Posted in Business Advices
- Teach your team about the mission and goals of the company. It can take up to 90 days to completely train a new sales team. On the first day, however, they should know who the company is, what they are selling, and who they are selling to. Schedule a day or half-day for this introduction. During this day, you should: State the company’s mission and development. Here, you should describe what the company sells as well as their role in the industry.
- Describe the features of the product in detail. Give a demonstration of how it works. Teach your team everything they need to know to sell the product. What does it do? How is it made? What makes it a good buy?
- Give a thorough introduction to the types of clients interested in your product. Describe what they need and how your product can fill that need.
- Develop useful materials to teach your sales team about the industry. Good training materials are brief. They provide models and definitions to help your sales team succeed in the industry. The team can refer back to these materials as they begin work. Some good training materials include: Draw up a list of definitions for common terms and give it to the new team.
- Case studies: Provide specific stories about past sales that both worked well and failed. Use the case studies to instruct the new team on what does and doesn’t work in your industry
- Executive summaries: Instead of bombarding your new sales team with several long documents, summarize the main points. Give them a synopsis of major clients, competitors, and vendors.
- Demonstrate how to use the technology for your sales team. If you want, you can invite someone from IT to come in and do a demonstration for the entire team. You can also coach new employees individually by walking them through the process of using the software.
- Remember to show them how to use all forms of technology, including any software, phones, point-of-sale systems, and website
- Provide scripts for selling the product over phone and email. Scripts provide a general format that your sales team can follow while they sell your product. You can also provide scripts for how to deal with a difficult customer or how to convince a customer to repurchase.
- Ask the team to sell you something. Pretend to be a client interested in buying your product. Either as a team or individually, have your employees try to sell you the product, just as they would to an actual client. Take notes on how they do this. Praise them for what they did well, then offer suggestions for how they could improve