Sales Training For Small Business

B2B

Jenga stack of sales system

Sales training for small to medium size business needs to be highly tailored to the business to get a meaningful ROI. Below are some factors we consider to essential and provide in our sales training programs.

Building Rapport & Communication

Building rapport is often a bit overdone in sales training and encourages salespeople to be over familiar with new prospects. A bit of self-awareness from behavioural profiling is a powerful way to ensure effective communications.

Right Questions Preparation

Too many sales calls have no direction or sensible outcomes. The best place to start is to find out your customer pain points and if your B2B buyer has a problem you can solve. There's nothing that builds rapport like you telling a B2B buyer you can solve a big problem for them. Apply a bit of experience of paint points from existing customers and a bit of empathy and build a hypothesis. Test it by asking open questions. Warning! Don't state assumptions, test with prepared questions. We can help with this preparation and question development. ​

Handling Objections ​

It is important to strike the right balance here. In sales, you can't succeed if you give up at the first hurdle, but when you get a 'No' they mean it. It is important to prepare and note down what the common objections are, so that you can handle them in a polite way. When prepared you are much less likely to have an emotional response to an objection. Getting the right balance between pushing back on assumptions and getting into an argument takes a bit of practice, which we can do in role play. ​

Product Knowledge ​

Product knowledge is not something you will get on a sales training course, but you can develop a good understanding of the types of things you need to know and understand. I encourage my clients for example to develop an enquiry sheet, that enables the salesperson to collect the minimum information required to give a price. Knowing about the product is not enough. What really matters is how those features and benefits are going to make a difference to customers. Too many salespeople drone on about features and benefits and forget the customer has problem to solve. ​

Sales Processes ​

Motivation is like a sugar hit, it's short term and unreliable. This is why you need strong documented processes, for consistent and reliable closing deals. The best way to develop sales processes is with customer journey mapping so that the sales process will correlate well with their buying process. ​

Sales Performance ​

Ever heard the phrase 'you can't manage what you don't measure'? Too few salespeople are measuring the basic KPI's they need to be successful. Things you definitely need to measure are Deal days; Pipeline value; Outstanding quote value; Conversion rate. You absolutely need to know if you're going to make target or not. Looking back at the previous months' revenue is like driving using the rear-view mirror. ​

CRM ​

Customer Relationship Management - It's in the name. If you're not operating one, then you're probably not delivering it. Customer service starts at the first interaction, and the leads are free to leave at any point. So many companies I meet have lots of leads and potential leads that go begging because they don't operate a CRM.

If you see that your organisation might have some gaps in these areas, please get in touch here.