How can you scale sales development training and coaching across your organization?

1 Assess your current situation

Before you design or implement any training or coaching program, you need to evaluate your current state of sales development. This includes identifying your goals, metrics, challenges, gaps, and best practices. You can use tools like surveys, interviews, quizzes, call recordings, and CRM data to gather feedback and insights from your SDRs, managers, and customers. This will help you understand what works well, what needs improvement, and what are the priorities for your sales development team.

2 Create a standardized curriculum

Once you have a clear picture of your sales development situation, you can create a standardized curriculum that covers the essential skills, knowledge, and processes for your SDRs. A standardized curriculum ensures that all your SDRs receive the same level of training and follow the same guidelines, regardless of their location, experience, or background. Your curriculum should include topics such as product knowledge, value proposition, buyer personas, prospecting techniques, email and phone scripts, objection handling, qualification criteria, and CRM usage.

3 Use a blended learning approach

A blended learning approach combines different modes of delivery, such as online courses, live workshops, webinars, podcasts, videos, and e-books. This allows you to cater to different learning styles, preferences, and needs of your SDRs. It also enables you to leverage the benefits of both synchronous and asynchronous learning, such as interaction, feedback, flexibility, and convenience. A blended learning approach can help you scale your sales development training by making it more accessible, engaging, and effective for your SDRs.

4 Implement a coaching culture

Training alone is not enough to ensure the success of your SDRs. You also need to provide regular and consistent coaching that reinforces the learning outcomes, addresses the performance gaps, and motivates the SDRs to achieve their goals. Coaching is not just a one-time event or a top-down directive. It is a culture that fosters continuous learning, feedback, and improvement. To implement a coaching culture, you need to define the roles and responsibilities of the coaches and the coachees, set clear expectations and objectives, use a structured coaching framework, and track and measure the results.

5 Leverage technology and tools

Technology and tools can help you scale your sales development training and coaching by automating, optimizing, and enhancing the learning and coaching processes. For example, you can use a learning management system (LMS) to create, deliver, and manage your online courses and assessments. You can use a sales enablement platform to provide your SDRs with the right content, tools, and guidance at the right time. You can use a call intelligence software to record, analyze, and coach your SDRs' calls. You can use a gamification software to make your training and coaching more fun and rewarding.

6 Evaluate and iterate

The last step to scale your sales development training and coaching is to evaluate and iterate your program based on the feedback, data, and results. You need to measure the impact of your training and coaching on your SDRs' skills, behaviors, and outcomes. You also need to solicit feedback from your SDRs, managers, and customers on the quality, relevance, and satisfaction of your training and coaching. Based on the evaluation, you can identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your program, and make the necessary adjustments and improvements.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?