How to Solve Business Pain Points via Bespoke Training Solutions

Bespoke training solutions can offer businesses a stunning 353% return on investment. Tailored training in sales ensures that your employees are prepared for the unique pain points that impact your business, enabling them to address the issues specific to the markets you serve. Training providers increasingly look for trainees to bring real-world examples with them into the classroom, whether physical or virtual, which can help them understand how to put their learning into practice in the scenarios that arise each day. 

Whether your salespeople are struggling to maintain long-term relationships with key accounts, or they’re finding it more difficult to connect with decision-makers and close deals amidst an uncertain economy, tailored training can help to ensure they have the skills and techniques they need to succeed in their career. 

This guide looks closely at how bespoke sales training can help to solve your business’s pain points. We’ll first look closely at the common struggles that sales-focused organisations encounter, before exploring the role of bespoke training solutions in addressing these pain points. 

Alongside this, we’ll highlight some of the other benefits of sales coaching training and other tailored training courses for staff engagement and retention, allowing you to get the most out of your relationship with a bespoke sales training provider and effectively implement your learning and development initiatives. 

The Importance of Recognising Your Pain Points

Identifying and evaluating the pain points that pose the largest impediments to your revenue-generating activities is crucial when it comes to maintaining agility and competitiveness within the dynamic and fast-paced marketplace. This initial assessment is vital to understanding your organisational weaknesses, and will often act as the guide by which you and your change partner can implement sales enablement and lead generation tools, arrange additional training for staff at all levels of seniority, and plan your sales cadence to maximise revenue growth. 

The first question to ask yourself is, most likely, whether you actually know what areas your sales team are underprepared in. Despite 82% of decision-makers within the organisations contacted during the B2B sales process highlighting that sales representatives come to them unprepared or underprepared, sales readiness continues to be an issue for many businesses. 

This audit phase lays the foundation on which you build wider, more impactful cultural change and business development, ensuring that processes, objectives, targets and KPIs are all aligned with the organisation’s vision, and that staff are provided with the competency frameworks and recognition they need to develop loyalty and progress in their careers. 

Without this knowledge, a number of issues can take root within your sales team and lead to a diminished ability to grow revenue, including: 

• Sales representatives wasting valuable time on lower-priority tasks

• Ineffective approaches going unremedied 

• Customers being engaged too early in the sales cycle

• Unintentionally prolonging the sales process

• Slower sales cadence

At the same time, this exercise also enables you to understand the needs of your management staff.

Many managers within the sales environment are promoted due to their skills and expertise in selling, which doesn’t necessarily lead to excellence in leadership. An audit of their skills and the pain points they encounter when coaching and mentoring staff can help you to understand the management style that would be most suitable for them, helping them to drive accountability and ownership of duties within your business and the nuances of managing and supporting millennial and Gen Z candidates, an increasingly large contingent of the sales workforce.

Common Sales Pain Points

Now that we’ve understood why it’s so crucial to audit your business prior to implementing bespoke training solutions, we can look closely at the most common pain points that sales-focused organisations will encounter.

Tailored sales coaching training can help business leaders, hiring managers, and supervisors realise the potential of their inbound and outbound teams. This isn’t to say that it’s not crucial to identify and understand where these problems creep in, though—whether it’s an issue with a single employee or the entire sales team, recognising these issues can help you to work with a learning and development partner to create a training plan which has a significant and positive impact on revenue-generating activities. 

Despite the benefits offered by bespoke sales training, data collected by Taskdrive shows that only 17% of organisations offer regular, continuous professional development opportunities for their sales representatives, and fewer still offer personalised training that can target individual salespeople’s weaknesses. 

Before we get into how bespoke training solutions can help address inefficiencies and other weaknesses throughout the sales cycle, let’s consider some of the most common sales pain points that businesses across all industries will encounter:

• Lead generation. Discovering prospects and driving them through the sales funnel can be challenging, particularly for the B2B industry, where salespeople may fail to connect with potential customers due to an inability to identify their problems and articulate the solutions their product or service provides. As we’ll see, bespoke training solutions can address this issue, but it’s important to identify why your staff are struggling to identify leads. 
  
