3 Ways to Rethink Your B2B Sales Training

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When was the last time you ever walked into a big box electronics retailer and expected a whole lot out of the sales associate? Probably back in the 1990's. The internet has revolutionized the customer buying experience. Companies that have not updated their sales training and enablement strategy to the 21st century risk poor performance, high turnover, and wasted talent and resources.

Whether you run sales for a scrappy young startup with one or two products, or you do it for a behemoth with thousands of products, the principles of rethinking your sales training are the same:

1. Teach them something they don't already know

The number one complaint veteran salespeople express is having to spend days in the classroom learning the particular sales methodology used at their company. Most sales methodologies repackage the same stages of the sales cycle with different names like "solution development". Arguably, having a sales methodology is better than not having one at all, but unless your sales force is composed mostly of new college grads, spending a week in sales methodology training is a waste of time and saps their initial excitement of joining your company.

Overwhelmingly, the salespeople I've trained have told me:

Spend time training me on the products, the messaging, and best customer case studies. I can handle the rest.

You can:

• Train them to do a simple product demo, so they don't need to drag the pre-sales engineer to every call.
• Do role plays with different customer personas they will encounter frequently, e.g. executives, managers, IT admins. Have them not just role play the sales rep, but more importantly, the customer. They need to feel the customer's pain, think about likely objections, and propose solutions that fit the customer's needs.
• Teach them how to convey key concepts with a simple whiteboard drawing. I love this because if a concept is simple enough to be sketched out by hand from memory, then you know it's been distilled down to its essence. Importantly, for the customer, it's memorable.

2. Discard the one-size-fits-all mentality

The second biggest complaint I've heard from salespeople is a company's over-reliance on e-learning. Yes, e-learning is scalable and much cheaper than in-person training, but most e-learning courses I've seen assume:

• You are an idiot unless proven otherwise
• A voice-over recording of someone doing a PowerPoint is as effective as a live trainer
• Everyone needs to learn exactly the same thing and how dare you try to skip ahead!

In addition, once a course has been created, I'll bet they are rarely, if ever, updated with new content. It's not a priority for Product Marketing teams and the platforms are usually too cumbersome. A live trainer can adjust the content every time if he chooses to.

So what can you do about this?

• Separate your learning content into fact-based and skills-based buckets. If it's a fact, e.g. "our customers include over two-thirds of the Fortune 500", put that into e-learning and documentation. If it's skills-based, put that into live training.
• Cater to different learning styles. For example, for facts, I much prefer reading vs. watching a video. But others might prefer a video.
• Break e-learning modules into bite-sized pieces of no more than 3-5 minutes. That way, sales reps will be much more likely to review something they don't feel confident about.

3. Treat learning as a continuous process

Too often, companies bring on new sales reps or introduce new products with a big bang, then the effort peters out. This has two main problems:

1. Studies show people can only absorb a limited amount of information per day. Anything beyond that is time and effort wasted. Cramming training into 2 or 3 days is sensory overload.
2. People also learn best when they are in a situation that require new knowledge. For example, someone in telesales may never have to whiteboard, but a field rep with a face to face customer meeting tomorrow will be very keen to learn a whiteboard sketch today. Relevance is a key test of whether you should teach something.

What you can do:

• Make sure you have a very user-friendly content management system (CMS), not a fileshare or other dumping ground of information. In addition, you need to someone or a team dedicated to curating the content, deleting outdated ones and bringing the most important ones to the front. Bad systems are often a people and process problem, not a technology problem.
• Equip every sales manager with coaching skills. Too often, when a company relies solely on trainers or product marketing to do the whole job, they miss out on just-in-time coaching where the benefit would be greatest.
• Develop learning paths, like a university. Give your sales people, customer support staff, sales engineers, etc., clearly defined sequence of what they need to learn, from a basic to advanced stage, and develop appropriate content. It's quite possible someone could "test out" of a course that teaches basic domain knowledge and immediately move on to a more advanced topic.

In Conclusion

If you follow the 3 principles I've described, you are on you way to building a truly differentiated and engaged sales team. I've provided some ideas in each principle to enable you to take action immediately, but you need to decide what works best in your organizational context.

Perhaps the greatest challenge you'll face is the "we've always done it this way" mentality. Fight the good fight and may you succeed!

1. Teach them something they don't already know

2. Discard the one-size-fits-all mentality

3. Treat learning as a continuous process