3 reasons why ongoing sales training is crucial to sales success

by Teresa Mulomi

Ongoing sales training is the success ingredient for strong outperforming sales teams. The sales and marketing landscape is continuously evolving to adapt to changes in technologies, consumer trends and other market nuances.

To stay on top of the trends and ahead of the competition, updating your sales team skills through ongoing training is critical. These are the 3 main reason why continuous training is crucial for the success of your sale team.

Keep up with industry trends

The sales and marketing industry is a highly competitive customer-driven field. As a result, technologies, consumer trends and market landscapes are continuously changing. It is wrong to assume that the training given during onboarding or an information dump workshop or seminar will remain relevant to your team throughout their career or for the next ten years.

Social media platforms are disrupting the way your sales team communicates with potential customers. Emerging technologies for generating prospects are on the rise and consumer preferences and taste keep changing all the time. As you can see, the market is not static. Your sales team can also not afford to be static.  Always being on top of the current sales trends through ongoing training is the best thing you can do for your team.

Learn and implement the best strategies

Are you using the best sales strategies?

Do you know the strategies that work and the ones that don’t? Training you sales team will help them understand the best sales tools, techniques and strategies to implement depending on different situations and mediums.

Sales training experts have made it their business to understand the best practices, the outdated practices and have insights on what works best for which mediums. Sales trainers have a rich repository of information and it is only through ongoing sales training that this information can trickle down to your team and empower them.

For example: A while back, cold-calling was considered a great sales strategy. However, for some industries, cold calling is a highly ineffective strategy. With this knowledge, many companies have stopped cold calling in favor of better lead generation tactics that produce better results such as warm calling.

Better information retention

87% of new skills are lost within a month of training. Research by Xerox has proven that only 13% of information is retained within a month of sales training.

These are very grim statistics but your team is not to blame, it’s your method. The human brain cannot retain a bulk-load of information especially if it’s conveyed over a short period of time. However, our brains process information better if they are delivered in small bite-sized chunks over a lengthy period.

Retention rates are even poorer when the training is presented verbally instead of visually, as is the case of most sales training. This means that if your sales team undergoes training on a regular basis i.e. yearly instead of once after every 5 years- time, repetition and practice will help them gain and retain good sales skills that they can implement to improve your bottom line.

Ongoing sales training can have a refreshing effect not only on the company’s bottom line but can have other trickle-down effects such as improving the companies competitive advantage and even boosting employee morale. Even though training can be costly, the benefits to the organization make it totally worth it.

Ensure you keep your sales team skills razor-sharp and current, enroll them in the sales training program by emailing the General Manager, Ms. Muthoni Ndegawa, on email at muthoni@corporatestaffing.co.ke.