Mastering sales fundamentals has become more crucial than ever for sales professionals.
Whether you’re new to the field or looking to close more sales, online sales training offers a flexible and effective path to success. Through virtual instructor-led training, professionals can now master the intricate selling process without the hefty price tag of traditional programs.
Understanding the modern buying process is essential as customer behaviors continue to evolve. Online sales training programs have adapted to meet these changing demands, providing comprehensive strategies aligning with today’s customers’ purchasing decisions.
The Benefits of Choosing Sales Training
By investing in these proven methodologies, sales professionals can:
- Improve their sales skills
- Boost their confidence
- Ultimately win more deals
Sales training online for sellers has become essential for developing high-performing sales teams. This comprehensive guide explores proven strategies that drive sales excellence and consistently help win more deals in modern B2B sales environments.
Success in modern sales requires mastery of specific, measurable skills. Here are the essential sales skills that sales training programs provide.
Sales content writing is an essential skill for modern sales professionals. The ability to craft persuasive emails, engaging proposals, and compelling sales presentations directly impacts deal success rates.
Effective sales content focuses on the customer’s perspective, clearly articulates value propositions, and drives specific actions.
How Content Supports Sales Performance
The best sales content tells a story that connects business challenges with concrete solutions. It also uses clear, concise language that resonates with decision-makers.
Rather than focusing on product features, successful sales content emphasizes business outcomes, ROI, and strategic benefits.
How Sales Training Can Help
The right sales training program can help sales professionals seeking to improve the quality of their sales content. These programs achieve this by imparting sales skills like:
- Understanding customer needs and how to meet them.
- Effective messaging and customer-centric communication.
- Knowing how to engage customers emotionally.
- The use of proven frameworks for creating compelling content.
Even the most capable sales and content creation teams may need assistance with creating compelling content. FlyMSG Auto Text Expander can save your content creators up to 20 hours per month with minimal input – just a few key strokes.
Our intelligent tool offers a free personal writing assistant and automatic text expander. These features allow you to create captivating copy relevant to your audience’s needs, and to expand on existing text within minutes.
Optimizing Brand Communications
Designed for efficient communication, our tool allows your teams to categorize, manage, organize, and store your business’s top-performing snippets, messages, and posts in the cloud.
From there, sales professionals can use the Auto Text Expander to turn short messages into longer, more detailed posts, and share them anywhere in just seconds. Our solution gives your team the power to rapidly use branded content for a myriad of applications. This makes it easy for your brand to maintain a consistent tone of voice across all channels, reinforcing its identity and increasing engagement.
Extensive Integrations
FlyMSG Auto Text Expander and personal writing assistant can be integrated with your business’s best-performing online apps and tools for effortless communication. Integrate it with:
- Gmail
- Drift
- Slack
- Teamwork
- HubSpot
- Outlook Web
- SalesForce
- Sales Navigator
- and Google Docs
…to give your team the tools they need to build a loyal community and command prospects’ attention.
Sales Leadership Development
Understanding sales management and sales leadership principles is crucial for those pursuing a sales career.
Richardson sales performance metrics show that organizations investing in comprehensive sales training programs see significant improvements in their sales teams’ effectiveness.
Also, sales leaders must make sure to stay away from ineffective sales training and learn to properly equip sellers with digital and social selling skills. Learn more by watching this video:
How Training Supports Effective Leadership
Sales training programs support sales leadership development by nurturing skills, extending beyond the sales techniques that individual team members rely on. Many courses include strategic sales management modules, giving team leaders the knowledge they need to:
- Develop concise sales plans
- Analyze key trends in their markets
- Make data-driven decisions accordingly.
Managing and Motivating Teams
They can also promote proper sales team coaching by training managers on how to manage, motivate, and support their teams in a way that maximizes their performance over time.
These techniques can also help sales representatives enhance their own skills and abilities, creating more resilient sales teams overall.
Optimizing Sales Processes and Pipelines
Sales leaders and reps alike need a keen understanding of sales operations. The right sales skills training will assist leaders in fully understanding aspects like forecasting, CRM use, and how to optimize their sales process and sales pipeline.
Programs like FlyMSG Sales Pro equip leaders with the knowledge to track and analyze KPIs, too, promoting sales success at every level.
