Is your sales team spending enough time training?

We are spending a LOT of money on sales training, but not getting the true organisational benefits from it. The reality is that it’s not creating behavioural change and continuous improvement in our sales teams.

Recognising that the current sales training model is broken is all well and good, but what do you do about it? How do you initiate change and continuous improvement in your sales team?

In this post I am going to talk about developing a culture of training within your business, and present a 5-step process that will help deliver the change that you need to succeed.

Firstly, how much training is enough?

What you really need to understand is the optimum amount of hours you should be training, to achieve the outcomes you are looking to.

The major concern reps and businesses have with committing more time to training is that it could detract from how much they are selling. One study found that the average sales rep only spends 36% of their time actually selling:

Most seasoned sales professionals would say that 36% of your time selling is nowhere near enough, so can you risk decreasing that even more? That’s precious customer-facing time you could be losing.

On the flip side, let me ask you this: Of that 36% of your time selling, for how long are you at full productivity?

Most sales reps are not at full productivity even when they are selling, which means there is an opportunity to get more done with less selling time if you initiate the right training culture.

I recommend that if you could dedicate about 4 hours per week (rather than the average of 1.6 hours) towards sales training and development, then your execution would increase by such a significant amount it would validate the additional time spent training and not on the phone.

So then, how do you adopt a culture of training in your organisation?

Of course, before you can embed training and development into your sales team's daily lives, you need to have a solid base level of skills to work from.

This is where event-based training comes into play. You attend a sales event or have an in-house trainer come in and establish a base level of understanding for what your reps should be learning.

After that event, your team requires time and reinforcement to actually learn and adopt these new skills, which is why you need to follow a process for creating a common sales vernacular and weekly training rhythm that continues beyond that sole event.

Here is a simple 5-step process for doing so.

Step 1 - Map out an ‘ideal’ week in the life of your sales reps

The concept of an ‘ideal’ week is not a new thing, in fact it’s been a sales productivity framework for many years. You can read more about it in the book Time Traps: Proven Strategies for Swamped Salespeople by Todd Duncan.

Essentially, to work at full productivity, your sales reps need to understand what success looks like. If they were to have a great week, what would they do on Monday morning? Tuesday afternoon? How many calls would they have made every day?

You can work closely with your reps to map out what an ideal week would look like for each of them individually. By understanding what the optimum week is, from a sales productivity perspective, you can begin to find opportunities for embedding sales training into that schedule.

Step 2 - Create monthly themes

Once you have identified an ideal week for your sales rep, now it’s time to figure out what areas of training are most important.

I find it best to look at training through ‘themes’. A theme is a core topic of development that will impact the performance of your sales rep.

The idea is that you will focus on one theme for an entire month. An area within your business which has the potential to have a significant impact and that you believe you can create sustained behavioural change.

How do you pick your themes?

There are 7 key data points in your business that will have the most impact on your sales agenda:

1. Conversion rate from Prospects to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) - Did the marketing team qualify prospects?
2. Conversion rate from MQLs to Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) - Did you have a qualifying conversation with those marketing leads?
3. Conversion rate from SALs to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - Were you able to convert that conversation into an opportunity?
4. Conversion rate from SQL to Win - How many of the these opportunities do you win?
5. Discount rate - Did you provide any discounts?
6. Churn rate - Have you lost any customers recently?
7. % of revenue increase from existing accounts - Were you able to generate more revenue from your existing customers?

These data points should guide your decision for picking a theme that will have the biggest and most long-lasting behavioural impact on your team’s results, and will identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Step 3 - Focus on weekly development

Once you have your monthly theme, you need to go back to that ideal week and identify two key moments within the week that you can focus on development.

I recommend finding 2 hours during the week to schedule in this weekly development training:

1. Hour 1 - Individual coaching. Where you or your sales leaders can spend one-on-one time with each sales rep to focus on the monthly theme. It could be sitting side-by-side, on a conference call, reviewing recorded calls, or breaking down customer emails, to identify areas of development that could shift the needle within the chosen theme.
2. Hour 2 - Team discussion. In this hour, you will focus on high impact call reviews, and crowdsourced deal discussions that relate to the monthly theme. You could do role-plays, negotiating battles, or any sort of fun team development activity.

Step 4 - Develop daily drills

As well as the 2 hours of weekly development habits, you should aim to create daily drills for each of your reps that add up to about 2 hours of training time. These drills are designed to create good habits for your reps, and help them ‘warm’ up for the high impact sales opportunities.

Can you imagine if your favourite sports team ran onto the field without warming up? They would likely miss their first opportunity, and it would be frustrating for everyone. The same applies to your sales reps. If you don’t train your skills, and create daily habits, even champion teams struggle.

In most organisations it’s left up to the individual to kick off their day, which can cause inconsistency in performance. There will always be some people that come in and embrace the day, getting the most impact out of their first few hours. But there are also a whole lot of salespeople who come in and procrastinate, dealing with low-impact activities such as email or admin tasks up front.

High-performing sales teams start their days with 15 minute stand up meetings. The first five minutes of this meeting is everyone in the team stating their intentions for the day. Then the next 10 minutes is spent conducting short call role-plays with each other, known as ring-rings. The idea behind these role-plays is to focus on real-life customers, calls, or demonstrations that will be happening that day, to allow reps to practice.

The final part of the daily drill is how you and your team finish your day. You should take 10 minutes to close the loop on your daily intentions. You can do that by having a short 10-minute stand up meeting again, and discussing how everyone in the team progressed those intentions from the start of the day.

Step 5 - Revise your ideal week

The final step is perhaps the most important, that is to document your new ‘week in the life’, adding the new elements of weekly and daily training moments so your team can plan their days accordingly.

Now you need to initiate the journey of continuous improvement. Every month you should sit down and revise your weekly development plan and daily drills with your team.

How can you optimise the timing of these habits to create better outcomes? Are you conducting the right exercises? What’s missing?

So there you have it, 5 steps for creating a culture of training in your organisation.

Good luck implementing to help your team achieve your development goals and hit those numbers!