A Lesson To Learn: The Importance Of First-hand Experience In Sales

Sales management is a discipline that requires a good portion of knowledge. However, confining oneself to book reading is unlikely the way to becoming an expert in the field of sales. The truth is that selling a product or a service cannot be learnt without first-hand experience. Managers need to try, fail and try again before they turn into selling stars. And that is something to be taken into consideration by managers responsible for online sales training courses. Just like solely reading books on sales management will lead to nowhere, watching theoretical lectures or studying presentations on sales won’t be enough to educate your personnel. What many training courses really lack is the possibility to try sales skills in practice.

The key issue when the managers learn how to sell by reading books and watching video lectures is that in a real-life conversation with a client things happen very fast, there is no time to think over your answer, remembering what the book told about the way one should act in this or that situation. The answers need to be practiced until they become second nature. So in the case of sales management the LMS used by companies needs to be revised to provide sales training courses in totally new formats.

The formats of the courses should plunge the managers into the circumstances where they get to train necessary skills by repeatedly performing the same functions a sales manager has to perform on a daily basis. An example of this kind of courses can be sales simulations. In this kind of simulations sales managers need to choose the right responses for a series of clients’ objections and only the right reactions to the clients’ needs will allow them to close a deal. In-built gamifications elements in a form of a reward for certain number of closed deals will only ginger up employees.

Managers may try their skills in a simulation making mistakes and fixing them, gaining the best results on deal closing, however understanding why they did this or that mistake is crucial. This is exactly the point where theory overlaps with practice. To deal with this issue there exist courses that allow managers to record their conversation with a fictional client and send it to their mentor. Thus they will get to learn not only from their mistakes but also from the real-life experience of their colleagues as well as their co-peers’ knowledge.

Usually interaction with clients is far from being the only sales manager’s task. A good sales manager needs to be able to deal with all kinds of associated functions that can turn up during the work. That is why it would be good if the online sales training courses for managers included business cases where they are put in some kind of real-life business situation and have to take a number of steps to deal with the issue and maximize company’s profit.

To cut a long story short a professional sales skills course is not just another academic lecture. Sales differ a lot from other disciplines: it is the area where one has to know exactly how to transfer all the academic knowledge into real-life business situations. And the only way to achieve this is by constant practice. That is why choosing an LMS for your sales department pay careful attention to the formats offered by the platforms. Of course there should be academic lectures and reading material, but it should always be fortified by different kinds of courses aimed at sales practice.