How to maintain an effective and competent sales team

The job of field salesperson is difficult. Teams always on the move spend a lot of time and energy prospecting and making appointments with clients. For the company, the challenge is to keep their sales teams performing at their best, despite the distance. This entails:

· training them quickly on the company’s new products or services,

· helping them stay on the cutting edge of the latest trends and commercial techniques,

· ensuring a certain consistency in practices and discourse between sales forces,

· encouraging the sharing of a common corporate culture.

All aspects that require a regular training program dedicated to salespeople.

But when salespeople are always in the field, bringing them together for “traditional” face-to-face training is complex and expensive: you have to find the right niche for everyone, manage transportation, sometimes rent a room… organisational and financial expenses that are easily reduced through Digital Learning.

· Remote accessibility prevents salespeople from getting too far away from their customers and avoids costly travel, accommodations, etc.

· On-demand training enables employees to organise themselves however they wish, following the modules according to their individual availability and pace of progress.

· The individualised access and the follow-up on each employee make it possible to evaluate the progress of each of them, by knowing which modules they have followed, which topics they have mastered or which ones they need to review.

· The ease of deployment offers great responsiveness: when a new product, concept or regulation is introduced, training is made available to all salespeople simultaneously. Teams are trained more quickly.

Finally Digital Learning comes in a wide variety of formats and on various media, to adapt to the company’s objectives and constraints. Training may therefore be offered on tablets or smartphones (depending on the equipment available to its teams), short and dynamic modules will be better adapted to the pace of work of field sales.

The range of formats offered via e-Learning makes it especially possible to adapt more finely to the specific nature of a salesperson’s work.

· ASerious Game will show salespeople and confront them with realistic situations (prospecting, negotiation, sales pitch, etc.) to “repeat” their business practices.

· Social Learning will connect mobile salespeople, letting them share best practices as well as communicate and help one another, which will strengthen cohesion and a sense of belonging.

· Blended Learning will make it possible to maintain discussions and meetings within the teams and with their managers and/or the company’s other trades.

· Various modules, accessible on demand, will allow everyone to review points less well mastered.

Finally, Digital Learning can easily tap into the competitive spirit of salespeople. For example, setting up a badge system (at each “level” passed in the training program) or organising challenges—individual or team—will ensure, by maintaining a friendly rivalry, better participation of sales representatives.