  Over half of salespeople report that effective lead generation remains a pain point for them in their careers, dramatically impacting an organisation's revenue. On average, each of your sales representatives will spend two-thirds of their working day dealing with non-revenue-generating activities such as lead generation, which can similarly impact morale and engagement.

• Follow-up. Without an effective strategy for customer retention or relationship management, following up with prospects can become an issue for salespeople and impact the agility of your sales cadence—whether it’s an issue with potential customers failing to provide a response, or a lack of organisation leading to an inability to devote the necessary time to following up. 
  
  Sales coaching training offers one way of addressing this pain point, but it’s important that staff begin to understand how to leverage technology to automate certain aspects of the follow-up process, giving them time to focus on addressing customers’ specific needs. 

• Closing. The average closing rate for sales professionals across the UK sits at around 27%, directly impacting a business’s ability to generate revenue and grow. Recognising when it’s the right time to close a deal, facing objections, and failing to negotiate the terms of a contract can all cause friction during the closing process. 
  
  Ultimately, a failure to close can be addressed by bespoke sales training—as we’ll discuss in the next section—but it’s crucial that salespeople understand the knock-on impact that continued rejection can have on not only their own well-being, but the reputation of their organisation within their specific verticals.

• Data management. Sales-focused organisations often sit on a large volume of data—unfortunately, this is often not leveraged to its full extent by salespeople, leading to missed opportunities and strategies which aren’t underpinned by quality insights. 
  
  Tools like CRMs are useful for consolidating all of the data generated as prospects pass through the sales funnel, but it’s vital to ensure that staff are offered tailored training to understand how this information can then be used to effectively drive new business growth and enhance their key account management duties.

• Communication. Whether it’s a misalignment between marketing efforts and the day-to-day duties of the sales team, or a phone manner that could do with improvement, the process of selling often hinges on salespeople building a rapport and learning how to communicate with their prospects, customers, and colleagues. 
  
  Inefficient processes surrounding communication can be a major stumbling block for closing deals, especially if leads are unable to get in touch with a representative or reach a communication dead-end when they need help with an aspect of a product or service. 

Whilst this list isn’t intended to be exhaustive, and the issues your organisation faces often being unique to your market and customer base, it’s likely that the root of the pain point can be found in one of these five areas. 

As a result, bespoke training solutions that encourage your representatives to bring real-world examples into the training environment can significantly and positively impact peformance, productivity, and profitability—whether they need help with communicating effectively with clients, or they’re looking to bring data-driven strategies to bear on their daily responsibilities.

The Role of Bespoke Training Solutions in Addressing Pain Points

As we’ve noted, a provider of bespoke training solutions will work closely with your organisation to understand your specific training needs, helping you implement business-critical changes that can improve the chances of your sales team connecting and forming long-lasting—and profitable—relationships with leads and customers. 

Beyond a standard learning and development model, these organisations act as consultants on the transformations to processes and culture, which can guide your continued success within a competitive market.

Let’s look at how bespoke sales training can help address each of the issues outlined above in more detail. 

1. Basing All Change On A Bedrock of Tools, Processes, and Frameworks

Without ensuring that your staff have received lead generation training, sales follow-up training, or the other essential competencies, frameworks, and toolkits necessary for success, they’re unlikely to be realising their full potential. 

As a result, ensuring that sales stages are clearly defined, and that processes and KPIs are in place to make certain that success and failure can be measured and reported on is vital. This can help to guide sales cadence and ensure that staff have the correct approach to maximise their interaction with each lead and established customer. 

2. Developing Management Teams

Once these core, fundamental aspects are in place, it’s then time to look more closely at your management team. As we’ve established, many managers within sales-focused organisations are promoted based on their expertise, not necessarily due to their ability to drive a team. 

