Advanced Sales Training | From Good to Great

Advanced Sales Training – Top question from Google

What is advanced sales training?

Sales is a critical component of any organization, yet many sales professionals lack the proper training and coaching to be successful. As an example, many salespeople simply cannot generate their own sales leads, which results in them continuing to miss their sales targets. In order to be successful in sales, you must be able to build relationships, identify needs, and provide solutions. Whilst these are basic selling skills, Advanced sales training helps sales reps take these skills to new levels, whilst developing additional ones.

It’s important to acknowledge, advanced sales training will have no impact on your sales results unless your sales team are already highly proficient and consistent at the fundamentals of selling.

There are no magic wands or silver bullets in sales

As a society we have become addicted to the instant gratification of likes and shares on social media. It’s human nature to look for a shortcut, a hack or a quick fix.

There is no substitute for hard work in sales and in B2B sales you need to be prepared for long sales cycles where patience is as important as any sales skills you have.

Whilst there may be no glamour in the fundamentals of selling it’s important to understand this is the foundation for your success. A sales team that is well drilled in proven selling skills, motivated and hungry for success, is an essential starting point.

Participants in advanced sales training should already be proficient with things like overcoming objections, how to gain commitment, closing more sales, and building lasting customer relationships.

These are the foundations of success and without these essential building blocks, there is no business benefit to delivering any form of advanced sales training.

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What does advanced sales training cover?

Advanced Sales training can mean completely different things to people within a sales team, let alone two different companies. It’s impossible to articulate what advanced is unless you have a baseline or best practice in sales to follow.

After all, it’s one thing to convince a customer to buy a product or service, and quite another to develop and execute a sales plan for a new product, in a new territory.

This is where advanced sales training comes in. It can help ensure you have the right strategy, and are not simply learning how to close more deals.

Traditional sales training is focussed around things like new skills, new sales techniques, how to makes sales calls and close more deals.

Our own advanced sales training course is designed for sales people who want to increase sales performance, learn and understand the latest in sales strategy and develop their overall sales career.

Typically, participants will already have a proven track record of success and will have already mastered skills like: account management, sales process, sales cycle, listening skills, key benefits, value proposition, sales presentations and gaining commitment for repeat business.

Advanced sales training can also help you build stronger relationships with clients. By learning how to better understand their needs, and then develop custom solutions that meet their specific requirements.

You’ll also be able to provide valuable insight into your products and services, which can help set you apart from the competition.

Sales is a critical function for any business. It is the engine that drives profits and growth. However, sales is also a complex and challenging endeavour. To be successful, sales teams need to have a diverse range of skills from strategy and planning through to people management, whether that be of their sales team, or customers.

At Klozers our Advanced Sales training i.s focussed around what we call Box 2 Thinking. The name comes from the Eisenhower Matrix on priorities and Box 2 refers to the Important Non Urgent quadrant.

For business owners this is akin to working on the business, rather than in the business. Our Box 2 Thinking is like a Mastermind group for sales leaders.

Box 2 thinking is a great way to develop great salespeople, sales management and sales leaders. All sales people are busy, Box 2 Thinking makes them effective.

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Developing a Winning Mindset

When it comes to sales, having a winning mindset is key. Too often, people give up when they encounter a setback. A winning mindset means being resilient and continuing to fight even when the odds seem stacked against you.

It also means being confident in your ability to succeed, no matter what the situation may be.

A winning mindset is influenced by our belief system, and all too often there are negative self limiting beliefs that are holding sales professionals back.

These could be negative beliefs like imposter syndrome, low money blueprints and self sabotage.

If you want to improve your sales skills, it’s important to also develop a winning mindset. With the right attitude, you can overcome any obstacle and achieve success.

Sales Training is essential, but if you’re not mentally prepared to win, you’ll never reach your full potential.

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Using Sales Training for Employee Retention

For companies looking to retain high performing staff and take their business to the next level, advanced sales training is essential.

Survey after survey tells us that the best sales people are more likely to leave a company if they stop learning.

This is no surpise, rather it’s Maslows Heirarchy of needs in action. The last step in Maslows pyramid is self actualisation which is why sales training is an essentail part of your employee retention strategy.

Every employer knows the cost and disruption caused when sales people leave. Costs don’t just stop at recruiters fees, they are exacerbated by the management time required to go through the entire search and selection process.

Add to that, the disruption in your client base and it’s easy to see why holding onto the best sales people is simply essential.

Companies can gain further benefits from providing advanced sales training in that, Sales Professionals at an advanced level are more likely to be able to provide sales coaching, and mentoring to more junior colleagues.

Often time advanced sales training forms part of an ongoing development programme whereby a sales rep is progressing on to sales management.

