Our Five Steps to Sales Training Success
How Sales Training in Five Steps Works
At Action Selling®, success isn’t just a dream — it’s a destination. Using our five step training approach, your sales team will develop the skills and strategies essential for triumph in today’s competitive market.
Depending on your particular industry and unique needs, our training modules can be customized to your needs — include the right mix of in-person and digital sessions — but the general approach remains the same. Why? Because it works.
Step 1: Preparation
Having an effective sales team is one of the most important components of a flourishing business. After all, they’re the ones most closely focused on driving new revenue.Selling Skills Assessment
Have your team take the FREE Benchmark™ Selling Skills Assessment to get a baseline idea of where your sales team is currently before receiving a customized training regime focused on improving the areas where they’re weakest.Sales Performance Analysis (SPA)
A thirty minute phone call will help us better understand your sales’ teams challenges and needs. Our team will be happy to provide answers to common questions like:
- What does your team need to do?
- How long will it take?
- What’s your investment?
- What kind of ROI can you expect?
With Action Selling®, getting the ball rolling with your team’s sales training is entirely free. We offer free 30 minute sales performance analysis (SPA) calls and a free online selling skills assessment for anyone that’s interested. Why? Because we know our approach works.
Step 2: Sales Training Workshop
Salespeople learn, practice and apply the most critical selling skills involved in the Action Selling ® approach during a workshop that can be conducted by our certified trainers, or your own, depending on your preference. During this workshop each student learns and practices applying skills — through both roleplay and group exercises — that prepare them for reinforcement, certification and, ultimately, more closed deals.Learning the 5 Critical Selling Skills
Most salespeople fail to follow a selling process that matches the decision-making process of the buyer. When salespeople have a process that matches the buyer’s thinking, they’re more easily able to build the sort of lasting relationships that lead to repeat business.
Being able to set the right commitment objectives before making sales calls will help your team better guide the conversation toward the close. According to some of our research data, salespeople can shorten sales cycles by more than 25% by focusing on this particular skill.
A good question is the professional salesperson’s most important tool. By learning how to ask questions that don’t invite resistance, sales teams can better engage the prospect, build rapport, discover needs, manage conversations and — most importantly — gain commitment.
Many salespeople think that two-thirds of their selling takes place during the presentation when they describe their product features and benefits. Unfortunately, this “data dump” technique often ends up causing more harm than good. Our workshops will teach your team a better way.
Did you know that, of all the selling skills, many salespeople feel weakest in gaining commitment? Considering that’s one of the most important parts of the cycle, it’s surprising — but true. Improving this skill is essential and starts with setting the right commitment objective and knowing the most common buying signals.
Role Playing
Roleplay in sales training sharpens skills by providing a dynamic and controlled environment that allows sales professionals to anticipate, navigate and overcome objections — ultimately enhancing their adaptability and effectiveness in real-world customer interactions.
Role plays demonstrate how NOT to complete each skill
Moderators explain the BEST approach
Role plays demonstrate the CORRECT way to sell
Step 3: Reinforcement
Traditional sales training often yields short-term results, but the effectiveness diminishes over time as salespeople revert to old habits.
Action Selling ® uses reinforcement to address the issue of diminishing effectiveness in two main ways:
- Our Field Coaching Procedure recognizes the crucial role of field managers in training and provides them with the necessary tools and accountability for follow up.
- Our Reinforcement System ensures continuous post-training support by conducting and following up on periodic Skill Drills that make it easy for you to take stock of your team’s continued progress.
Using an online system for prescribing, assigning and holding everyone accountable, these reinforcement tactics are as easy to establish as they are to benefit from.
Online Learning Link
The Action Selling ® LearningLink™ is a vital online sales training portal contributing to the ongoing success of our approach. It engages your sales team and managers by making it easy to follow real-time reporting and weekly Skill Drill results. Convenient, self-paced usability ensures accountability and makes it easier for your team to prepare for their final certification assessments.
The Skill Drills™ Reinforcement System
You already know that our Skill Drills are easy to access online through virtual sales training scheduled regularly to ensure your team’s training sticks. Action Selling®’s five step sales training approach uses a Reinforcement System that:
Starts immediately following the learning experience
Includes field-based homework for every day application of skills
Web-based system assigns the work and collects the responses
Involves field managers in field coaching
Reinforces the skills that lead to sales mastery
Holds everyone accountable for the completion of reinforcement
Embeds a selling language throughout the organization
Step 4: Assessment
Within our five step sales training approach, we use our Selling Skills Assessment — accessed through LearningLink™ — to provide immediate reports measuring sales team progress according to initial benchmarks and our database. This helps guide training recommendations to make sure your team is learning in a way that suits them best in preparation for receiving their final certification.Measurement Leads to More Effective, Customized Training
The most critical ingredient of any learning plan is measurement. In sales training, what gets measured gets learned. Our ultimate objective is to ensure that not only do your salespeople learn — they remember. By measuring where they’re at in the beginning, we’re better able to customize our approach to guide them to success that’s long term.
Measure only long-term memory
Assessments that are taken immediately following a workshop are useless.
Assess both knowledge and application of knowledge
These are two entirely different things. And, solutions to each are completely different.
Benchmark selling skills before you start
This provides a starting point for establishing learning goals.
Assessments need to be prescriptive
They must tell salespeople exactly where the problems are and exactly how to eliminate them.
Create Sales Certification standards
Give the team a way to achieve mastery of selling skills.
Step 5: Certification
In today’s competitive business landscape, a skilled sales team is a massive asset for anyone looking to gain a competitive edge. Sales certification courses play a vital role in enhancing a sales professional’s effectiveness in promoting products and services. While some businesses may consider creating their own, the value of professional sales certification training — with modern customizable teaching tools and technology — are crucial for making smart investment decisions and ensuring overall success.Sales training programs enhance interpersonal skills, fostering strong relationships between salespeople and customers. This improves trust and the ability to communicate the benefits of your products or services.
Targeting effective communication, sales training refines skills for engaging prospects through methods best suited for a variety of scenarios and industries.
Sales training equips teams with strategies to deliver compelling messages to the right customers at the right time. This helps the sales team capture and maintain customer attention, contributing to more reliable revenue generation.
Accelerating onboarding, sales training helps new hires quickly grasp successful sales techniques, reducing the time it takes for them to become efficient sales professionals.
A five step sales training approach like the one used by Action Selling ® identifies behaviors aligned with the brand’s tone, ensuring a positive, credible image.
Beyond prospecting, sales training teaches how to streamline administrative tasks, contributing to more efficient and organized workflows.
Objections are a normal part of every sales transaction and our sales training helps your professionals know how to get past the first “No” to the eventual close.