Whether your company sells shoes, software, or services, one thing is certain: your sales representatives will directly affect your company’s bottom line. Therefore, your sales representatives need to have profound knowledge of the product and must be well-trained in order to excel at their job. While this may seem like an easy task to fulfill, it entails more intricacies than you may imagine. In this article, we tell you all about training your sales representatives to reduce the number of mistakes being made, to facilitate the pinpointing of sales strategies that aren’t boosting performance, and to encourage better customer relations.
1. Focus on Product Knowledge First
While some companies have the tendency to hire individuals on the basis of their personal qualities (i.e., soft skills) such as their ability to smile and be endearing with strangers, this charisma can only go so far without the proper product knowledge. Your sales representative needs to be crystal clear on what they are selling. That includes knowing the price of the product and the Return on Investment (ROI) that the product will provide to its buyers. The salesperson should also know all about the customizations offered, how clients or customers can use the product, special features, such as tech-savvy tools that the product includes, and should likewise be able to answer any question their prospect may have. He or she should also know where to redirect the buyer in case they may need help from the support team.
2. Encourage Sales Representatives to Read Customer Testimonials
A great way to practice explaining the product to prospects and to solve their problem (i.e., by offering the product) is to look through customer testimonials. These often outline specifically what the customer enjoyed most, what their reason for working with the company was, and hence, provides the sales representative with solid information to work with in their next pitch.
3. Use E-Learning Platforms to Improve Training Outcome and Reduce Costs
Hiring new employees is an expensive process. Onboarding and training employees is also a very time-consuming one; in fact, training a new employee can cost as much as €1200! Hence, the goal for any company is to avoid a high turnover rate and keep employees as long as possible to avoid having to train new employees frequently. The extent to which they are well-prepared to perform in your company significantly depends on how well your sales representatives are trained, how ready they are to face customers, and how convincing their pitch is. To this end, training must be done properly and with tools that reduce the amount of time spent on the training process.
Lighthouse Organizational Development creates engaging digital learning content that is tailored to your specific products, processes, and technologies and require minimal effort on your side. E-learning boosts productivity by gathering, structuring, and distributing organizational knowledge that protects your organization from knowledge loss while providing a standardized learning experience for every employee being onboarded. E-learning saves your company time and budget, and ensures that your sales representatives are thoroughly trained to perform to the best of their abilities.
Looking for ways to boost your sales representatives team’s performance at a fraction of the cost of face-to-face training? Our team at Lighthouse Organizational Development is here to help. Contact us today.