How to Train Your Sales Team Remotely
As the modern and remote workplace continues to evolve, employers have come to realize traditional, long training programs may not be the most effective way to train a sales team – especially those now working remotely.
In fact, according to ATD research reports, organizations in North America spend over $2.2 Billion every year on sales training. Unfortunately, despite management efforts, many of these training programs fail to produce results or an increase in revenue.
Why do sales training programs fail?
- Traditional training programs present significant costs to gather an entire sales force and train them in one place. These include travel expenses, exorbitant conference fees, and lost employee work time engaging with customers and leads. The current COVID-19 pandemic makes in-person conferences and breakout training nearly impossible.
- Low employee engagement is consistently ranked as one of the main hurdles to sales training. The content may be a poor fit or irrelevant for their specific job function. Sales representatives may be distracted by incoming customer texts, calls, and emails. They may be present, but they are not actively engaged and learning.
- The training content is not custom to the business, product, or process. Many companies in their haste to train go with a one-size-fits-all-approach. While some basic skills can transfer across industries, having a custom and focused program helps define objectives and increases the likelihood of a positive experience and outcome.
Microlearning for sales teams
Given these shortcomings in traditional approaches, many companies are now exploring remote training options including microlearning.
Microlearning involves breaking content into smaller, bite-sized units of information. Microlearning platforms, including the one offered by Concannon Business Consulting can be completely white-labeled and customized to your sales team’s products, services, or objectives. Sales managers, now faced with a more remote workforce, are seeing the benefits of a multi-platform (including mobile web, desktop, etc…) microlearning tool and exploring how this can work to train their sales teams.
Microlearning is a way to deliver short, highly focused content and training material. Microlearning involves:
• Short interactive sessions – content is more focused and personalized. Many content sessions are broken into lessons 5 minutes or less.
• Actionable objectives – helps teams master specific responsibilities, job functions, and new product information.
• High engagement – microlearning is well suited for corporate environments and disparate teams with limited time or resources for training.
Why it Works
A robust sales force is always on the move and ever-changing. You don’t want your sales executives to be sitting at their desks all day; you want them in the field, meeting with clients and potential clients and doing what they do best, selling for you. Utilizing microlearning for this group of talented multitaskers fits the typical sales-person learning-type. They want their information to be concise and to the point, presented in small, easily digestible pieces and available at their fingertips for quick reference.
Moving away from hours-long training sessions achieves just this. Microlearning is tailored to your organization’s needs and can be developed from existing content by breaking it down into modules for interactive learning.
Why Microlearning Works
• Ideal for learners with short attention spans
• Each lesson focuses on a few, specific takeaways
• Can be completed in less than 10 minutes
• Accessible on multiple platforms (mobile devices to desktops)
• Lessons can be catered to different learning needs
How Microlearning Can Work for Training Your Sales Force
Let’s looks at a scenario where you want to train a group of new hires. Here is an example of how you might use a microlearning approach to set up their training:
• Create a video introducing the company to them, including a brief history, and stating the organization’s vision and goals
• Use multiple micro- content interactive lessons to teach your products and services. Microlearning format is great for highlighting most important selling points and confirming user understanding of the key takeaways.
• Include interactive PDFs for quick reference back to micro-content lessons
Microlearning is the ideal solution to deliver remote training for sales teams on a mobile web platform. It allows businesses to keep their employees up to date on the latest products and sales strategies. Concannon Business Consulting (CBC), a full-service consultancy focused on optimizing your learning and training results, is highly experienced in building microlearning programs to achieve organizational goals. Our team will manage a custom microlearning solution and process that fits your needs from start to finish. Beyond a microlearning platform, we’ll work with your sales management team to completely customize and develop your sales training solution. Contact us today to set up a consultation or personalized demo experience.