The rise of online sales training courses has revolutionized how sales skills are developed. The best sales training course offers flexibility while maintaining the high standards of traditional sales training courses, making them ideal for career sales professionals.
Sales Training for Successful Selling
Effective sales training programs can provide sales managers and their teams with a wealth of sales skills needed for successful selling. They impart information on:
- The best sales strategies for each platform and audience.
- Fundamental sales skills, relationship building, and sales techniques.
- How to use Customer Relationship Management platforms to streamline sales processes and optimize sales rates.
- The ins and outs of digital selling – a vital skill in this day and age.
Expert Lead Generation, Prospecting and Negotiation
They can also teach sales professionals valuable sales skills like lead generation and prospecting, effective customer negotiation techniques, and sales performance analysis using key performance indicators.
These skills enable team members to enhance their sales effectiveness, adopt best practices in inbound sales methodology, and secure more deals as a result. Their customer success rate will also increase as they’re equipped to make more sales.
Strategic account management requires a unique set of sales techniques. The most effective sales training emphasizes the importance of maintaining and growing existing accounts while pursuing new opportunities.
Training for Account Management Skill Development
Online sales training courses like Vengreso’s MSG Sales Pro equips professionals with the account management skills they need to build strong relationships with clients, promoting loyalty and returning business.
These skills can assist with reducing client churn and optimizing customer retention. They also aid in ensuring ongoing customer and client satisfaction.
The right sales training programs and virtual coaching sessions can even help sales professionals to identify new growth opportunities. These include pinpointing new sales strategies and identifying chances to cross-sell and up-sell their products or services.
Social media-based sales have become a powerful tool used to build relationships that last with leads and customers. This digitally focused sales skill focuses on the use of social networks to:
- Identify target audiences
- Engage leads
- Start sales conversations
- Nurture a brand’s prospects
The ultimate goal in all of these actions is to maximize sales conversions through channels that can reach millions, if not billions, of people. Watch the following video to learn 4 ways to master you sales etiquette on social media and social selling:
Developing Social Sales Mastery
Important social selling skills for sales professionals include establishing a recognizable online presence using consistent personal branding and eye-catching, professional profiles. They should also be able to:
- Discover and target leads.
- Use data to identify strategic selling opportunities.
- Build relationships with these leads through personalized content and interactions.
- Continuously engage with prospects through social media to nurture relationships and build credibility and trust in their brands.
FlyMSG Sales Pro for Selling Upskilling
Sales professionals who use social selling strategies can use social media platforms to reach and engage with a vast target audience of prospects to drive future sales conversions. The right sales training courses will equip professionals with the sales skills to boost B2C and B2B sales.
FlyMSG Sales Pro Teams and Individuals provide the foundations for building exceptional social selling skills across tried-and-tested platforms. Our courses enable professionals and teams to master video engagement, LinkedIn sales, and effective sales messaging.
We have also designed a module that allows sales pros to learn the ins and outs of social triggers. These learnings work together to create versatile, nuanced social selling skills that will supercharge your sales online.
AI for Effortless Social Engagement
Tools like our FlyEngage AI social media engagement system can make it easier for teams to explode your social engagement rates. This revolutionary tool can enhance your team’s LinkedIn networking, commenting, and conversion activities by scaling them rapidly using artificial intelligence.
FlyEngage AI offers your team pre-defined prompts, allowing it to create and share human-like comments with your audiences. This allows your sales professionals to engage with leads in a way that feels sincere, authentic, and natural across both LinkedIn and Sales Navigator.
Engaging Replies in Seconds
Our smart tool will read social posts and write optimistic or investigative replies depending on each context. All your team needs to do is edit the post for relevance and tag the recipient!
FlyEngage AI can help to boost your team’s productivity by as much as 12 hours per day, leaving them with more time for brainstorming, learning, and tackling essential tasks. While saving time, it also helps to ensure that your customers and prospects never miss an opportunity to connect with your brand.
This provides sales reps with a valuable lesson to enhance their selling skills, too. Maintaining a strong connection with leads results in better sales in the long run.
Continuous learning and adaptation are two more essential sales skills for any sales force.