Being a great sales manager and sales leader requires very different skills to even the advanced sales professional. So whilst advanced training can be part of a wider programme sales management training may be more appropriate.

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The Objectives of an advanced sales training course

Sales training is an important part of any organization, but advanced sales training is especially critical for organizations that want to stay ahead of the competition.

The objectives of advanced sales training therefore have to be unique and bespoke to that company. Generic sales training will simply discourage top sales reps and not deliver the key benefits for the individual or any form of business growth,

Typical sales objectives for Advanced Sales Training revolve around Strategy, Planning and Implementation.

These objectives revolve around where you are now, where you want to go and what needs to happen in order to get you there.

For some companies this type of sales training is built around growth and entering new markets, whilst for others it’s about maximising profitability.

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How do I design an advanced sales training program?

In order to design your advanced training course we recommend the following approach:

1. Set the business objectives – what is it the business wants the attendees to achieve after the training? This could be growth, employee retention or the implementation of a new sales strategy.
2. In order to reach these objectives what skills and knowledge do the participants need to achieve the objectives? In learning this is often referred to as the Knowledge Gap. These selling skills could be things like how to engage buyers, improving customer experience, developing sales opportunities, sales process or product knowledge.
3. What content and activities will fill the knowledge gap? These could be activities could support new sales techniques such as questioning skills, listening skills, client needs assessments, securing long term clients and key accounts.
4. What structure and delivery methods does the training need to follow in order to provide a great learning experience and maximise knowledge retention. Developing the right training approach is essential to the success of any sales training. Is the programme built around value based sales training or some other sales methodology?

Here’s a really simple example of a programme we put together for a client using the framework above.

1. Set the business objectives – what is it the business wants the attendees to achieve after the training?

Our client was successful selling there Service as a Service offering to the SME market but wanted to target larger Mid Market and Enterprise accounts. They knew that even the best sales people they had would need a different strategy and skill set in order to sell to larger corporations.

1. In order to reach these objectives what sales skills and knowledge do the participants need to achieve the objectives? In learning this is often referred to as the Knowledge Gap.

With a customer base of 20,000 SMEs, many of which were high street businesses who bought on price, our client wanted to help their sales team understand how larger companies buy on more value, not price. How to navigate a complex sale using advanced selling skills. and how to manage the entire sales process with larger companies.

1. What content and activities will fill the knowledge gap?

After an initial evaluation where we found the salespeople where excellent at what they did we designed a programme around Enterprise Selling skills. This included training modules, case studies, quizzes and games.

1. What structure and delivery methods does the training need to follow in order to provide a great learning experience and maximise knowledge retention.

The training was delivered via our campaign based learning whereby we worked with our client in advance to design a sales campaign and then trained and coached the team on how to execute the campaign. People learn by doing so it was important for us to spend the minimum amount of classroom time with the maximum amount of sales floor time.

The Importance of Practice in Advanced Sales Training

Sales professionals know that in order to be successful, they need to continually hone their skills. And while many salespeople may think that practice is only necessary for those who are just starting out in the field, this is not the case.

In fact, even experienced sales professionals should regularly engage in practice activities.

One of the main reasons why practice is so important for advanced sales professionals is because it allows them to stay sharp.

When sales reps are constantly meeting with customers and pitching products or services, it can be easy to start easing off on their preparation and conversation skills.

However, if they take the time to engage in regular practice activities, they will be better equipped to handle any situation that comes up during a sale.

Sales roleplay is a great way for sales professionals to practice and improve their skills and techniques. This develops their unconscious competence, which is the ability to execute skills without thinking about it.

Unconscious Competence is the last stage in Kolbs learning theory and similar to mastery in sales.

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When to Consider an Advanced Sales Training Course?

Before you sign up for an advanced sales training course, make sure that it is the right fit for you. Some programs are designed for experienced sales professionals, while others are meant for beginners and simply called advanced sales training by slick marketers.

If you are already familiar with the basic selling skills and following a sales process, then a more advanced program may be the right choice for you.

If you have attended our Sales Fundamentals training course or our Consultative Selling skills course and are now regularly hitting your sales targets our advanced training may be right for you.

As previously mentioned it’s important to identify and agree on the business objectives for any training program and because of this, each of our advanced sales training courses is bespoke and designed to meet the needs of our clients.

We would love to work with you and become your training provider of choice. In addition to our public courses and in person training, we provide a full range of online sales training programs.

Our sales training courses cover everything from cold calling to Key Account Management, Sales Negotiation Training and Sales Management Training and a lot more.

You can find our more about our sales courses and how we can hopefully work with you to deliver the results you are looking for here

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