How to Launch Remote Sales Team Training

If you want to scale sales training in your company and have well-prepared sales forces across the nation or even the globe, online training is your solid choice. With online courses, you can create training content once, but use it as many times as desired for any number of learners. Need a hint on how to move sales training online? This is a grab-n-go action plan to start that process today.  

Step 1. Set Training Goals

The launch of any training program requires a clear understanding of its intended outcomes. Sales are very results driven, so for this kind of training, it’s especially important to set measurable goals. Come up with the goals related to your company’s prospects and sales quotas. For example:

• After CRM training, the learner will be able to manage leads and customers in a pipeline effectively
• The learner will be able to increase their sales by 8% this quarter after finishing the training

Step 2. Assess Your Training Content

Most likely, you already have sales training materials in the format of doc files, PPTs, PDF manuals, Excel reports, etc. So, see what materials you have at hand, as some of these materials can serve your goals well and be suitable for online training.

To start remote sales training quickly, you can convert this existing training content into e-format. It’s sufficient to use a user-friendly authoring tool for this purpose – a specific software to create online and video courses, quizzes, e-books, etc.

Step 3. Create Your First Online Course with an Authoring Tool

With authoring tools, you can upload existing training materials, convert them into one of the online learning formats, and share your newly made course via a link in a snap. If you use a tool like iSpring Suite, this won’t require any IT or coding skills, or even experience in instructional design – course creation is possible with PowerPoint alone.  

If you’ve already used PPT slides for sales training at some point, then you don’t need to build training modules from scratch. You can open a PowerPoint presentation, add any of 14 different types of interactivities and knowledge checks, and spruce up your presentation with professional-looking backgrounds, icons, and characters. And presto, it’s ready to be displayed on any type of device.

Step 4. Build Sales Training Courses for Various Tasks

Once you’ve tested the waters and made your first online course, you can build a full-scale training program for your salespeople. With online training, you can cover all types of sales jobs: sales rep, customer care manager, account executive, regional manager, reseller, etc.  

As for training topics, your courses on sales can address:

• Onboarding. Make introductory courses to give all remote new hires the same knowledge of the company’s culture, code of conduct, and product assortment.
• Product knowledge training. Enhance the employees’ understanding of your products and services. Courses and quizzes on product features and specs help to expand salespeople’s expertise and generate sales.
• Standards and sales models. Online courses can improve the way your sales team performs within given frameworks. Consistent training will help you ensure that the staff follows a sales pipeline, no matter where they are.

Step 5. Use a Learning Platform to Deliver Sales Training

If you plan to make sales training a continuous and organization-wide initiative, the best way to do so is to have courses, assignments, and all training data in one place. A corporate learning management system (LMS) can be such a place and help you launch training for the entire company in a matter of hours.

There, your salespeople and other employees, including new hires or affiliates, can access the training content you uploaded. And you can alleviate grunt work, like sending notifications manually or managing enrollments regularly. Plus, with the learning platform, you’ll be able to track how learners progress in courses and quizzes in greater detail.

Step 6. Measure Results

Last but not least, you need to evaluate your learners’ performance and conduct knowledge assessments. For remote training, you can use online quizzes and add them to your course easily with the same iSpring Suite authoring tool.  Practical exercises and interactive role-plays in a simulated environment will help you with several tasks at the same time:

• Identify knowledge gaps and assign relevant training
• Lay out a consistent framework of sales skills assessment
• Conduct regular appraisals and certification
• Identify top performers
• Give meaningful feedback

To get extended statistics on how learners take courses and quizzes, opt for sales training in an LMS. The system will provide you with detailed reports that you can refer to anytime or present to higher management. These reports will help you correlate the results that your team demonstrated with their post-training sales performance.