When
should you invest in developing your sales team’s skills?
- You have new salespeople and need to prepare them before their first independent meetings with clients
- Team members sell in different ways and you need a common approach and standards
- You have salespeople with very strong results, but the performance of the others is uneven
- The company offers good terms, but deals are lost during the negotiation process
- Sales are declining, but it is unclear whether the cause is the sales team’s skills, the sales process, the positioning, or the market
How we approach sales trainings
We tailor the content and scope of each sales training program to:
- The company’s industry—for example, selling agricultural equipment is very different from selling software
- The specifics of the products or services
- The complexity and duration of a standard deal
- The participant’s current level and experience
- The organization’s goals
Interactive methods
During the training, we use interactive approaches that allow participants to practice specific sales techniques and approaches:
Role-plays
Demonstrations
Game-based simulations
Business case work
Video recording and analysis
Self-assessment questionnaires
Group discussions
Practical assignments
How do we create the sales skills trainings?
Step 1
Project goals
We organize an initial meeting with management to define the project goals.
Step 2
Interviews and/or focus groups
We assess needs through interviews and/or focus groups with participants and their managers to understand the specific requirements and challenges of the role.
Step 3
Program
Based on the data, we create the final program, discuss it, and confirm the design with the project owner.
Step 4
Trainings
We deliver the training sessions.
Step 5
Recommendations
We collect feedback from participants and meet with the project owner to share impressions and recommendations.
Topics
Basic sales skills
Advanced sales skills
Sales negotiation
Sales management
Customer service
Customer relationship management
Sales mentoring
In addition to training, we offer sales mentoring—a development format in which the mentor and salesperson work in partnership. Mentoring helps participants apply what they have learned in real sales situations, develop new behaviors, and achieve more sustainable improvements in results.
Mentoring may focus on the following goals:
- Role identification and acceptance
- Assessment of current behavioral strategies and identification of alternative approaches
- Setting specific goals for testing new behaviors or strategies
- Addressing limiting beliefs and unhelpful sales mindsets
Case studies
Related articles
FAQ
Sales training develops the skills required by the company’s sales process. If the process itself needs to change, we can provide separate consulting support.
Before every sales training program, we conduct in-depth research into:
- The industry and how sales work within it
- The company’s specific business model and sales process
- The products and services it sells
- The specific challenges and development needs of the salespeople who will participate
Ideally, as part of the preliminary research, we conduct interviews with sales managers and seek their feedback on the program.
If the organization wishes, we work with sales managers to create an individual development plan for each salesperson participating in the training.
Sales training may not deliver the expected results when performance issues stem from the sales or marketing strategy rather than the team’s skills. We reduce this risk through in-depth preliminary research and advise the client when broader factors may limit the impact of training.
