In today’s competitive market, equipping your sales team with the right skills and knowledge is crucial for business success. But when it comes to sales training, companies face a common dilemma: Should they invest in custom training tailored to their specific needs, or opt for off-the-shelf programs that offer a more generalized approach?
Both options come with their own set of advantages and drawbacks. Understanding the differences can help you make an informed decision that best suits your organization’s unique goals and team dynamics.
What is Custom Sales Training?
Custom sales training is specifically designed to align with your organization’s sales processes, products, and unique challenges. This type of training is often developed in collaboration with training consultants or experts who tailor the content to fit your company’s needs.
Benefits of Custom Sales Training:
Tailored to Your Business Needs: Custom training reflects your sales cycle, product offerings, and industry. This specificity increases relevance and improves the chances of retention and application of the skills learned.
Focus on Company Culture: You can incorporate your company’s culture, values, and communication style into the training. This ensures that sales strategies and techniques are aligned with your organizational ethos.
Scalability and Flexibility: As your business evolves, custom training can be adapted to new products, markets, or sales goals, ensuring long-term value.
Higher Engagement: Personalized content that resonates with your sales team’s real-world challenges tends to increase engagement and motivation to apply learned techniques.
Drawbacks of Custom Sales Training:
Time-Consuming Development: Creating a custom program requires significant time investment, from identifying needs to developing and testing content.
Higher Initial Costs: The cost of developing custom training can be much higher upfront compared to off-the-shelf solutions.
Maintenance and Updates: Over time, your custom program may need regular updates to stay relevant, which adds additional ongoing costs.
What is Off-the-Shelf Sales Training?
Off-the-shelf sales training is pre-designed and ready-to-use content that focuses on general sales techniques and skills. These programs are available from various providers and are designed to address universal sales challenges.
Benefits of Off-the-Shelf Sales Training:
Immediate Availability: Off-the-shelf programs can be implemented quickly, without the long lead times needed for custom development.
Lower Upfront Cost: These programs are often more affordable than custom solutions, making them ideal for smaller teams or companies with tight budgets.
Proven Content: Many off-the-shelf programs are developed by experts and have a track record of success across various industries, which can offer peace of mind.
Wide Range of Topics: Off-the-shelf solutions often cover a broad array of topics, from basic sales skills to advanced negotiation tactics, making it easy to find a course that fits your immediate needs.
Drawbacks of Off-the-Shelf Sales Training:
Lack of Customization: These programs may not fully align with your specific sales process, industry, or team dynamics, potentially reducing the program’s effectiveness.
Generic Approach: Since the content is not tailored, it may feel less relevant to your team, leading to lower engagement and a reduced impact on performance.
Inflexibility: Once purchased, off-the-shelf programs cannot be easily modified to address any evolving challenges or changes in your business model.
Which Option is Right for Your Team?
The decision between custom and off-the-shelf sales training depends on several factors, including your budget, timeline, and specific needs.
Choose Custom Sales Training if:
You have a unique sales process or product that requires a deep understanding of your market.
You want training that reflects your company culture and aligns with specific business goals.
You are looking for a long-term investment that can evolve alongside your organization.
Choose Off-the-Shelf Sales Training if:
You need a quick, cost-effective solution to provide general sales skills.
Your team requires training on fundamental sales techniques that apply across industries.
You’re operating with a limited budget or smaller team size and want proven, readily available content.
Both custom and off-the-shelf sales training offer valuable solutions, but the right choice for your team depends on your company’s specific needs, budget, and long-term goals. For businesses that need tailored, highly relevant content, custom training is an investment that can pay off in improved performance and stronger alignment with business objectives.
For those looking for a faster, budget-friendly option, off-the-shelf training can provide a foundation of skills that helps boost sales efforts immediately.
By evaluating your current sales challenges and organizational goals, you can make the right decision to empower your team with the tools they need to succeed.
Build a Custom Sales Training Program on an LMS
Building a custom sales training program on a Learning Management System (LMS) is an excellent way to ensure that your sales team receives tailored training that aligns with your business’s specific processes, goals, and products.
By using an LMS, you can create engaging, trackable, and scalable training content that drives measurable results. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you design and implement an effective custom sales training program on an LMS.
1. Define Your Sales Training Objectives
Before you start developing the actual training content, clearly define what you want to achieve with the program. Consider your sales team's specific needs, challenges, and performance gaps. Some common objectives for sales training include:
Enhancing product knowledge.
Improving sales techniques and closing skills.
Strengthening negotiation and objection-handling abilities.
Increasing sales efficiency with CRM tools.
Boosting customer relationship management.
2. Analyze Your Audience
A successful custom sales training program should be built around the needs of your learners. Analyze the characteristics of your sales team, including:
Experience Levels: Are they new hires or seasoned professionals?
Roles and Responsibilities: Do they focus on lead generation, account management, or enterprise sales?
Learning Preferences: Do they prefer short, interactive modules or in-depth, formal training? Understanding the audience will help you create more relevant and engaging content that addresses their specific challenges.
3. Choose the Right LMS Platform
Selecting an LMS that fits your organization’s goals and requirements is critical. Consider the following when evaluating an LMS:
Customization Capabilities: Does the LMS allow you to tailor courses, assessments, and reporting to fit your sales processes?
