What Are Bespoke Training Solutions?

With the market for bespoke training solutions in sales anticipated to grow by around $4.21bn by 2024, it’s perhaps unsurprising that many organisations are now leveraging these opportunities for sales skills training to enhance the capabilities of their teams.

With talent shortages continuing to bite across all tech-forward sectors, business leaders are saving money and upskilling their existing employees instead of engaging in costly hiring exercises and executive searches to bridge their skills gaps.

But what are bespoke training solutions? In this guide, we’ll answer that question, looking closely at how customised training differs from other forms of sales training. After we’ve done this, we’ll explore how this form of training can help your sales team to hit their revenue targets and perform at a high level, highlighting the ROI that specially-tailored sales skills training can offer at all levels of seniority.

What Is Bespoke Training?

Around 69% of businesses will spend an average of £19,700 each year in coaching their salespeople on the latest processes, methodologies, and skills needed to thrive in a high-performance culture. At the same time, when they’re utilising off-the-shelf courses, business leaders can’t always be certain that every moment of their team’s time will be spent working through the most complex issues that their organisation faces. 

This is where bespoke sales training can make all the difference.

So, what is bespoke training? In short, a training partner will work in close collaboration with your business to customise a learning and development experience that meets the specific needs of your staff, aligned with your vision at all times—but what does this mean in practice? 

1. Audit

Any provider of bespoke training solutions should always begin by closely assessing the current state of your organisation and wider market circumstances. This period of auditing will allow them to discuss your short and long-term goals with your business leaders, enabling them to evaluate the output of your current sales team against where you ought to be. 

They’ll then give you the support you need to understand how bespoke sales training will enable you to see a tangible ROI: whether that’s driving performance or minimising the time-wasters that stand in the way of high productivity, ultimately, all custom training will aim at maximising your revenue growth. 

The training provider you’ve contracted to work with your organisation will give you individual and group-level feedback on the skills and competencies in your sales team, helping you see where your talent stacks up against the industry standard for excellence. By knowing what good looks like, you’ll be better placed to address not only your team’s weaknesses, but to leverage their unique strengths to achieve your commercial strategy.

2. Align

At this stage, the provider of bespoke training solutions will again work closely with your business, creating a course which will help your staff and colleagues get the most out of sales skills training. 

They’ll ensure that not only content, but evaluation and assessment methods are chosen to achieve your commercial vision and objectives, establishing hard KPIs that will be used as metrics to ensure staff achieve a high level of excellence. 

This second stage of the customised training process is vital to ensuring that any sales training offered to your team is embedded and implemented in their working practices. 

The ultimate goal of the alignment phase is making certain that the positive change you see in terms of your team’s strengths and weaknesses is a broader, deeper, more cultural shift—with a healthy, high-performance sales culture likelier to retain high-quality talent, leading to upwards of 33% higher revenues when compared to organisations with poor or nonexistent cultures.

3. Attain

Once your bespoke training solutions have been designed, they will then be implemented—and your staff will begin to undertake their sales skills training with your provider’s learning and development experts. 

At this stage, your team will undertake sales training that is personalised to their—and your organisation’s—needs. From role-playing different scenarios that impact their performance and ability to close, to studying the techniques that lead to sales excellence, they’ll be focusing on understanding not just why these skills are necessary for long-term career success, but how they relate back to your objectives and vision at all times.

Similarly, personalised training in sales will also focus on your supervisors and managers. One of the major benefits of bespoke training is the coaching and mentorship your leadership team will receive, ensuring that they can provide your frontline staff and representatives with the support and resources they need to hit targets and achieve revenue growth.

4. Accredit

In the final stage of the personalised training process, a personalised accreditation programme will be developed in collaboration with your business leaders, ensuring that existing staff and new starters alike will be able to get up to speed with enhanced sales methodologies rapidly. 

The accreditation phase is crucial to ensuring that you can plan for succession within your business, giving you the confidence to know that your future leaders will have received the sales skills training they need to drive improvements across all business areas. 

With almost three-quarters of sales managers highlighting that they haven’t received the training they need to encourage and motivate high-performing teams, by ensuring that all of your future leaders have received the tools and techniques they need to carry your culture forward, you can guarantee your ability to compete over the long term. 

