How Offering Your Staff Sales Training Online Results in Growth

Ensuring that your staff are provided with continuous learning and development opportunities can prove challenging in the dynamic world of sales. Offering sales training online is one way of ensuring that your employees are able to keep up-to-date with the latest techniques that have seen success across your industry, with many providers aiming to deliver online sales training courses which are tailored to the unique problems faced by your business. 

Given that access to continuous, flexible, and high-impact training can result in a 50% increase in net sales per representative, it’s clear that businesses who aren’t providing their employees with ongoing opportunities for professional development in sales prospecting training, sales pitching training, or other techniques crucial to the process of selling are likely to encounter difficulties in remaining competitive within their market. 

This guide explores how offering your staff sales training online can help drive business and revenue growth, covering a handful of the areas they’ll explore in expertly crafted online sales training courses. We’ll also discuss how virtual sales training can help to enhance employee motivation and engagement, and why the bespoke learning paths provided by this form of sales learning and development can be an effective way of realising your team’s potential. 

The Specific Challenges that Online Sales Training Can Address

Research from Action Selling has highlighted that failing to reinforce sales training will often result in a lack of long-term impact and the loss of any new skills gained in 90% of cases. This lack of reinforcement can significantly impact your ability to implement wider cultural and process-based changes within the sales-driven workplace, with education researchers finding that within six days of study, we forget around 75% of course content. 

As a result, providing sales training online for your staff can help them retain the vital resources and skills they’ll need for their job. As we’ll see in the following sections, online sales training courses can provide staff with a resource they can return to repeatedly, helping reinforce the techniques and strategies they’ll need to win business, address objections, and maintain motivation after rejection. 

These online courses are an excellent way to get a “field training” culture in place—where staff and their managers learn how to utilise the tools, technologies, and techniques they’re encountering when they study in real-world scenarios, allowing them to apply the latest proven knowledge and research to succeed with their everyday duties. This can drive the wider cultural change that spreads throughout an organisation, helping staff at all levels of seniority to understand the goals and objectives they need to aim for to achieve sales mastery. 

Similarly, with the number of decision-makers involved in the B2B selling process increasing from six in 2019 to over thirteen in 2023, handling this increased complexity in getting that sales win requires a robust regimen of training, which allows them to break down what may seem like an otherwise insurmountable task into bite-size, easily-tackled objectives. 

Providing your employees with sales training online can help them to better understand this technique by instilling in them a microlearning approach to their professional development, resulting in them understanding that even the most difficult concepts can be grasped when we review and reinforce the information that is needed at regular intervals, and refresh ourselves on key notions and theories before we try to tackle the bigger issue. 

Upskilling Teams with Online Sales Training Courses

Enabling your staff to engage with sales training online has a number of proven benefits, giving them the competitive advantage they need to drive revenue and business growth. 

Successful sales enablement, sales prospecting, and sales pitching training initiatives that are delivered virtually have been shown to enhance quota attainment by 32%, individual sales representative attainment by 24%, and lead conversion rate by 23%, according to a study conducted by Aberdeen Strategy & Research.

But how is this possible, and what are the ways in which online sales training courses help to upskill your inbound and outbound sales teams? 

1. Sales Prospecting Training

Offering an online solution for sales prospecting training can be an excellent way to upskill and enhance your team’s ability to identify and connect with clients via various communication channels. These online sales training courses are focused on much more than just telephone communications, instilling a mindset that will help them qualify leads and get through to the decision-makers who can make the difference between conversion and rejection. 

2. Sales Pitching Training

Delivering an impactful pitch can be a challenge, particularly if a salesperson has never engaged with sales pitching training during the course of their career. Knowing how to prepare for a meeting with a prospect, sell the value of a product based on industry-specific knowledge, and gain commitment for the next steps in the sales pipeline requires a thorough process of planning. Of course, possessing confidence and verbal, vocal, and visual communication skills are also necessary to effectively convey a concept, which offering your staff sales training online can help impart.

3. Sales Closing Training

Online sales training courses can help to impart valuable lessons in closing techniques for salespeople at all levels of their careers. Best-in-class organisations will close an average of 30% of their qualified leads, whilst average companies will find that they close around 20%—with the primary differentiation being that those best-in-class organisations have effective processes and strategies which ensure success amongst their salespeople, imparted by high-impact sales training. Online solutions enable your inbound and outbound teams to gain rapid access to resources that can make it easier to grow your book of business.

4. Consultative Account Management Training

The post-sales process is a crucial aspect in the upselling and cross-selling of services and products, but one which few professionals are encouraged to consider in their sales training. Online solutions can help to solve this issue by enabling salespeople to understand why account management is business-critical, and imparting practical, pragmatic techniques they can introduce into their workflow to help them build long-term, mutually beneficial, and professional relationships with key accounts.