They involve staying updated with social media trends, tools, and best practices, and adapting strategies to maximize effectiveness.
By embracing social selling strategies as mentioned above, sales professionals can effectively leverage social media platforms to engage with prospects. They can also build relationships and drive heightened sales conversions.
Curiosity for Accelerated Learning
Continuous learning through sales training can also promote curiosity and open-mindedness about new learning opportunities. This helps stay up to date with industry trends and new tools and technologies.
Sales team members who commit to continuous learning can also gain deep knowledge about the services and products they offer and actively seek out opportunities to develop their sales skills. They may also be open to learning from their customers’ feedback, allowing them to enhance their sales approaches further and seal more deals.
Active Adaptation with Sales Pro Training
Vengreso’s FlyMSG Sales Pro Teams provides sales teams with a plethora of opportunities for continuous learning. Our modules like LinkedIn Sales and Profile Mastery, Speed Writing Mastery, Sales Messaging Mastery, and Human Centered Communication give teams all the resources they need to learn how to use proven sales tools with maximum efficacy.
Once a team has perused these topics and more, the foundations will be laid for continual learning, exploration, and adaptation in sales and beyond.
Communication is one of the many must-have sales skills for both sales reps and managers.
Every sales team must communicate clearly and effectively verbally and in writing with team members, their sales manager, potential customers, and existing clients.
How Online Sales Training Streamlines Communication
The right sales training programs can improve the entire sales process by providing everyone with key communication skills. They can teach sales reps and sales teams how to express themselves concisely, sharing ideas and information about products and services in an easily understandable way.
They can also teach sales teams how to craft compelling email marketing campaigns and written communications that resonate with potential customers. With email marketing set to achieve a profit of $17.9 billion by 2027, effective email communication is crucial for nurturing leads, maintaining client relationships, and driving conversions.
Active Listening and Smooth Negotiations
Additionally, sales training tools teach strategic sales skills like active listening, which are essential for effective sales calls. These skills help sales teams ask the right questions and understand their customers’ needs. In person, they are useful for identifying nonverbal cues like positive gesturing and open body language to create more productive sales conversations.
Building Trust with Prospects
These sales skills are also important for building trust and rapport with customers and clients. Sales training programs equip sales reps with the tools they need to engage their customers actively, show sincere interest in their needs and preferences, and secure repeat business by establishing meaningful connections.
Both FlyMSG Sales Pro Teams and Sales Pro Individuals contain essential training tools specifically designed to build communication skills. Courses like Sales Messaging Mastery, Social Triggers Mastery, and Human Centred Communication enable individuals and teams to enhance their communications, hold productive sales discussions, and close deals with confidence.
ROI Demonstrations
Another key sales skill related to communication is return-on-investment (ROI) demonstration. Effective sales reps must be able to show prospects their potential ROI should they choose to buy a product or service. This is especially important when selling high-ticket offerings, or when a service may take time to produce visible results.
Strong sales training programs give reps the skills they need to demonstrate ROI. There are many ways to do so, including connecting prospects with past or current customers who have experienced significant benefits. Reps can also provide leads with customer case studies and evidence of cost savings, sales increases, or other persuasive statistics.
In some cases, sales professionals may even be able to highlight advantages such as potential tax savings. Effective sales process training teaches reps how to identify all of these unique selling points and relay them to prospects in a compelling way.
Consistent Following Up
Sales reps need to be tenacious in order to make their quotas and reach key goals. One skill that a good sales training program should impart is how to follow up consistently with prospects.
With data suggesting that a mere 2% of sales are made after the first communication with a prospect, following up is an essential part of the job. The same data notes that 44% of sales reps never make a second attempt to connect. This could result in major losses of potential earning opportunities!
A large part of great sales communication is knowing how to follow up with prospective customers. There are many methods to use for reaching out, from follow-up emails to phone calls and beyond.
Adding Value to Follow-Ups
Regardless of the method used, reps should be trained on how to add value to each communication. Simple actions like asking a prospect how they and their business are doing, noting and remembering their problems and pain points, and notifying them of special offers can build trust and rapport and help to re-engage them.
Effective training courses also teach reps how to clearly define their prospects’ next steps. This can take many forms, from setting a defined follow-up time with a prospect to arranging demos. These next steps should be as specific as possible for a professional approach.