Ease of Use: Is the platform intuitive for both learners and administrators?
Mobile Learning: Can your sales team access training from anywhere on their mobile devices?
Integration with CRM: Can the LMS integrate with your CRM to provide sales performance tracking and analytics?
Scalability: Can the system grow with your business as you add new team members or expand to new regions? Popular LMS options for sales training include platforms like LMS Portals, which offer features such as customization, mobile accessibility, and integration with sales tools.
4. Develop Sales-Specific Training Modules
Now that you have clear objectives, a defined audience, and the right LMS, it’s time to create your custom content. Tailor your sales training modules to focus on the key skills and knowledge areas that are most relevant to your team. These modules may include:
Product Knowledge Training: Detailed information on your products and services, including features, benefits, pricing, and positioning.
Sales Process Training: Outline your company's sales funnel, including lead qualification, prospecting, closing techniques, and follow-up strategies.
CRM Tools Training: Teach your team how to use your CRM platform effectively to track leads, manage pipelines, and generate reports.
Soft Skills Development: Focus on improving communication, negotiation, and active listening skills to help build stronger customer relationships.
Role-Playing and Simulations: Incorporate scenario-based learning and role-playing exercises where your sales reps practice real-world selling situations.
For each module, aim to use a variety of formats, such as video lessons, quizzes, downloadable resources, interactive simulations, and live coaching sessions to keep the content engaging.
5. Incorporate Interactive and Microlearning Elements
To maximize engagement and retention, incorporate interactive elements and microlearning into your custom sales training:
Interactive Videos: Use videos that include branching scenarios or clickable areas where learners can choose their response in a sales conversation.
Microlearning: Break down complex topics into small, digestible modules that can be completed in 5-10 minutes.
Gamification: Add elements like leaderboards, badges, or points to make learning more fun and competitive.
Quizzes and Knowledge Checks: Regularly test your sales reps with quizzes to reinforce key takeaways and ensure they are absorbing the material.
6. Create Assessments and Certification Programs
To track progress and validate skills, incorporate assessments into your training program. These assessments could take the form of:
Quizzes: Short multiple-choice or true/false questions after each module.
Simulated Sales Calls: Ask sales reps to record mock sales calls or submit videos practicing their pitch.
Final Assessments: A comprehensive test covering all aspects of the sales process. Once learners complete the course, offer certifications to boost their confidence and provide them with formal recognition of their new skills. Certifications can also serve as motivation for ongoing development.
7. Utilize Data and Analytics to Track Progress
One of the key advantages of using an LMS is the ability to track learner progress and performance through built-in analytics. Use the LMS to measure:
Completion Rates: How many team members have completed the training?
Assessment Scores: Are sales reps retaining and applying the knowledge?
Engagement Metrics: Which modules are the most engaging, and where do learners drop off?
These insights allow you to refine your sales training program by identifying areas of improvement or gaps in the content.
8. Gather Feedback and Iterate
After your sales team completes the training, gather feedback to ensure the content is relevant, engaging, and effective. Use surveys, post-training interviews, or LMS-provided feedback tools to understand:
What worked well in the program?
Which parts of the training need improvement?
What other topics or skills could be added in future versions? Use this feedback to iterate and improve the course for future learners. Regular updates also ensure your content stays current as your sales process or products evolve.
9. Leverage Ongoing Training and Continuous Learning
Sales skills and market dynamics are always evolving. To maintain a competitive edge, consider using your LMS to provide ongoing training opportunities, such as:
Refresher Courses: Periodically offer refreshers on key sales techniques or new product updates.
New Modules for Advanced Skills: Offer additional training for advanced techniques, such as consultative selling or enterprise sales strategies.
Sales Coaching and Mentorship: Integrate mentorship or peer coaching sessions to provide continuous support and growth opportunities.
10. Measure the ROI of Your Sales Training
Ultimately, the goal of any training program is to see results. Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the ROI of your custom sales training program. Some metrics to consider include:
Increase in sales performance or close rates.
Reduction in onboarding time for new hires.
Improvement in customer satisfaction scores.
Higher employee engagement and retention within the sales team. Analyzing these metrics will help you determine the success of the training and justify continued investment.
Summary
Building a custom sales training program on an LMS offers a powerful way to deliver tailored learning that can drive real results for your team. By taking the time to define your objectives, develop targeted content, and leverage the capabilities of your LMS, you can create a flexible and scalable solution that grows alongside your business.
A well-designed sales training program not only improves individual sales performance but also helps your entire sales team align with your company’s goals, ensuring long-term success.
About LMS Portals
At LMS Portals, we provide our clients and partners with a SaaS-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows you to launch a dedicated training environment (a portal) for each of your unique audiences.
The system includes built-in, SCORM-compliant rapid course development software that provides a drag and drop engine to enable most anyone to build engaging courses quickly and easily.
We also offer a complete library of ready-made courses, covering most every aspect of corporate training and employee development.
If you choose to, you can create Learning Paths to deliver courses in a logical progression and add structure to your training program. The system also supports Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) and provides tools for social learning.
Together, these features make the LMS Portals platform the ideal SaaS-based platform to support both off-the-shelf and custom sales training programs.
Contact us today to get started or visit our Partner Program pages
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