What is Sales Training?

Written by Mike Schultz

President, RAIN Group
Sales Training Defined: Sales training is the process of improving seller skills,
knowledge, and attributes to drive seller behavioral change and maximize sales
success. To be most effective, sales training should be viewed, designed, and executed
as a change management initiative.
The global market for sales training is approximately $4.6 billion.
Yet most sales training fails to deliver lasting results.

This is because most companies do not define and approach sales training properly.

To deliver effective sales training, you need to redefine what sales training is. You need
to focus on changing your sellers' behaviors to drive sales results and support this
change as a change management initiative.

A New Approach to Sales Training

Sales training used to be about developing specific skills in a 1- or 2-day training
program. Sellers would attend training, learn new sales skills and then were expected to
immediately apply those skills to their jobs. For the most part, they were left to their own
devices. It was up to the seller to retain the information from the training and recognize
when and where to apply it.
When you consider that 77% of learning is forgotten in just 6 days if not reinforced, it's
no wonder that most training was not producing the desired results over the long term.
With this knowledge, and the scars from a few sales training failures, companies moved
to improve sales training with reinforcement. Blended learning became an industry buzz
word. It was no longer about a 1- or 2-day training program. Training now included
assessment, eLearning, virtual instructor-led training (vILT), email, and gamification.
While blended learning has been a step in the right direction, especially in helping
sellers remember the training itself, oftentimes it does not go far enough to
drive behavioral change.
The most effective sales training focuses on true behavior change. Skills need to be
learned, absorbed, and applied on the job.

The Most Effective Sales Training

The most effective sales training takes into account all of the positive learning advances
of the last decade and adds:
 Transformational Experience: For true behavior change to take hold, sellers
need to go through a transformational experience. There are psychological principals
that need to be applied to effect long-term behavior change. This includes
understanding how adults learn and how people work (and work together).
 Coaching: Coaching and support from first-line sales managers is critical for
driving behavioral change. When applying new skills, sellers need to know exactly
what to do, have support for when they're not in their comfort zone, need feedback to
calibrate their behaviors, and need to be held accountable for taking action and being
productive.
 Leadership Support: It's not enough to just develop the desired sales skills. You
also need a work culture that drives and supports top sales performance, and
leadership that prioritizes sales success.
 Motivation: Without motivation, you won't change sellers' behaviors. Sales
motivation goes beyond compensation. In one of our research studies, we found that
Value-Driving Sales Organizations had sellers who were much more motivated than
The Rest. When sellers believe they make a true difference for their customers,
they're much more motivated to sell.
 Value: When sellers create value and are valuable to buyers, they win. All sales
training must connect to the value you can bring forth to your buyers. For the most
successful sales and sales training, and to achieve—and maintain—top performance,
you need value to be the core focus.

Sales Training Programs

Sales training can be broken down into a number of topics and skills. Sales training
programs should cover the spectrum of the sales process, from finding new clients and
winning sales opportunities to growing accounts and managing sellers.

Sales training topics that are core to driving the greatest success and improvements in
sales competencies include:
 Consultative Selling—fundamental (uncovering needs, building relationships,
crafting solutions) and advanced (insight selling to inspire buyers with ideas and
change their thinking and agendas in critical areas)
 Sales Prospecting
 Sales Negotiation
 Sales Presentations
 Sales Opportunity Management