Whilst a lack of training can significantly impact short and long-term sales performance, undirected or unfocused training can similarly result in your team spending too long honing in on techniques and tools they don’t need for success in their roles. 

Bespoke training solutions, on the other hand, give you the confidence to know that every moment your salespeople spend in the classroom is going to be laser-focused on the specific issues your business faces, and the ironing out the weaknesses discovered during the impartial auditing stage of the training process.

How Does Bespoke Training Differ from Other Sales Training?

Whilst pre-made courses can certainly be an effective way of training staff on the basic sales skills they need for success, a course that has been specially tailored to your team—and the problems that your business faces—will always ensure that every piece of information or resource your team receives will be targeted to achieve your vision. 

Now that we’ve understood how bespoke training solutions work and answered the question, “What is bespoke training?”, we can look a bit more closely at how this form of sales skills training differs from off-the-shelf options. 

Flexibility is Key

As we’ve already covered, bespoke training solutions are customised to the unique, specific needs of your business and your team. 

This means that you can work with the training provider to ensure that any bases you need to be covered can be. Whether you need a time-served representative to receive a refresher on the digital skills they need for success in the current marketplace, or you want to ensure that your high performers are gaining the professional skills they need to prepare for senior leadership and executive positions, bespoke sales skills training can offer the techniques your people need to realise their potential.

Every part of a customised training course in sales can be customised to your unique needs, from the hard KPIs that will be used to evaluate staff attainment, the course materials, how the content is delivered, and at what times. In short, your business dictates the timeframe, the venue, and the style of intervention.

Save Time When Compared to an Off-The-Shelf Course

Due to the nature of bespoke training solutions—with the course content and topics covered focused specifically on your business needs—you can ensure that staff complete their studies and end-point assessments quickly, minimising the time they’re taken away from revenue-generating duties and core tasks. 

Similarly, customised training providers will understand the nuances of your specific market and locale due to the in-depth auditing phase. As a result, you can be certain that all training is focused on the material and techniques that each individual employee needs, allowing them to quickly implement solutions and drive a return on your training investment as soon as they’re back in their position. 

Whether they need a hand with developing existing accounts and maximising revenue from already-loyal customers, to understanding how to finesse operations management, bespoke sales training gets your personnel to where they need to be rapidly.

Provide High-Quality Service to Customers

Bespoke sales training helps your representatives develop the specific competencies they need to please your unique base of customers and prospects, ensuring they’re provided with a high-quality, efficient, and delightful service whenever they engage with your business. 

By foregrounding the issues and problems that your customers face, and the roadblocks standing in the way of your team successfully consulting and offering solutions, you can create a culture of honesty, transparency, and customer success.

As a result of this deeper shift within your organisation, personnel at all levels of seniority within your team will be better placed to build trust and rapport with key accounts and high-value prospects. With 81% of B2B decision-makers highlighting that they’d repeatedly buy from a brand that offers a positive customer service experience, it’s a crucial consideration that organisations can’t afford to get wrong.

How Can Bespoke Training Help Your Sales Team?

It should hopefully be clear now that personalised, unique training can offer your sales specialists a range of abilities and competencies that aren’t always going to be provided by off-the-shelf solutions. The flexibility and time savings provided by bespoke sales training ensure that your people can always put what they’ve learned into immediate practice.

We often hear that training in sales techniques can result in a 353% ROI for businesses, but what concrete ways can bespoke training help your team work more productively and cohesively to achieve your vision?

1. Bespoke Training Solutions Ensure the Perfect Fit

Bespoke sales training is customised to the unique needs of your business, ensuring that all staff that undertake your specially-tailored training course will be guaranteed to be a perfect cultural fit. 

Customised training solutions are built for your specific sales team and your business alone, using examples, role-playing scenarios, and case studies that are tailored to your customer base and the problems your people face when completing their daily responsibilities. 

Differing from off-the-shelf sales skills training, bespoke training solutions ensure that your employees not only have the right techniques and methods to close deals, but the right attitude, too. 

A personalised training provider will work closely with your representatives to ensure that issues of will—as opposed to issues of skill—are resolved, giving you the confidence that all staff are starting from the same point, and are ready to make a difference in their personal and professional lives.

2. Offer Your Team a Consistent Sales Training Experience

Whilst off-the-shelf courses are regularly changed to reflect the “average” for best practices across the sales industry, bespoke training solutions guarantee that your learning and development initiatives are truly one-of-a-kind and future-proofed. 

