How to Get the Most Out of Inside Sales Training

If you’re in a large (Zoom) room with a projector and attendees with a bunch of notebooks, you may feel like you’re missing the mark. This isn’t about memorizing a bunch of facts and hoping they can recite them when needed.

Sales is about skills.

It may be a good time to stop and reevaluate your training to ensure that both you and your sales reps are getting the most out of it. Read on to learn how to get the most out of your inside sales training.

Inside Sales Training Sessions

You’ve heard about Agile training sessions. The concept involves you breaking up the content into shorter chunks, and assigning reps to smaller groups to maximize engagement.

People tend to forget things learned in training sessions (60% is lost a week after training!), especially if they don’t put them into immediate practice, and long training sessions that take up a day may be a waste of their time — and yours. Combine training sessions with workdays and vice versa.

Try to put into practice things reps are learning as soon as possible, so the information and the skill aren’t immediately lost. Try to find ways to continually reinforce training when in the field as well.

Inside Sales Training Analytics

Analytics is only as good as the data collected and people reviewing it. We see people attempting to implement analytics before fully understanding how it will change their team’s behavior.

The typical outcome is that they generate a lot of data and do absolutely nothing with it. When done right, analytics will help you understand how your team is truly performing but only if you start by figuring out what you’ll do with different metrics — and what those metrics are.

Time to Review Your Tech Stack

It’s about output — not input. There’s a tool for everything today. That’s not to say you need something for everything, but if you’re doing something manually, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Break it into sections. Prospecting, sales calls, and follow-ups (for example). Go through each thinking about “can we do it better,” and “should we do more of it?”

Sales Training That Does Not Seem to Stick?

Information retention from lectures is about 20%. It’s important to put in place training that is going to consistently reinforce what reps need to know and update them as things change. These approaches need to be ongoing, rather than one and done.

Sales skills, industry knowledge, and company knowledge are among the major areas that reps need to keep up to date with. Given how different each is, it pays dividends to have different approaches for each.

If you want more information on how we can help you build a better sales team, contact Copilot today, so we can help you get started!