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A high value or technical product can’t be sold with one line closes that would be effective in low value retail sales. To effectively sell these products and services you need a sales process that includes:

• How you introduce yourself to the buyer
• Questioning techniques
• Sales presentation skills
• How to close the sale
• And overcoming sales objections.

If your product has one unique selling point, such as a competitive price, then do you really need a long sales process?

Consider the sales process that the sales training uses and assess it against the type of product that you sell. You are looking for sales techniques that match the value, technical level of the features, and the main selling points of the product or service that you sell.

How will the sales training make your customers feel

Put yourself in your customer’s position. How would you feel if a salesperson tried to sell your product to you, using the sales pitch that is going to be trained to you or your sales team?

Will it keep the buyer’s attention? Are they going to feel patronized, confused, rushed, or bored?

Will there be buyer’s remorse, and cancelled orders, because they have been manipulated into agreeing to a sale?

It’s important for the sales training to get the balance of logic and emotion in the sales pitch just right.

You don’t sell dream vacations with technical data, and you wouldn’t sell a technical piece of machinery by building good feelings.

Can the sales training be used in real sales situations

Sales training is often made more attractive and marketable by adding sales techniques that look great but are not practical.

This can be because the sales trainer genuinely believes their new methods are effective, but they haven’t done realistic testing and development in real sales situations.

It can also be a way of marketing the training courses by claiming there is something new, improved, or unique. When in reality they are standard training methods with added complicated techniques to help the training company sell them to you.

...Acronyms are a particular hate of mine when it comes to sales training presentation..

There are a few rare examples of when one good acronym is used to good effect. Such as the marketing aid A.I.D.A. It’s been around for years, it’s simple, easy to use, and it works.

But too many courses have lots of new acronyms that are the foundation of each stage of their training. The sales training appears to be built in such a way as to accommodate the new acronyms and make them appear as a golden tool that’s suddenly been discovered.

When the course delegates get back to the real world they may try and use them for a while, but then it is far easier to go back to the easy to follow ways they know. The money and time invested in the training course is wasted and sales training gets another black mark against it.

A financial return on your investment into sales training

What do you expect from the sales training?

Many individuals and companies have no idea of what they want the sales training to do for them. Think about it, whether it’s for yourself, or for your employees, what do you expect from the training?

This is a good place to start when looking at sales training.

What do you want it to do for you?

Which part of the sales process do you want the training to work on?

Is it marketing to get more incoming sales leads. Sales skills to increase the number of prospects you convert to paying customers.

Or is it cross selling to your existing customer base.

Before you buy a sales book, invest in a sales training course or training program, clearly set out what you want to gain from it. How many more sales, what percentage increase, and look for how the training will give you that return.

How easy is it to pick up and use the sales training

Sales training should be easy to take on board.

Good sales trainers use their hands on knowledge of the sales techniques to present the ideas in many different ways to meet all the delegates learning styles.

If the sales course, training book, or CD, gets boring the trainees stop taking in the information. Too much information and they switch off. Some people need interaction, and it’s a great way to learn, to pick up and use the selling techniques.

CDs, books, and workbooks should have exercises and task in them to test learning and get the reader or listener involved. Others need to see diagrams and visual aids, or have things explained in a diagrammatic way, such as following a sales process.

Keep it simple. The objective is for the delegates to take in the information and be able to use it. The sales trainer, or author, should not be showing off their technical knowledge of sales language and terminology. Keep it simple and it will be used.

Are there added complications

Look for anything that’s been added to the training that makes it look good, but adds no real value to the effectiveness of the sales training.

When a business is based on marketing and selling sales training courses and books, you can sometimes find the content has been made more complicated than it needs to be. This can be to make the course look different and stand out from the rest of the programs on sale.

It can be related to the title of the course. You get great titles that are easy to advertise, like The Whooosh Selling Technique, or The Ace Way to Sell. These are made up as I didn’t want to embarrass anyone, but you get the picture.

When you look at investing your time and money, no matter how little, in sales training, be wary of anything that’s added but doesn’t appear to have a practical function. Has a good basic idea been remoulded and made more complicated than it needs to be. The more that’s added the harder it will be to learn the training and put it into action.

How will the sales training be remembered and used

If I give you a list of twenty things to remember you’ll probably be able to recall around a half of them the following day.

If I tell you those twenty things embedded into a story, show you how they follow a logical process, you’ll remember them a lot easier. Then if I add a really good reason for you to practice this process, such as, it will earn you commission payments, you will make sure you can recall it.

Look for how the sales trainer is building into the training a way to recall it and put it into action. Many sales people I have managed and trained have read books, listened to CDs, and attended courses, aimed at increasing their sales. But only a small percentage of the training presented is ever used, and the percentage gets less with time.

Make sure the training you invest in will be used. Look for the embedded sales training techniques that make it memorable.

Does it make use of existing sales skills

Does the sales training tell you to forget everything you know and start using the new selling techniques being presented?

So should your decades of experience, the knowledge you’ve built up and refined, all be thrown out and replaced?

Even if you need to drastically improve your sales results, I’m sure you have plenty of good sales skills that are effective. Sales courses should be viewed as a new set of skills that can be added to your current abilities, or even better, make use of your current skills in a new way.

For example, you may know how to close a sale, but you may not know the best way to lead into the close from your sales presentation. You don’t want to erase your sales closing skills, you want to add some selling techniques on linking your closes to your presentations.

Imagine if every time you went on a course, read a sales book, or listened to CD, you completely changed the way you sell. You would be a beginner again after every course or book. The most effective sales training makes use of what you already know and adds to those sales skills.

Now you know what to look for

Now you have a good plan for choosing the best sales training for you, your business, or your sales teams, take a look at the Sales and Training solution shop and see if the sales training there matches will do it for you.

All the sales training you’ll find there is proven by the sales teams I manage and train as part of my role as a working sales manager. It’s worked for them and it can now work for you.

Do you have a question about sales training? How it can work for you, what has worked for others, what are the alternatives available to you?

Open the question page on the website and Learn more about sales skills and sales training by asking questions that will be answered by all the sales professionals that visit the site.

That's my aim with The Sales Buzz Free Newsletter and with all the selling and career techniques on the sales training website. You can learn sales skills without spending huge amounts of money or ploughing through long boring books.

Pick up sales techniques and sales skills from wherever you can. You do not have to spend huge amounts of money to get the learn sales skills that are right for you. I present sales techniques that are:

Easy to learn sales skills
Short and to the point
Simple to put into action

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The Sales Buzz is the free newsletter for all sales people in all sales roles. If there is a topic you would like to see covered here use the contact form on the website and I'll get the best information, from working sales professionals, to learn sales skills and pass them on to you on this newsletter.

Wishing you the very best with your sales career.