This way, you can be certain that every employee who engages with your training course, whether they’re a seasoned professional who’s been with the business since its first day or a recent hire just starting out in their career, is starting at the same level of knowledge. 

With a consistency of experience that can’t be beat, bespoke training solutions allow you to make certain that a standard of excellence is put in place across your business, and that all team members know what good looks like through receiving the same training.

3. Boost Employee Morale

Bespoke sales skills training can enhance your employees’ ability to generate revenue—increasing their earning power as they regularly exceed targets—and improve their morale, too. 

As a report in the Harvard Business Review illustrates, professional development and training result in 15% higher levels of engagement, and 34% greater retention rates, than competitor organisations who don’t invest in sales skills training.

By investing in their personal and professional development, you prove to your staff—as well as any potential hires that apply to and interview with your organisation—that you’re committed to ensuring they feel valued and supported to achieve their goals, ultimately driving motivation and job satisfaction.

4. Utilise Bespoke Sales Training to Create Cohesion

Data from Frost & Sullivan shows that a strong culture of workplace collaboration can increase sales by up to 27% and simultaneously enhance customer satisfaction by 41% when compared to sales-focused organisations that don’t foster a culture of cohesion. 

By ensuring that your sales representatives regularly engage in training together, you can create a sense of unity and a singularity of purpose amongst your team members and their supervisors, making certain they work together to leverage their strengths and achieve their goals. 

Likewise, our second point—regarding a consistent training experience—also has an impact on your culture, allowing your colleagues to build a sense of collaboration and hold one another accountable for their professional development.

5. Higher Closed Deal Percentages

Bespoke training solutions ensure that your staff have the skills they need to resolve the unique problems facing your business and sector, enabling them to close more deals in turn. 

By providing customised training options for your staff, you can give them the specialist skills they need to succeed in the roles that they’re carving for themselves with your organisation. If they want to be experts in social selling or negotiation, you can accommodate that with bespoke sales training that’s geared to their needs and desires. 

Ensuring that your team regularly engage with training opportunities by fostering a culture of learning and development can result in around 50% more sales per representative, compared to businesses that don’t invest in their salespeople's professional and personal development.

As we can see, bespoke training solutions can have a significant return on investment for businesses that are looking to fine-tune their sales strategies and ensure their people have the skills they need for long-term success. 

From improving productivity to increasing the likelihood of deal closure, bespoke sales training gives you the confidence to know that your staff have the unique blend of competencies, abilities, and attitudes they need to play a significant role in their team and the broader ability of your organisation to achieve its goals. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the impact that training can have on the ability of your team to convert leads into loyal customers and how you can foster a truly high-performance culture, explore our recent guide on the topic of How Digital Skills Training Can Bridge Your Company’s Skill Gaps, where our consultants give you a rundown of how bespoke training solutions can drive change, growth, and success.

Closing Remarks: What’ve We Learned About Sales Skills Training?

Bespoke training solutions stand out as a distinctive and strong approach to sales training. In this guide, we’ve answered the question “What is bespoke training?”, showing how it’s an easily-customised methodology designed to meet your team's specific needs and align with your long-term vision for success. 

With the customised training process encompassing an initial audit, and alignment of training with your business objectives, you can ensure that any content covered is a perfect fit for your team and provides all staff, whether newcomers or time-served professionals, with a consistent training experience. In short, this form of training is a powerful tool to boost employee morale and foster a cohesive environment in which staff can realise their potential. 

Moreover, bespoke sales training equips your staff with the specialised skills necessary to excel in their roles, no matter how complex they might be, ultimately resulting in higher percentages of closed deals. This personalised approach not only enhances productivity, but allows you to regularly revisit your strategies to ensure they’re still effective. As organisations seek to bridge their skills gaps without resorting to cost-intensive hiring, bespoke training solutions become a vital investment to ensure competitiveness and profitability.

Experts in Providing Bespoke Training Solutions

Pareto’s specialist team of training providers has been championing the enhancing effect of bespoke training solutions for over 25 years. From empowering tomorrow’s sales leaders to giving graduates the expert skills they need for long-term career success, we help organisations thrive and compete in the increasingly complex world of sales.

If you’d like to learn more, contact us to discover how our sales skill training can help to realise your team’s talent.