Designing a training programme for sales employees - your step-by-step guide
If you’re researching how to design a training programme for your sales employees, the chances are that you’re ready to take your employee sales training to the next level. Great news, you’ve come to the right place.
Sales training programmes make it easy for you and your team to follow a course of action to ensure that new skills are learnt and performance is improved. They are also a clear and structured way of outlining what you intend to achieve from your training, how you intend to achieve it and what you will track to measure success.
Designing a good sales training programme will help you identify what skill gaps you have within your workforce; you can then work towards filling those gaps to ensure you have a well-rounded and high-performing team.
A good sales training programme will give your business the competitive edge you need to succeed
We understand that the initial thought of designing a programme for your sales staff can seem overwhelming. You may start to wonder if it’s all really worth your time and whether it will actually make a difference to the bottom line of your business. The truth is that you can’t really afford not to implement an employee training programme for your sales team.
A good training programme will make your business more profitable
It makes sense, the better skilled your employees are, the better they will perform and the more profit you will see as a result. According to the Association for Talent Development (ATD), companies that offer comprehensive training programs have 218% higher income per employee than companies without proper training programmes.
Providing regular employee training will make you more desirable to new employees
In fact, 70% of employees would be somewhat likely to leave their current job to work for an organisation that is known for investing in employee development and learning. Whilst 76% of employees say that a company would be more appealing if it offered additional skills training to its staff.
Having a great sales training programme will also reduce your employee turnover rate
It has been said that retention rates rise 30-50% for companies with strong learning cultures. Training is also becoming increasingly in demand from millennials with 86% saying they would be kept from leaving their current position if training and development were offered by their employer.
So that’s enough of telling you the reasons why you so desperately need a training programme for your employees. Let’s get started on the step by step guide which details exactly what it is you need to do to design an effective sales training programme.
Step 1 - Identify what training your employees need
A personal trainer would never develop an exercise programme without knowing the needs of the client and you should never design a sales training programme without identifying the needs of your employees.
You need to find out what skill gaps are present in your organisation and what training would be most beneficial to improve the performance and knowledge of your employees.
How do I identify the training needs of my sales team?
Think about what you are trying to achieve. For example, do you want to decrease customer wait times to achieve more sales? Perhaps you want to improve the service your hotel guests receive in order to improve your TripAdvisor ratings. Whatever your goal is, write it down and follow step two.
Write down what knowledge and skills your employees will require in order to meet those goals. For example, if you want to decrease customer wait times, do your employees need to be trained around how to handle customer queries or complaints in an efficient manner? Should they be more knowledgeable about products and services to help them answer questions faster?
Use questionnaires and surveys to assess what your employees already know. If you want your employees to be more knowledgeable about your products and services you should ask questions that assess how much they know already. This will help you identify gaps in knowledge.
Look at customer reviews and customer feedback. This will make it obvious which areas need improvement. For example, you may notice that the majority of your customers complain about your restaurant staff not being attentive. You should then develop training to improve performance in this area.
Ask your managers which areas they think need working on. After all, they are in close contact with all staff and customers on a regular basis so they will be acutely aware of any skills or knowledge gaps.
Step 2 - Write out your main objectives
Training objectives help to keep all employees focused, they ensure everyone is always working towards the same goal. This makes it a lot easier to achieve real, tangible results.
Like any good objective, it should be a S.M.A.R.T.
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Timely
It should identify;
What specifically you hope to achieve. For example, ‘our employees will reduce customer wait times.’
What you are going to measure to ensure success. You may want to reduce wait times by 30% or increase your trip advisor rating by 1 star.
How you are going to ensure this success. So which training is going to be used to make sure you hit the goal mentioned above. It may sound something like this “We are going to reduce customer wait times by 30% through efficiency training.”
You then need to add a date by which you want this objective to be met and you have to make sure it’s realistic. There is no point setting a date for 3 weeks time if you know your employees haven’t got the time to do the full training within the 3 weeks.
Here are some examples of what your objectives may look like;
1). Our call agents will reduce customer wait times by 30% by the 30th of October through our efficiency training programme.
2). We will increase our trip advisor star rating by 1 in 6 months through our customer service training programme.
3). We will increase customer bookings by 50% by the 30th of December through our marketing training programme.
Step 3 - Design your training programme
This is the meatiest step in our guide because it’s all about actually designing the programme. You know what you want to achieve and when you want to achieve it, so it’s time to start designing your training. There are a few questions that you’ll need to ask yourself.
1). Do I have the resources already?