Instead of a rep saying, “I will give you a call in a week’s time”, for instance, “I will phone you on Tuesday. Please let me know if 10am works for you?” is much more concise.
So, let’s discuss nine proven sales strategies for sales reps and managers.
Sales professionals seeking to improve their sales performance must understand that customers don’t buy products—they buy outcomes. Value selling puts relationship building at the center of every sales conversation.
Implementation tips:
- Begin discovery calls by asking about the prospect’s current challenges and desired outcomes.
- Quantify the cost of inaction by helping prospects calculate their current inefficiencies.
- Create customized value propositions that directly address each specific pain point.
- Use case studies and ROI calculators to demonstrate concrete benefits.
- Practice translating features into benefits by asking “So what?” after each feature mentioned.
Research and Prepare
The most successful value-based sellers spend significant time researching their prospects’ industry and competitors before meetings.
This preparation allows them to speak the customer’s language and demonstrate a deep understanding of their business context, helping to ensure repeat business. Consider creating an industry-specific value framework that maps common pain points to your solution’s benefits.
2. Customer Centricity
Building a customer-centric mindset and sales approach is vital for securing big-ticket deals. This mindset effectively directs your focus away from simply promoting your offerings and more towards solving your customers’ most pressing challenges.
You should both adopt this mindset as a sales leader, and encourage your team to do the same. When you train your team on how to classify and identify ideal buyer personas, they can develop personalized sales plans that genuinely resonate with your leads’ pain points, problems, and obstacles.
Once a customer understands that your product is the key to solving their challenges, you’ve effectively made a concrete sale.
Understanding Your Leads
One of the key facets of a customer-centric approach is creating a culture of understanding in sales. Very few customers want to be viewed simply as prospects.
They want sales representatives to understand their challenges, empathize with them, and offer solutions that will provide tangible value over time.
Focus on Customers for Growth
By honing your customer centricity, you could stand to increase your sales figures considerably. Data shows that 84% of businesses with a customer-centered sales approach have increased their revenues, and 79% have reduced their costs.
Finances aside, customer centricity can also help you and your team build lasting relationships with your customers based on trust, respect, and sincere engagement.
The discovery phase is where deals are won or lost. By mastering sales prospecting and strategic account management, you’ll uncover valuable insights that help position your solution more effectively.
Implementation tips
- Follow the 70/30 rule: Listen 70% of the time, talk 30%.
- Use the inbound sales methodology to structure your questions.
- Take detailed notes and create customer journey maps to identify all stakeholders.
- Practice reflective listening by periodically summarizing what you’ve heard.
- Look for emotional triggers and personal motivators beyond business needs.
Record your discovery calls (with permission) and review them later.
You’ll be surprised how many subtle cues and important details you might have missed in the moment. This practice also helps identify patterns in successful versus unsuccessful discovery conversations.
Modern consultative selling requires sales reps to position themselves as trusted advisors. This approach helps drive sales effectiveness and ensures repeat business through long-term partnerships.
Implementation tips:
- Share relevant industry insights and market trends during sales conversations.
- Provide value upfront through educational content and resources.
- Challenge customer assumptions when appropriate with data-backed insights.
- Create customized solution roadmaps that address both short and long-term goals.
- Maintain regular communication even when not actively selling.
Build a personal brand as a knowledgeable expert in your industry. Write articles, participate in industry forums, and share insights on social media. When prospects research you, they should find evidence of your expertise and commitment to their industry.
Winning more deals requires excellent sales pipeline management. Sales managers and sales leaders must work together to optimize the sales cycle and drive consistent results.
Implementation tips:
- Define clear criteria for each stage to maintain pipeline accuracy.
- Implement a consistent opportunity scoring system based on buyer engagement.
- Schedule regular pipeline review sessions to identify stalled deals.
- Create action plans for each opportunity with specific next steps and deadlines.
- Use automation tools to track engagement and identify at-risk opportunities.
The most effective pipeline managers focus on velocity metrics as much as volume metrics. Track the number of deals and how quickly they move through each stage. This helps identify bottlenecks and optimize your sales process for faster closings.
