Traditionally, organizations used to prefer the instructor-led training (ILT) approach to train their sales employees. In a classroom setting, trainers could easily augment the relevant content to ensure personalized training delivery. However, putting learners within a confined classroom for extended hours leads to several drawbacks including high training costs and less workforce productivity, which impact the overall business sales.

Today, enterprises prefer to deploy enterprise Learning Management Systems (LMSs) to impact impactful sales training, boost organizational performance and improve customer satisfaction. Training & development of sales professionals is essential to cater to their pertinent learning needs, without affecting their peak sales hours. E-learning content delivery serves as a sales training primer to help learners enhance their skills competency and effectively apply them at the workplace. Outlined below are the pros and cons of classroom-based training:

Pros

• Improved interaction and better team building between peers during a live classroom session.
• Face-to-face discussion with experts on diverse topics.
• Better scope for in-person role-plays as learners can participate in different activities and discussions.

Cons

• Sales employees are mostly on the go and have short attention spans. Therefore, taking out time to attend ILT sessions, results in waste of time as well as higher expenses on their travel.
• Sales employees cannot learn at their own convenience as they have to undergo ILT sessions as per the schedule. Therefore, it results in information overload, leading to poor learner engagement and retention.

Emerging Scope of Virtual ILT & E-learning

Many organizations utilize enterprise LMS to support Virtual ILT where learners can easily interact with the trainer as well as their peers via telephone calls, chats, polling, exercises and more. Discussed below are some of advantages of VILT sessions:

Pros

• Virtual classrooms enable the trainer to personalize the training content as per the pertinent needs and provide instant feedback based on individual performances.
• VILT also helps to improve sales training experience by delivering informative training sessions to widespread audiences.
• Learners can access training courses from home, office or while on the go. Therefore, it addresses the challenge of attending live classes, thereby enabling the learners to undergo training anytime and anywhere.
• This kind of training is also delivered as weekly or bi-weekly sessions, enabling the sales employees to learn at their own pace of time and convenience.

Despite these benefits, virtual classroom sessions have certain limitations which include:

Cons

• Lack of face-to-face communication as learners undergo training at home or even while travelling.
• It requires the adoption of customized instructional design methods to enhance learner engagement and retention

To overcome the challenges of ILT and VILT, the scope of using robust learning platforms which support e-learning has improved.

• As sales professionals mostly work offsite, it is essential for organizations to provide them with online training which they can undergo at any time. For this, enterprise LMSs support mobile-enabled content delivery in the form of infographics, quizzes, videos and more across personalized smartphones and tablets. This ensures the delivery of self-paced learning by enabling sales employees to improve their knowledge competency and overall sales.
• Online sales training also focuses on improving other skills of the sales personnel. For instance, modern LMSs can be integrated with Sales Support Systems to generate data on lead generation, performance metrics and more. Based on this data, different indicators are triggered for individuals to highlight individual performances as good or bad. This aids the organizations to decide which employee should undergo training on time management, soft skills, sales enablement and more.
• It is essential for modern salesforce to learn new skills and apply them in the real workplace situations. For this, modern e-learning platforms support simulation-based learning where sales employees can seek information in a virtual environment and learn how to apply them when actually at work. It helps to enhance overall employee efficiency, participation and knowledge competency.

To accelerate the overall impact of sales training, organizations need to follow various practices. Some of these include mentoring sales employees, reinforcing learning through refresher activities, giving instant feedback, encouraging learner collaboration and others. Various refresher activities include post-training meetings and feedback to reinforce the overall learning experiences. Modern enterprises aim to deliver effective sales training solutions to match with the dynamic needs of diversified audiences.

Today, the utilization of technology-aided platform to deliver effective sales training solutions has increased. Majority of the organizations are leveraging the benefits of modern LMSs by creating personalized mobile apps, supporting virtual classroom sessions, delivering bite-sized content across mobile devices and more. Tenneo (formerly G-Cube LMS) LMS holds the potential to support all these features, thereby catering to the training needs of the new-age workforce across diverse industry verticals. So, when it comes to boost sales performance, improve employee engagement and foster client relations, delivery of impactful sales training solutions via Tenneo (formerly G-Cube LMS) LMS becomes an optimal choice. For more details, contact us at info@gc-solutions.net.

Suggested Further Reading: The Best Way to Deliver Sales Training by Norman Behar