course, make sure the course has examples on how to execute on the research an SDR does prior to calling a prospect.

Any sales development training course you select should also show the participant how to use multiple mediums. It’s not enough to only email or only call a prospect. A successful prospector will call email and use social media to get in front of their prospects. The training course should teach sales reps how to use all of these mediums together to achieve success. You can find an overview of Funnel Clarity’s sales prospecting training program.

Consultative Sales Training

Most sales leaders want their sales force to sell in a consultative manner. Buyers these days are very informed and sales reps have to be insightful and consultative in order to stand out. To be consultative is also to be a decision coach for the prospect you are working with.

The most important thing to look for in this type of sales training course is a customer decision journey. It could be called the customer decision model or any other variation. The main idea is that the training needs to be centered around the decision journey that the customer is taking, not the process a sales person should follow regardless of the prospect’s buying decision stage.

It is not possible to be consultative if a salesperson can not identify the buying journey that their prospect is on. Some sales leaders and teams think that sales negotiation training will help them close more deals at a higher value. Adherence to a customer decision journey however, is what helps sellers create more value for the customer during the sales cycle. This then leads to higher close rates and an increase in the average deal size.

When searching for a consultative sales training course, it is vital to make sure that the course is teaching a customer centric approach and process. You can learn more about our consultative sales training approach here.

Inside Sales Training

Most companies have Inside Sales Reps to fill the gap between SDRs and Enterprise Account Executives. Typically, ISRs handle the smaller deals that are out of scope for an Account Executive. Sometimes, they take on deals as large as anyone else in the company. More often than not, ISRs are also prospecting for their own leads.

Since Inside Sales Reps need to be adept at skills across the entire sales cycle, an inside sales course also needs to do the same. Any training course for an Inside Sales Reps responsible for the full sales cycle should teach them how to prospect, how to qualify and how to successfully coach a prospect to a closed deal.

Since ISRs typically handle smaller deals, these skills may not need to be covered in great detail but the training course should give a basic understanding of all three aspects. Find out more about what your team can learn in Funnel Clarity’s Inside Sales training course.

Disruptive Solution Sales Training

There are many companies out there that are pioneering highly innovative solutions. These are products and solutions that have not been adopted by a large portion of the marketplace. Therefore, buyers often have a hard time understanding solutions of this nature and do not have a standard process for purchasing these types of solutions.

In these types of sales, the salesperson has to be capable of painting a vision for the potential buyer. Due to the innovative nature of the solution, prospects may have a tough time grasping the value of the solution as it relates to their business. The salesperson has to be able to understand the prospect’s business and use that knowledge to show possibilities previously unseen by their prospects.

Make sure the training course you select for a disruptive solution can teach your sellers to do exactly this. You can find more details on Funnel Clarity’s Selling In a New Market Space page.

Sales Qualification Training

Sales leaders often report that they want their sellers to qualify better. For some teams, the sellers are too lenient with what they enter into the funnel. For others, it's the opposite. Some sellers will be too strict about what they allow to enter their funnel.

When searching for a qualification training course, try to find something that strikes a balance between the two scenarios mentioned above. Some common qualification tools like BANT can often be too limiting. Looking for a budget when a decision maker has only begun their buying process could lead the sales rep to determine that the prospect is not in a buying journey. While in fact, the decision maker is poised to begin considering a change.

On the other hand, just because someone says they like the product or service does not mean they are ready to become an opportunity. The sellers need to be able to identify changes in the organization that would cause their prospects to want something different from the status quo. Make sure the qualification training course you choose covers these elements and helps sellers focus on the most winnable opportunities. You can find more details on qualification training here.

What to Always Look for

Regardless of what content area you select, there are some things you should always look for in a sales training course. First, make sure the course comes with examples. Adults have a hard time learning new things and it is highly effective to show real examples of the skills being taught. Second, but perhaps more important, make sure the training course has a reinforcement plan. There is no ROI on sales training if the participants don’t use what they learn. Make sure any training course you select has a plan for reinforcement and habit change.

If you need help finding the right course for your team, please reach out to us for a consultation call.