For those business owners just starting out or only in business for a short period of time, does your sales training have a personal touch? If it doesn’t, it could set the stage for some long days down the road.
The aim of sales training is to equip your sales team to do their best for your business. Well-trained sales people will pursue the best leads and communicating effectively with customers, ultimately improving your sales and conversions.
By adding a personal touch to your sales training, you increase the chances of success for your sales team.
So just what does a personal touch mean in terms of sales training, and how can you implement it in your business?
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
When it comes to sales training, it’s all too easy to take a one-size-fits-all approach.
You set up a training day or give your sales team an e-course to complete on their mobile devices, delivering everything you think they need to know. However, this may not be the most effective approach for your business.
Here’s why:
- Different people have different learning styles;
- Different people learn at different speeds;
- Some team members will already be familiar with some of the material;
- Team members will have different gaps in their knowledge;
- Some people will learn better at different times of day;
- Some people will respond better to specific content delivery methods than others.
Understanding the different needs of your sales team members is vital in creating sales training that has a truly personal touch.
What Does Personal Training Look Like?
Personal training is focused on what is best for each individual learner.
Personal training can include:
- Offering different learning options (such as videos or interactive quizzes);
- Breaking training down into bite size pieces so learners can choose where to go next;
- Recommending new training modules based on each learner’s history;
- Giving learners a chance to focus on problem areas;
- Delivering different content based on each learner’s progress.
The Benefits of Giving Training a Personal Touch
Adding a personal touch to your sales training means you’ll be offering the best training for each individual member of your sales team.
By focusing your efforts on adapting your training to be appropriate for each individual learner, you increase each team member’s chance of getting maximum benefit from the training.
As the article “Modern Pharma Sales Training Deserves a Personal Touch” points out, customizing training to each learner’s needs improves the quality of the training.
Each person will receive the best content for them, in a way that they can personally work well with. Their engagement with the content will be more meaningful.
Making Training More Efficient
Adding a more personal touch to your training also means your training will be more efficient.
When you deliver the same training to everyone, some people will receive training in topics they’re already well versed in. As well as wasting time, this is likely to bore learners.
By personalizing your training, you let each employee skip over areas they are already familiar with.
More personal training also lets you see where each member of your team is struggling, giving you the chance to offer them support. Learners can put their focus on the areas they most need to improve.
Finally, by personalizing your sales training, you can pay attention to each learner’s preferred method of learning, for example by reading, answering quizzes or watching a video.
Targeting a preferred learning method is much more efficient than having everyone wade through material that doesn’t gel with their personal learning style.
When you add a personal touch to your sales training, you are essentially delivering the very best training for each member of your team.
The result is the best-trained sales people, who are an asset to your business.
Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com
About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a variety of topics including social media, how to build customer relationships, content marketing and how to offer the best training to your sales people.