As a result of this, it’s important to establish a robust process for manager embedding and training cadence, all of which are focused on driving the three key aspects that managers are responsible for: 

• Accountability

• Competency 

• Engagement

This can help your managers and senior staff to adapt their style to each individual employee or team, ensuring they can get the most from all staff under them. At the same time, they’ll receive tailored training in the nuances of managing Gen Zs and providing them with purpose and progression opportunities. 

3. Sales Development and Enablement

After ensuring that all staff are provided with clear, actionable, and measurable goals and KPIs which can help them to realise their potential and take accountability and ownership of their success, you can then look in more detail at establishing a training programme which will pass this transformed internal culture on to all new hires. 

A dual-pronged approach to sales training and the application of sales enablement tools guides this drive toward success, retention, and growth. 

From social selling, lead generation, and prospecting, to account retention, negotiation skills and accreditations, these sales training programmes can quickly ramp new hires and existing staff to competence and sales professionalism. 

At the same time, the use of powerful technologies and sales enablement tools empowers efforts in cadence planning, staff coaching, and the utilisation of just-in-time assets. Alongside this, these enablement tools allow you to implement empowering, personalised e-learning pathways for your team, ensuring they have access to the resources and training they need for continued success and career development.

So, now that we understand how bespoke training solutions can address the pain points that were outlined in the first section of this guide, we can ask: How does bespoke sales training work, and what does the exercise look like from the planning stage to implementation? 

• A tailored training provider will first take the time to audit your business to assess the exact pain points that are preventing you from achieving your goals, helping you to understand what good looks like across the industry and offering objective recommendations to enhance your commercial strategy.

• Following this, your bespoke sales training partner will align the competencies and measures that will be used to evaluate their effectiveness with your vision and objectives, making long-term change in processes and culture achievable.

• Once they’ve collaborated with you to establish the KPIs by which staff will be assessed, the training programme will begin. Whether this is sales coaching training for senior colleagues, or a personalised course which aims to bring all members of your organisation up-to-speed, they should be working on the real issues that you face to ensure that knowledge is embedded and the techniques and methods offer practical benefits to your employees.

• The final stage of the tailored training process will typically involve the creation of internal programmes and processes to ensure that these positive business transformations are carried forward and can be embraced by new hires at all levels of seniority, giving you the confidence that you’ll receive a return on your investment in the training and professional development of your staff—including the creation of accreditation schemes where possible for management and executive-level employees. 

As a result of this considered approach to training, you can be certain that your staff will be provided with the skills they need to effectively connect with and sell to your target markets, whether local, national, or international.

The Other Benefits of Bespoke Sales Training for Businesses

Bespoke training solutions can significantly impact employee motivation and reduce staff turnover. A study from HubSpot highlights that 94% of employees would stay within a post for longer than a year if their employer nurtured their skills and invested in their career mobility—with wider reductions in attrition noted when organisations shift their cultures towards the facilitation of professional learning and development. 

At the same time, improving your staff's skills can help them recognise the value in the product or service they’re selling. By encouraging them to reflect on your organisation’s positioning within the market and the specific pain points you’re attempting to address for your clients, they can develop a nuanced appreciation for the importance of their role and the problems that it helps to solve. 

Research conducted by ValueSelling Associates has shown that 87% of high-growth businesses incorporate a value-based approach to selling products and services, since it enables their salespeople to more easily build rapport and trust with decision-makers in the B2B environment.

Nurturing your employees' skills also makes an impact on your ability to plan for succession. A training provider will be able to identify high-potential staff who can be offered greater responsibility or even placed in a development position, which will see them move into a management, executive, or director-level role with time.

If you’d like to learn more about the impact of tailored training on staff engagement, motivation, and retention, see our guide to Winning Strategies to Attract and Retain Gen Z for a deeper look at this rapidly growing contingent of the sales workforce, examining their training desires and providing practical, pragmatic tips to reducing attrition through a robust culture of learning and development.