Training thousands of employees with a known and proven sales process is not the same as training a small group of people who will represent the entire sales force for an online startup. Here are three fundamental keys to efficiently train a sales team to work in an online venture.
Personal experience
Let’s start with the most important thing: I firmly believe that if somebody wants to teach something, that person must first experience and understand it. The best teacher is someone who successfully achieves something. Only then, can they pass their knowledge on to others.
This first concept has a greater value in an enterprise context. The main reason is that in a new project everything must be defined for the first time. Sales does not yet know what they are going to sell. More importantly, they do not know how they are going to bring it successfully and efficiently to customers.
At this juncture, the online startup founders must conduct—and perfect—perform the first sales the potential customers. Founders must be the ones that generate the first revenues to consolidate this invaluable experience.
It's clear that in this way, founders are going to find many sales mechanisms that won’t work. However, they will certainly uncover a few techniques and tools to generate positive results.
Furthermore, no one is going to know the product or service better than the startup founders. Although there are plenty of examples that show when enterprises tried to outsource their sales force by using call centers or hiring other companies, most ended up closing. It is important to keep these examples in mind to avoid these same kinds of mistakes.
Defining an action process
Once startups learn the right mechanisms for efficiently making a sale, they can take an important and essential step toward training the sales team properly: defining the sales process.
In contrast to what many people may think, developing a sales process only requires time and dedication—for those who have experienced the startups first sales.
Following a step-by-step process, each phase should do something to generate new customers. And the most important factor is to keep the process actionable, and be sure to include plenty of details.
One of the first mistakes that we made at elMejorTrato.com was to assume that our new sales team would be able to solve unforeseen situations—or that they should even know how to move from one point to another in the process without having problems.
The lesson: the more detailed the sales manual, the better the results will be. For example, if we want the sales reps to transmit a sense of willingness to the client, the process must include the advice to "always receive the customer with a smile." As obvious as it may seem, these little details make the difference, even when the sale is by phone.
Finally, do not forget to include in the process two important sections:
- Responses to negative feedback from clients. This means how to answer when the customer says “no.” In other words, how can sales move clients from "no" to "yes" while being respectful and investing time and dedication to the process. If this area is well developed, even a new sales team will be able to overcome customer objections.
Answers to unexpected situations. What should the sales rep do during a dropped call, when a client cannot deal with them in that moment, or if the client already has the product and wants to change it for a newer one, among others.
Monitoring makes the difference
Paramount to any effective sales initiative is tracking the sales process. Data shows that during a startup, the average closing sales figure on the first contact is only about 3.2 percent. This is easily attributed to working with a new product and a brand that is unfamiliar to potential clients. Consequently, the 96.8 percent of sales are going to be made between the second, third, fourth, and fifth contact.
Clearly, tracking the sales process to learn what factors tip the scales for clients is essential for success since more sales are generated later in the sales relationship.
Training needs to include how to review client interaction and make adjustments for future contact. Training could also incorporate a tool that facilitates the creation of a “new sales pitch.” And this training must be equal or more important than the training for cold calls and initial contact with potential clients.
Bottom line
Although news headlines point to increasing number of sales closing through the web, data shows that those sales probably only account for 20 percent of an organization’s business. The remaining 80 percent demands personal contact from a salesperson who can advise clients and monitor the sales process. Underestimating the potential of a well-trained sales team is a big mistake.
