It’s no secret the war for sales talent is at an all-time high. By now, every sales manager has a story of an employee who abruptly departed for another opportunity.
Losing employees has a real impact – on your team morale and your bottom line. Research has shown that it costs more than $200,000 to replace a salesperson and up five months to fill an open sales position. Low attrition rates mean less money spent on hiring, a more positive team culture, and keeping your best people who drive your business forward.
So how can you retain the talent you need to succeed? Training. Ongoing, modern training is one of the biggest investments you can make in your people. And when employees feel personally invested in, they’re more likely to grow their careers at their company.
Great training programs develop stellar sellers and reduce turnover. With a few simple but important changes, your business can evolve its sales training program to both accelerate growth and earn your team’s loyalty for the long haul.
Develop sales managers, not just your salespeople
Just as your reps need guidance on how to close deals, businesses should also invest in ensuring sales leaders know how to mentor, manage, and motivate a team of salespeople. Sandler Training research revealed that 43% of sales managers do not receive adequate training prior to taking on the role. As a result, they typically last three years or less. Leadership churn is hard on a business – and even harder on a sales team.
Reverse this trend by investing in managers the same way you invest in your reps. At Highspot, we’ve experienced great success by building a manager enablement program. Alternatively, you can create self-guided resources for key topics like sales coaching, pipeline management, and performance management.
Providing ongoing learning not only helps sales managers effectively coach teams, but makes it clear the business is invested in their growth as well.
Implement regular, scalable sales coaching
We know providing reps with content and guidance through live sessions or self-guided modules is essential to producing great sellers. But ensuring these skills translate to the field is another challenge altogether. That’s where coaching comes in.
Coaching can take many forms, like roleplaying simulations or post-call critiques. These interactive sessions help reps bridge the gap between knowing what to say and actually doing so with confidence. In fact, coaching can grow knowledge retention from 10% to 90%, or even 100% simply because it shows you how to put training into action.
Great managers coach intuitively. However, it’s rarely a formalized part of the sales training process: 41% of sellers have either ad hoc coaching or, in the worst cases, no regular coaching at all.
When sales leaders are slammed for time, building coaching into a scalable sales training program helps managers hit their goals by radically improving rep performance. Consistent feedback before and after customer conversations ensures reps can confidently tackle new challenges and creates a feedback loop that ensures reps are meeting core competencies. And when reps succeed, they’re far more likely to stay, and your business is more likely to thrive.
Optimize sales training with technology Leading-edge training empowers reps with modern, deal-closing techniques. In a world where 67.9% of salespeople are achieving 60% of their quota or less, these resources are invaluable. Unfortunately, they’re rarely integrated with the sales tools that reps regularly use, limiting their impact on sellers’ execution.
Don’t let your investment in sales training go to waste. By embedding your onboarding, coaching, and training resources within a sales enablement platform, you can ensure reps have on-demand access when they need it most. Marrying training and sales technology also allows sales leaders to continuously refresh materials and guidance on how to use them. This transforms training from a disruptive obligation to a natural step of preparing for customer conversations.
Evolve your business’s training program from a one-time necessity to a dynamic, integrated, and valuable resource. When training resources are integrated into your sales enablement platform –– and into reps’ workflows –– your team will have everything they need to perform, and no reason to leave.
Invest in your people – grow your business
Join today’s top sales leaders who have invested in a combination of ongoing training, coaching, and technology to take control of their team’s growth, development, and performance before they find greener pastures.
Done right, a sales training program will transform sellers into lifelong learners that meet goals by elevating the art of customer conversation. Their contributions will be amplified by longer tenures, driving a virtuous cycle of high performance and retention that empowers your people and grows your business –– not your competitor’s.
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