How to Build Sticky Sales Training

Research by the Gartner Group and Miller Heiman shows being trained on a proven customer centric selling framework is imperative to successful and consistent selling performance. I have seen it for years. The AE's and teams that stick to a process close larger deals, have higher close rates, and exceed quota more consistently. Providing, especially at the AE and first line management level, a conversational selling framework and set of skills drives more effective:

• Pipe generation

• Deal qualification

• Solution messaging

• Objection handling

• Negotiation

• Closing Winning Deals
  

The question is post training. Three, six, twelve months down the line how does sales leadership insure the training sticks, the team does not revert back to old less effective habits, and the return on investment is realized in KPI's such as higher average selling prices and close rates? There are a number of strategies that include people, process, and technology. Today, I will share one in the "technology" bucket that I cannot live without.

As the Chief Revenue Officer of Samanage it was important to me that we train my selling teams on a sales process. The teams were hungry for professional sales training and appreciated being shown a more consultative and effective way to sell. After putting the teams through a training engagement and configuring our opportunity management workflows in salesforce to enforce the process, the team was off and running. The first six months post training all the key kpi's were trending up - average selling price, close rates, deal cycle time, etc. Then, three quarters out we started to dip a bit, with the exception of a handful of our reps, who continued to improve month over month. What was their secret sauce? Were they following the process or veering off? Other than "hot jacking" in to listen to their calls every so often, was there a better way to know why they were consistently putting strong numbers on the board?

As a leadership team, we challenged ourselves to find a better way. That's when we found the "conversation cloud" from a company called Chorus.ai. For a comprehensive understanding of the solution do yourself a favor and spend 15 minutes on their website or contact their VP of Sales, Joe Caprio. Chorus.ai provided us a consistent way to capture and act on insights surfaced from all my reps conversations with their prospects and customers. It simply records every conversation automatically (through integration with web conferencing tools such as GTM, Zoom, etc.) provides insights into those conversations, and logs them in your CRM. We can now answer questions such as:

• Are the reps following our selling methodology?

• Are the reps discussing "pricing" to early or to late in the cycle?

• Are the reps discounting the price and getting nothing in return when they should be driving a multi-year commitment for the concession?

• Are the reps not asking the right questions that are persona specific?

• Are the reps presenting a solution before they understand the problem?

• Are the reps not actively listening enough because they are talking 80% of the time?
  

Armed with these insights we were now better equipped to coach the team to drive more consistent behavior. AE's can learn from themselves, their peers, and management on how to improve. We took C reps and made them B's. We took B reps and transformed them to B+'s. Imagine being a first line manager and being able to share a a conversation where your top account exec took a prospect from lead to close in less than an hour. Now imagine sharing this with the entire team (together or individually) as a best practice. This is game changing stuff.

By implementing the "conversation cloud" solution we maximized our sales training and enablement ROI and took our performance to another level. It made our training "sticky" and held the team accountable for following the winning playbooks we invested in building and deploying.