Another great way to sales leaders can accelerate their sales pipeline is with sales referrals. You can dive deeper into this watching the following video:
The best sales training courses emphasize negotiation skills as crucial for sales development. Successful sales organizations invest heavily in improving sales training around negotiation techniques.
Great sales negotiation strategies are built on a few key tenets. Sales reps need to prepare thoroughly for each negotiation. They can do this by researching and understanding:
- Their customers
- These customers’ needs
- Relevant market conditions
…before heading into a meeting.
They must use clear, effective communication to convey their products or services benefits, value, and unique selling points. They should also enter each negotiation with a focus on solving problems and finding mutually beneficial solutions that address customer needs and the goals of their sales team.
Implementation tips:
- Create a comprehensive objection map for your product or service.
- Address common concerns proactively in your sales presentations.
- Advocate assertively for your brand’s offerings and interests while remaining mindful and respectful of each customer’s needs and perspectives.
- Develop a “feel, felt, found” framework for emotional objections.
- Practice handling price objections by focusing on value and ROI.
- Document successful responses and share them with your sales team.
Strategy in Silence
Master the art of strategic silence in sales negotiations. After making an offer in a sales call or addressing an objection, resist the urge to fill the silence with additional justifications. Often, the next person to speak is at a disadvantage.
Practice being comfortable with these moments of silence during weekly coaching sessions or team role-playing sessions.
7. Training Teams in Proven Methodologies like SPIN
SPIN is one of the best-established and most effective sales methods you can use, especially when it comes to closing nuanced and complex deals. As a sales manager, you can use the SPIN selling process as an invaluable training tool for your team.
The framework encourages you and your team to ask a specific set of questions at the optimal times. SPIN, in the context of sales, stands for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Needs pay-off.
Situation
When using this method, encourage your teams to begin a sales conversation by gathering important information about a customer’s situation. Your team should ask the customer about the tools, processes, and systems they are currently using to achieve their core objectives.
Problems and Pain Points
Next, your sales team should identify the customer’s problems with their existing solutions. These include any pain points or inefficiencies they are experiencing and how this impacts them.
Questions like, “Does this process ever go wrong for you?” and “What major challenges does your current solution pose?” can be helpful here.
Implications
Your sales force should also be encouraged to ask the customer about the implications of the problems they experience. Every problem they face will probably have a negative impact on their business, organization, or workflow.
Sales professionals should also ask detailed questions to understand these implications fully. For instance, they could ask the customer how much their solution costs them when it fails, and whether this failure creates bottlenecks or delays.
Needs Pay-offs
The last step of the SPIN method is for teams to prompt customers to reflect about their needs pay-offs. Ideally, the customer should have their own idea of how to improve their systems, and which features and solutions would make things simpler.
Maximizing the Impacts of SPIN
Once you have trained your sales team on using a methodology like SPIN, you can support their ability to use it effectively by applying a strong sales training approach. They should, of course, have a good understanding of what each letter stands for and how it applies, but this may not be enough to teach them how to use the framework optimally.
As a sales leader, take time to go through each letter of the SPIN acronym with your team. Encourage them to actively come up with as many potential questions as possible, which they can ask customers to gain extensive insights into their situations, problems, implications, and needs.
Training Your Team in SPIN
Playing a team game may help your sales team to brainstorm innovative questions in an engaging way. For example, you could have your team members choose a prominent business owner to theoretically use the SPIN method with.
Have them write lists of 10 possible questions for each letter of the acronym, and then get them to research the business owner online for 30 minutes. Once they’ve done their research, they should try to answer as many of their questions with information that they find on the internet. Each member will lose a point for a question that can be answered with online info.
The Advantages of Active Training
This game can help your sales team to understand that the SPIN questions they ask should be unique and insightful, and should extend beyond the obvious challenges of a customer or business.
It will also encourage them to thoroughly research all of their prospects before they initiate any negotiations.
How Training Wins More Deals
Your sales team forms the foundation of your selling efforts as a sales manager. You may be tasked with managing, motivating, and inspiring your team members. However, when it comes to closing deals, it’s essential to adopt a collaborative approach for success.
