Each member of your sales team needs the right training to reach his or her goals. You can give your employees the tools they need to exceed your expectations by including the following six tips in your sales training program.
1) Improve Product Knowledge by Using Real-Life Sales Situations
Inside sales techniques work best when your employees understand every aspect of your products and services. Without a deep understanding of the products, they cannot answer client questions or show off the products’ best features.
Often, sales associates think that they know how to give stellar inside sales presentations. They don’t identify their gaps in knowledge until they have a chance to hear themselves talking to clients. Suddenly, they can listen to hesitancy in their voices while answering difficult questions.
Recording sales calls lets your team hear themselves make the wrong steps. It also allows you to point out opportunities that they could have used to talk about other features.
2) Focus on Building Rapport During Calls
Employees that meet face-to-face with potential clients have the advantage of reading body language. Body language can make it easier to build a rapport with clients because you get to mirror their stances and see uncertainty.
You don’t have the benefit of body language when you use inside sales strategies. Still, you must build a rapport during calls.
Building a rapport on sales calls is more of an art than a science. It takes much practice to tune a sales associate’s ear to the nuances in a client’s voice.
Listening to recordings of past sales calls makes it easier to develop rapport instincts and identify missed opportunities. It’s like a football coach playing footage to a team. When you see (or hear) everything laid out before you, you can learn from your mistakes.
3) Practice Active Listening to Maintain Control of Sales Calls
Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience explains that most people only pay attention to 20 to 50% of what they hear. In most situations, you only give attention to the most important information around you. The rest gets filtered out.
Not surprisingly, you can miss sales opportunities when you only pay close attention to 50% of what a client says on the phone.
You can make your sales associates better listeners by including active listening in your training seminars. Active listening involves giving someone your full attention, using verbal clues to show that you’re listening, letting speakers communicate their thoughts, and replying appropriately to questions and demands.
You can help people improve their active listening skills by demonstrating strategies to them during discussions. For an even more significant impact, use phone recordings to show them examples of when they don’t sound like they’re listening actively. You can also point to missed opportunities when active listening might have lead to a sale.
Call recordings also give you evidence that a sale’s associate can improve his or her approach. When you don’t have a record, the person might disagree with you. When you have a strong example, it’s difficult for the person to become hostile or ignore your feedback.
4) Use Specific Examples to Improve Communication Strategies
General tips can give your sales team some instruction, but they don’t work as well as specific examples.
When you want to improve someone’s communication strategy, you need to provide specific examples of where the person did an excellent job or missed an opportunity.
Recording sales calls makes it possible for you to provide examples during training feedback sessions. While you listen to a rep’s calls, mark areas that you can use as strong examples of positive and negative communication strategies.
5) Boost Employee Engagement With Achievement-Specific Rewards
Positive feedback and rewards can encourage sales teams to keep doing their job well. You can get better results, though, when you tie rewards to specific achievements.
For example, you might discover that one of your associates only spends 75% of her time actively talking to potential clients. You want that person to use 95% of their work time on the phone, though. By setting that specific metric, you give the employee a number to work towards. When the person reaches that goal, you can reward her with a gift card or public praise.
You can’t offer achievement-specific rewards unless you can access each’s performance. Software like CallTools includes features that let you track each person’s metrics. Use these metrics to boost employee engagement and provide actionable feedback based on hard evidence.
6) Share Success Stories to Boost Morale and Provide Positive Examples
Spending all day on the phone can make people feel isolated. It’s easy to forget that you’re a part of a team striving to meet goals together.
Sharing success stories can boost your team’s morale by reminding them that each person plays a crucial role. It also gives you an excellent opportunity to share some of the best sales strategies used by your top sellers.
When people hear a team member turn a negative call into a positive experience that leads to a sale, they can learn from the experience and get a reminder that every call offers a new opportunity.
Call Tools has features that you can use to improve training and magnify your inside sales. You can even use it to build better relationships with clients. For example, the software lets you set post-sale reminders. Relationships matter. It’s that simple. However, some reps don’t engage in post-sale conversations with their customers. With Call Tool’s software, sales associates get reminders to contact customers to build post-sale relationships,
Learn more about the training benefits of Call Tools by connecting with an expert ready to talk about the features that matter most to you.
