This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

What do you arm your sales people with? A phone, a computer and a database of prospects (or worse, a phone book)?  How do you prepare them for what is to come, the rejection, or better still, the prospect who wants to buy?   How do we better equip our sales team and enable them to reach and exceed their goals? These are questions we recently decided to tackle at ReachForce…one of our answers came in the form of training.

Our typical training regime used to be comprised solely of a full-day quarterly kickoff.  During that time we would run through a few “sales” skills specific sessions, some background on our industry, and a piece on what we do and how we do it (for newbies).   Part team-building, part skills training, it was an exhausting day and by the end of it some of our more ADD inclined employees had mentally checked out.  Recently we decided to make some changes.  First, instead of only hosting training sessions on a once a quarter basis, each of our weekly sales meetings would be host to a mini-session led by a sales rep.  Second, our quarterly sales training meeting would be shortened to a little over half a day.

Some of the topics that have been assigned out (and presented) by our sales team are:

• Best Practices: Preparing for a first call – items to research/points to know prior to the call
• Overcoming Objections
• Winning Closing Techniques
• Managing Your Time Effectively
• Creating ‘Date Certain’ Decisions
• Call to action emails
• Bringing a proposal to life
• Upping the average sales price

Each of our reps was assigned a date and a topic.  There aren’t really parameters around what they prepare, some have used PowerPoint, some have just spoken and some have created handouts.  I can’t say that we’ve measured our results, but I can say that our reps have been able to put these things into practice as quickly as they are being taught.  One of the greatest things about this training is that it is led in a peer to peer setting.  We felt it very important to remove senior management from these meetings, thus alleviating the fear of looking stupid or asking questions.   Only our floor managers stay in the room with the sales reps, because our floor managers interact with our reps on a peer level, so they teach and learn alongside their fellow sales reps.

The topics listed above are just a few that we have come up with, our program certainly will continue to have fuel and the momentum of continuing education should have a great impact for us.  What kind of topics would your reps benefit from?