You may already have tonnes of resources around the subject you want to improve which is great. It means you just need to adapt them for training purposes. E.g. turn them into a presentation or create questions out of them.
If you don’t, you can create new resources using information from the internet or you can hire a training specialist in the area you require.
2). How do I want to deliver my training?
This step requires you to think about how you want to deliver your training but also which methods of delivery would be best suited to your employees.
For example, do you want to do a PowerPoint presentation or would you rather deliver it in video format so your employees can ingest the information in their own time?
Other delivery methods include;
Podcasts
Text-based articles
Workshops or classes
3). How are you going to make sure training is remembered and understood by your employees?
Delivering your training is just the first step in your programme. To make sure your training is effective you need to put a programme in place which will assess how well your employees are understanding and retaining the new knowledge which they’ve learnt.
Will you be;
Sending out questionnaires
Using surveys
Allocating homework
All of the methods above are crucial to make sure new knowledge is properly retained. With no post-training activities, you’ll find it difficult to make knowledge stick and to see any real change in employee performance.
Step 4 - Implement your training programme
You’ve created your training and it’s now time to implement it. But how exactly do you implement your training programme?
You need to make your employees aware of the new training
Let your staff know what your new training is, why they need it and what you hope to achieve as a business by everyone completing the training.
Share a calendar of events that highlights when the training is happening e.g. presentations etc. or when new training is going to be released.
Give each individual employee their own training programme, with this, you’ll be able to track all of their progress and results. It will make it 100 times easier to keep everyone on track and assess where your staff are struggling. Download our free training plan template below;
Individual training plans also make it easy to analyse patterns and trends of your workforce as a whole. If you want an easier way to gather insights try Engage our digital training and reporting tool for free. Engage lets you deliver training through our digital microlearning platform making it effortless to see strengths and weaknesses amongst your workforce. The digital reports allow you to carry out assessments and automatic scoring cards are generated after you submit your report. These make it simple to view insights across your workforce.
Step 5 - Keep everyone on track with your training
You’ve created your wonderful training programme, everyone is excited and engaged then after the first month, enthusiasm and motivation starts to fizzle out. This is the primary reason why most training programmes fail.
In order to see yours through to ensure you see real tangible results, you MUST keep everyone on track along the way.
How do I keep everyone on track?
Give employees their own mini objectives
You’ve got your overarching objective for the business but this can lose meaning for your employees because it’s not personal or specific to them. People pay attention to things when they are relevant to them.
Here’s an example:
Your overarching business objective is: Our call agents will reduce customer wait times by 30% by the 30th of October through our efficiency training programme.
Your employee’s individual objective should be: I will improve my product knowledge to help me reach my goal of 50 customer phone calls per day by the end of October.
Get all managers onboard
Your managers need to be your cheerleaders, if they aren’t on board with your training then you’re fighting a losing battle. Tell them how the training will benefit them and make it easier to manage their team. Explain how important the training is for the company and get them to talk about the training with their employees at every opportunity.
In morning meetings managers should remind employees about the training.
In conversations about issues at work, managers should talk about how the training can help them with the problems they are concerned with.
Managers should set deadlines for when the training should be completed by their staff.
They should always be checking in to see how their employees are getting on with the training.
This will show staff that you are taking the training seriously and it won’t go unnoticed if they fail to complete it.
Send notifications
If you’re using a digital training app you can usually send alerts and notifications which go straight to an employees mobile phone or tablet device. Sending these twice a week is enough to keep everyone on track with their training.
If you don’t have a digital learning platform use emails or texts.
Put reminders up at work
Print out posters and put them up in places where your staff are most likely to see them.
In the staff room
At the entrance
At the exit
In their work vehicles
On the back of doors
In the kitchen
Step 6 - Assessing the effectiveness of your training programme
It would be great if you could leave your training programme ticking along and then reap the rewards at the end but unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. You need to set dates and times when you’ll check in to view progress and assess how well the training is working.
It’s a good idea to send out employee surveys
These help you gain knowledge around how useful your employees are finding the training. If you need some help with what questions to include take a look at this article - 85 questions to ask frontline employees about your workplace training.
Take a deep dive into the data
Look closely at where your staff are struggling or succeeding. If most employees are struggling in a certain area it is usually a sign that you need to create more resources and training for that particular area.
Take a look at which employees are on track with their training plans and which are behind, those that are falling behind will need some extra attention.
And that’s all there is to it. We hope you now have everything you need to design the perfect training programme for your employees.
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