Five tips on organising internal sales training

For educating employees, many companies rely on external agencies and expensive, specialised training sessions. But these are often only one-offs and, though they can bring some success, they will never replace smaller, regular internal training within a company. Use the potential of your own staff to organise regular, short and powerful internal sales training where well-seasoned employees pass on their know-how to less experienced colleagues. Here we will explain how to go about this.

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The idea that selling is a service

According to Selling Power, the key to the success of employees is the idea that sales is not an attempt to sell anything to anybody, but rather a consultation service within which an experienced salesperson can truly and effectively help a client with their situation or problems. Accentuate this idea at your training sessions.

Experiences of senior colleagues

Invite senior salespeople to individual training sessions to share their own examples of sales successes and failures they have learned from and that made them able to share their experience.

Dialogue

Training should not just be directive. It should not be a monologue, but a dialogue within which older colleagues share their experience and the younger ones share their ideas and innovation visions.

Role plays

Within your training, allocate roles to the participants and show various solutions to possible situations in the form of practical examples and role plays. If you stick to theory only, a large part of your training will not leave any trace in employees. You must therefore show the individual points of training in practice.

Sales theory

Explain also sales theory to employees. Talk to them about what "cross-selling" or "up-selling" means, what the basic selling techniques are or what types of contracts they can close from the legislative point of view.

 

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Article source Selling Power - online version of a US magazine for sales managers
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