5. Digital Sales Techniques and Social Selling Training

63% of sales professionals that engage in pitching, prospecting, and closing via digital channels such as social media report increases in company revenue. Online sales training courses can help salespeople understand how to utilise tailored and targeted messaging to reach new and existing audiences through sites such as LinkedIn, and drive engagement and buzz around their company’s products or services. 

Sales prospecting training, sales pitching training, and social selling techniques are only a handful of examples of how an impactful virtual course can help nurture the skills and abilities of your top talent, especially when they come prepared with specific examples of issues they face in their day-to-day roles. This allows training providers to deliver bespoke solutions specifically tailored to your unique business case, ensuring that all of the virtual sales training received is grounded in the real-world issues they’ll face in achieving their targets. 

The Benefits of Online Sales Training for Staff Motivation

Of course, enhancing your team’s self-confidence and providing skills enhancement will typically help to motivate staff in and of themselves, but there are a number of additional boons to engagement and productivity that can be realised through sales training. Online courses provide not only practical techniques through sales pitching or sales prospecting training, for instance, but can also help to establish the structures and working habits that ensure long-term success. 

Staff turnover and talent retention remain major issues for sales-focused organisations, with representatives leaving their roles at around twice the rate of all other groups of employees. Online sales training courses can help to reduce this attrition by offering line managers and business leaders the tools they require to mentor and coach employees over the long term, supporting the overall development of the business and evidencing your commitment to staff well-being. 

Even sales pitching training, whilst closely focused on the practicalities required to effectively introduce a lead into the sales pipeline, can help to motivate staff. By helping your salespeople to understand the ins-and-outs of your product or service, they can identify a more significant purpose to their roles beyond simply closing deals—helping them to perform better in their roles and feel a sense of loyalty and ownership over their daily responsibilities. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how offering your employees sales training online can support not only their learning and growth, but also enable your business to improve productivity and performance, see our recent guide to Building Resilience and Agility in Times of Uncertainty for a deep dive into the world of change management and nurturing talent.

Sales Training: Online Courses Offering Bespoke Learning Paths

As we touched on earlier, offering staff sales training online is an ideal way to address issues that are unique to your verticals or specific to your business—with salespeople encouraged to bring examples of challenges to sessions that they can explore in depth with the training provider. This can vary from leads where it’s proven difficult to connect with decision-makers within the organisation, to clients who they haven’t been able to convince of the value of your products or services. 

Engaging with online sales training courses enables your staff to gain access to resources which will then become accessible from anywhere—at their desk in the office, on the way to a pitch meeting with a key account, in the waiting room of a new, qualified lead—meaning that they can brush up on their skills and remind themselves of crucial techniques whenever they’re needed. These resources will be kept up-to-date, giving you the confidence that your employees are focused on studying cutting-edge techniques with a proven track record of success.

Providing sales training online for your staff also enables you to ensure that staff at all levels of the organisation are catered to. 

Courses and the content covered within them can be tailored to each individual’s needs—especially helpful given the fact that the problems facing a senior salesperson are unlikely to be the roadblocks that stand in the way of success for early-career or graduate professionals—and interactive elements of online sales training courses, such as quizzes and simulations, can be focused on that salesperson’s weakest areas. 

77% of professional learning and development experts agree that personalised approaches to staff training ensure engagement with training materials and course content. At the same time, the flexibility offered by virtual sales training means that your team will be able to learn according to their own schedule, which is beneficial for employees who are likely to have meetings and client calls in their diaries throughout the day. 

Alongside these benefits, bespoke virtual learning and development solutions offer a cost-effective way of providing your team with impactful sales training. Online courses eliminate the need for staff to travel to the provider, meaning that they can leverage their free time between client touchpoints to address the areas for improvement they’ve identified in coaching and mentoring sessions with line managers and colleagues. 

Closing Remarks

Leveraging online sales training courses represents a strategic investment that can drive significant growth for your business. These courses ensure that your employees are provided with the latest, industry-proven techniques, from sales prospecting training and sales pitching training, to social selling techniques, all of which can be tailored to address your unique business challenges. 

The data demonstrates that businesses that embrace continuous, flexible, and high-value sales training online witness an increase in net sales per representative. Furthermore, virtual sales training enhances staff motivation, engagement, and productivity, contributing toward talent retention initiatives. 

By facilitating a culture of learning and growth, you not only empower your staff, but also position your organisation for long-term success. If you’re looking to boost revenue, improve performance, and realise your team's potential, embrace sales training. Online methods provide an ideal opportunity for you to enhance your salespeoples’ skills and competencies without pulling them from their day-to-day, revenue-generating responsibilities. 

Experts in Delivering Online Sales Training Courses

For over 25 years, Pareto’s team has provided online sales training courses, empowering tomorrow's trailblazers with the specialist skills required to succeed in the fast-paced and increasingly digitalised world of consultative selling. 

If you’re interested in learning more or discovering how offering your staff sales training online can nurture and realise their talent, contact us today to discuss your needs.