Let’s be honest. Training workshops can be boring. Many trainers can hold their audience’s attention for about five minutes and then they’re in their own world dreaming about being anywhere other than in another sales training class.
You want these few hours (hopefully not days) to be valuable and not a waste of everyone’s time. Whether you’re training new sales employees or making current employees aware of new concepts, the sales training ideas below can help improve your next sales training workshop.
Put on a Good Show
This is where you could actually keep your audience from falling asleep. Even if you are in a highly professional environment, it is important to make sales training ideas more fun. In fact, the more professional the environment, the more important this may be. It gives everyone a chance to unwind a bit and take things less seriously. For new hires, it is a chance to see the workplace won’t always be straight laced. For current staff, it’s crucial for them to see that their work environment can relax a little. Not to mention this also helps those being trained actually retain the information.
Make It Engaging
Anyone can get bored simply being talked at. Make the approach more engaging and almost conversational and you are likely to see better results. When people feel they are involved in the training not simply being forced to listen to a lecture, their own attitude about listening and learning completely changes. If you combine this with making it fun, you are bound to have amazing results.
Introduce New Technology
So you put on this great new hire sales training workshop, what happens now? I’ll tell you what will happen. The new hires will leave the workshop and immediately forget a large percentage of what was learned during your engaging sessions. Instead of handing them print outs of the presentation, that will likely get tossed in the trash, put that valuable knowledge into a tool to be accessed whenever they need it. Give them a place to go so they can follow up on questions they may have had during the training sessions. It will take the burden of you having to remember their questions and answering them on the spot. Also, those questions and answers will always be in your knowledge base tool to be referenced at a later date.
Look to the Future
The bottom line is the better the training you offer, the better the results will be. When you think of the future you see engaged, well trained employees. This is not going to be possible with a lackluster training program. You want to equip your employees with knowledge to become the best of the best which will then help increase internal advancement and reduce turnover.