Salespeople are the soul of a business. The single best way to give them a shot at success is to provide them with ongoing, consistent sales training. Training makes them better salespeople, better teammates and helps them understand their role in helping the company achieve its goals.

The Two Elements of Consistency

Sales training doesn’t work if it’s arbitrary and scattered. It has to be consistent — but it has to be consistent on two different levels.

First, there is consistency in habit and pattern. The training should be predictable. It should take place at the same time on the same days and be conducted by the same facilitator.

Perhaps more important is consistency in messaging and language.

Here is a good exercise for an MD to perform. Call a salesperson into a room and ask him or her what the company does. Then ask another, then another. If you get three different answers, the company’s training program lacks consistency in message, culture and language.

Training is irrelevant if it doesn’t instill top-line fundamentals like what the company does, how it does it and how it positions itself in the marketplace.

Training Should be Relevant, Training Should be Fun

Training falls into three broad categories, all of which fit under the umbrella of education.

• Generic sales training: It depends on the type, tempo and technology of the business, but generic sales training should take place once a quarter at a minimum.
• Product training: This is an ongoing process, but sessions are more frequent and intense when new products are released or new features are added.
• Presentation training: This ongoing process is a wonderful opportunity to apply role-playing and shared-learning techniques, where team members reveal tactics they used successfully — or unsuccessfully — in the field during real-life encounters.

The team should look forward to training. They should receive actionable takeaways that make them better salespeople. Training sessions should be engaging, challenging and, yes, fun. Variety is important. Some training may take place in the field, perhaps watching a manager make a pitch. Other sessions, like product training, may mimic a classroom. It is important to note that the best training regimens are those that are flexible and that cater to the individual learning styles of the human beings they are designed to help.

Finally, training starts by instilling corporate culture during onboarding on a new recruit’s very first day. Traditionally, a new hire got the worst lists, the worst leads, the worst chair and the worst computer in the office. Imagine, instead, placing a welcome note from the rest of the team on the new recruit’s desk before arrival on his or her first day. Maybe you add a welcome box that contains the new hire’s favorite candy, coffee and biscuits, and a list of the times and places the team hangs out after work.

Salespeople who aren’t regularly acquiring new knowledge are falling behind because, eventually, they will be passed by others who are. Regular, consistent training helps to close knowledge gaps across the team, it encourages sharing and the exchange of ideas, and, perhaps most importantly, it gives everyone the ability to uniformly and consistently articulate the company’s values, purpose and differentiators.