Training Sales Teams to Win New Opportunities: How Sales Plans Can Drive Success

Within your organization, you may have noticed that top performers are meticulous planners. They understand that success doesn’t happen by chance and, as a result, they spend time at the beginning of the sales process preparing a well-thought-out strategy for “planning to win.” In our previous article, we explored the importance of understanding what matters most to your customer’s key stakeholders, and the types of questions that can help you discover and align their objectives and challenges with your solutions and unique business value.

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AI in Sales Training: Exploring Its Potential and Its Current Limitations

Today, there is hardly any more popular topic than artificial intelligence (AI) — its current capabilities, its future possibilities, its benefits and dangers. While AI will certainly be helpful and impactful, not even experts and scholars know what the “AI revolution” will look like ten or twenty years from now, nor when the true “year of AI transformation” will be.

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5 Sales Training Ideas to Drive Team Productivity

Sales reps never seem to have enough days in the month for all the phone calls, emails, meetings they need to have with buyers. Add to that the management and administrative tasks that go with every sale, and even top performers may end up exhausted and frustrated. They need help improving their productivity—to maximize sales results while reducing the cost, energy, and time spent on each deal.

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Empowering Your Team with AI: Effective Training for Customer Service Success

In recent years, the role of technology, especially the role of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, has significantly increased across a variety of industries. Customer service is one of the industries that has been introduced to the capabilities of AI technology, and businesses are turning to it and other evolving technologies to improve the quality of their business and the customer’s experience.

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3 Ways to Make Your Sales Training More Personal

Like many in the learning business, it’s likely you’ve spent the past several years adapting your sales enablement approach toward meeting the needs of an increasingly remote and, in some cases, highly distributed workforce. And, while the COVID-19 pandemic challenged each of us to redirect learners to new forms of enablement, it also provided a unique opportunity to view existing training methods in a new light and to reassess what has worked and what hasn’t for our learners.

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The New Age of Selling Is Here: Are Your Reps Ready?

Prospective buyers are generally reluctant to speak to sellers, which is one of the most considerable roadblocks salespeople face. And there are many factors that contribute to this reluctance beyond simple disinterest. For one thing, the sales landscape has dramatically and rapidly shifted in recent years. Since the late twenty-tens and accelerating through COVID-19, the sales process has become much more complex.

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How to Use Continuous Learning to Create Unstoppable Sales Teams

After their initial 90 days, your new sales reps likely feel ready to interact with buyers and lead sales calls. But ongoing training beyond this initial period is critical for their capacity to learn and improve. According to the Ebinghaus Learning Curve, tasks will require less time and resources the more they are performed. An employee takes time to learn to perform a certain task, and as they repeat it they learn to complete it quickly and more efficiently.

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How To Instill a Culture of Sales Training That Will Last

Even with staff that are capable of self-starting the learning process, no sales organization can afford to take sales training for granted — and it doesn’t stop when onboarding ends. When training is built to correlate with the sales process and pipeline, it makes a direct impact on results. To keep this training-results-training feedback loop flowing, we need to make training an ever-present practice with a culture of learning that permeates the organization through and through.

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Sales Training for Non-salespeople

However, when the concept is introduced, it’s greeted with cold stares, heavy sighs and resistance. Whether the employees voice their concerns or keep them to themselves, they sound something like this: “I’m not a salesperson.” “I didn’t join this company to sell.” “I don’t want my customers to think I’m trying to sell them more.”

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Sales Training vs. Sales Coaching: What’s the Difference

Although sales training and sales coaching both aim to improve a sales team’s performance, each process follows a unique approach.

Sales training equips reps with the tools they need to get started, but sales coaching is what allows for an individual’s continued growth over time. To ensure success, it’s important to understand how these two pieces work together, and when each should be used in your organization.

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Has Buying Changed and Has B2B Selling Adapted?

My articles begin with analogies so we'll start by asking, has baseball changed?

Games take longer, there is role specialization, starting pitchers rarely complete games, hitters are stronger, pitchers routinely throw in the mid 90's and there is a trend towards either hitting a home run or striking out. But it's still baseball. It is still played the same way. The changes are superficial.

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Lessons Learned From Talking to 53 Sales Managers

I surveyed 53 sales managers, asking them (among other things) what essential skills their top-performing salespeople possess. Okay, it wasn’t an actual survey.

However, our team at Sales Readiness Group (SRG) recently completed rolling out a sales training program from a large sales organization, and I was reviewing my notes from interviews with frontline sales managers as part of the customization process.

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7 Ways to Create Engaging Learning Experiences

What we’ve learned from the sudden shift to remote work is that people are generally quite positive about technology adoption to support their work and learning requirements. Many learning and development (L&D) professionals have scrambled to keep the lights on during the COVID-19 pandemic but, at the same time, they have taken the opportunity to evolve learning experiences into the digital era.

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ELAvate! Sales eZine Michael Griffin ELAvate! Sales eZine Michael Griffin

Igniting Motivation: How to Unlock Your Reps’ Desire for Coaching

Effective coaching sometimes requires us to shift our focus to igniting a coachee’s intrinsic motivation to change, as I mentioned in a previous blog post. This is not always easy to do, and some say it borders on the impossible. The good news is, there is an incredibly powerful tool one can use that has been proven by years of rigorous scientific study.

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