Training your team in proven sales techniques and methodologies like SPIN gives them actionable tools. These tools can help keep your sales pipeline running smoothly at all times. It also creates a capable, confident, and motivated group of professionals who can provide you, as a sales leader, with the support you need to win more clients.
FlyMSG Sales Pro for Individuals has been designed to provide you with the comprehensive sales skills you need to win more deals. When you pass this knowledge on to your team or include them in the sales training, you can all gain the knowledge needed to maximize pipelines and revenues.
8. Constructive Criticism
Sales managers are the driving force behind effective teams. Sometimes, your leadership responsibilities will include providing feedback and criticism to keep your team members performing at their peak.
Delivering criticism can be challenging but essential for team and organizational growth. Relaying information about team and individual performance is also a fundamental part of your role. What matters here is how the criticism is delivered. You can build trust and respect with your team by delivering constructive and empathetic criticism and suggestions on how they can improve.
The next time you need to relay criticism to a member of your team, use these tips for a productive discussion:
Choose the Location and Time Carefully
If you are meeting with an individual sales rep, select a neutral and private space for your conversation. If you’re relaying criticism to your team, use an empty conference room or another comfortable meeting area.
Choosing a ‘neutral’ area that is not your personal office can help relieve pressure on your staff. It also helps create an atmosphere in which everyone feels that they are meeting on a level playing field.
Focus on One Topic at a Time
Relaying too many criticisms at once can feel overwhelming for the recipient. This can lead to a lack of motivation and even an emotionally charged response.
When giving feedback, approach a rep with one issue that they may be able to address or improve. Tackling a single challenge feels more manageable than facing a long list of issues at once.
Be Honest and Direct
You should always deliver constructive criticism with empathy, but it’s also important to be straightforward and honest. Being vague about important issues could lead to misunderstandings and a lack of action.
Before you meet with your sales reps, think about your criticism and write down important details you wish them to address. This will help you to share your feedback clearly and concisely.
Keep Your Input Objective
Constructive criticism should always be fair and objective. As a leader, you need to maintain a consistent approach to issues with all of your team members.
Treating every employee equally will help boost their morale and motivate them to succeed.
Add Positive Interjections
Expert sales managers recommend beginning any critical discussion with a positive statement. Highlight the good contributions that your sales rep makes to the team before you deliver any negative feedback.
Avoid using words like “however” and “but” to introduce your criticism. Instead, mention the area that needs improvement and provide suggestions on how your team member can make these improvements.
Once you have shared your perspective, conclude the discussion with another positive statement. You could express appreciation for your rep’s hard work, praise them for consistently coming in on time, or thank them for always supporting their colleagues.
This approach helps to soften the impact of hard news and allows you to raise important issues while still showing appreciation for your team members.
How Constructive Criticism Enhances Sales
If you can deliver criticism tactfully and effectively, your team members will be more motivated to address issues and perform at their best. When they do, your sales pipeline and processes, and even your customers’ experience, will all benefit.
Team members who feel appreciated, valued, and respected are more likely to treat prospects and customers in a similar way. Customers who feel seen, heard, and understood are often more motivated to make purchases, helping you and your team close more deals and build lasting relationships with your client base.
9. Technological Tools
One of your many responsibilities as a sales leader is to ensure that your team, department, and workplace function at their best.
With recent studies showing that over 51% of sales leaders are now using technology to streamline their workplace operations, it’s definitely time to include tech in your daily workflows.
Training Tools for Workflow Efficiency
Using online training systems like FlyMSG Sales Pro Teams is one of the best ways to keep your workflows smooth and efficient. FlyMSG AI also uses advanced artificial intelligence to reduce the burdens on your teams, helping them to maintain great levels of productivity over time.
Features like our FlyPosts AI Post Generator can take social selling to the next level, allowing your teams to generate relevant and engaging social content with ease. FlyEngage AI LinkedIn Commenting At Scale also frees up valuable time and human resources by enabling teams to engage LinkedIn communities, convert leads, and sell with personalized and captivating communications.
Mastering these strategies for sales success requires consistent practice and refinement.
The most successful sales professionals regularly review and adjust their approach based on results and feedback. An online sales training program can also be a great help with this.
By focusing on sales excellence and implementing these proven methodologies, you’ll see significant improvements in your sales performance and win rates.
