Today’s sales training is rapidly moving away from live on-site seminars and classes. Online sales training eliminates the need to gather your sales team in one place. Training materials can be delivered to your sales reps directly on their computers and mobile devices. If your company is looking at investing in an online sales training platform, here are four things that you should consider.
Does the online sales training support diverse sales training formats?
People learn differently so the training material should be available in a number of different formats.
- Online video lectures and narrated slide presentation are great for communicating with your sales reps. Videos can also be used to present sale situation role-plays.
- Audio recordings are great for sales reps who want to listen to training while driving their car or doing some other activity that does not demand their complete attention.
- Some people want to review and study written material. This printed material can be delivered as a PDF file. This is a great way to distribute review sheets and study guides for any assessments and tests.
Does your sales training platform support different instructional modalities?
Your company may want to offer a variety of training options. It is important that the online sales training platform that you select support these different instructional modalities.
- On-demand training is great for on-the-go sales reps. The platform should provide the ability for your reps to download and stream training seminars to their mobile devices.
- Live online lectures are a great way to get your team together all at once. Your online platform should support virtual conferences where everyone can watch and participate in the same live lecture. This captures the benefits of attending a class without the need have everyone in the same geographic location.
- The platform should also support social learning by having discussion forums, chat capabilities and other ways that your sales reps can connect with each other to discuss what they are learning. This kind of social interaction is essential for online sales training.
Is the sales training platform customizable?
Most online sales training comes with a set of off-the-shelf training modules. These modules are great for the basics, but you will most likely want to be able to add your own content to the learning platform. You may have specific techniques that work well with your market or product specific information that you want to communicate. The learning platform should allow you to easily create and post your own training content.
Does your sales training platform have tracking and metrics?
You want to make sure that your reps are actually using and benefiting from the training program that you put together.
- A learning platform should track the progress of each sales rep and record the training that he or she has gone through. It should also be able to assess the rep’s mastery of the content through quizzes, test, and other assessments.
- The training platform should integrate with other performance metrics. In this way, you can see if increased training leads to increased performance from your team.
Choosing an online sales training platform is an important decision. These are just a few of the factors that you can look at to guide your choice.
By Helen Waite
By Rahul Mathew