In the sales process, learning and development is often overlooked. Learning about your customers, sales processes, and needs is important to successfully improve your sales enablement. Sales teams can be some of the biggest in organizations, making it costly to send them to an all-day-long training. This can strain the relationship of L&D with sales, but a strong partnership is important to increasing sales and preparing salespeople with the information necessary to be successful. 

L&D is important (but often overlooked) in sales because this department can truly flourish when given the right information and resources to develop. Bringing sales training into your wheelhouse is one of the ways L&D leaders increase the impact that they have across the company. 

Here are some tips you can apply to your company’s sales team:

1. Examine how time is spent

Learning how to effectively balance time is a valuable skill for all employees, but it definitely can apply to sales. For example, time management teaches your team how to sell to the right people, and avoid wasting time on ones that are not a good fit. Teaching your team what to look for when selling will save your team time searching and trying to sell to someone who isn’t qualified. It’s as simple as following a structure and asking questions to see if prospects fit into your buyer personas. Learning about the needs of others will transform your sales enablement and save time selling to qualified people. 

2. Follow a system 

Simply following a system will help guide your employees through the sales process and provide clear expectations. Teaching your team what steps to take when prospecting and selling will create more structure and allow your employees to stay organized. Learning how to sell in a structured way paves the way to consistent results and fewer mistakes. Learning about your sales process can be easy and expressed quickly in an explainer video that can also be viewed on-demand when salespeople want a refresher. 

3. Train your sales team

Often, people go about the sales process hoping for the best and getting lucky, but there is an opportunity to teach beyond that. Salespeople need to learn about the customer, identify their needs, and manage their relationships. L&D enables your salespeople to identify the customer’s needs, budget, and decision-making process as a part of your company’s sales ethos. Learning about the customer will help them better predict and manage the direction of their sales. simpleshow’s training videos allow your teams to save time on L&D training so they can get right back to their clients with a clear vision of expectations and goals. 

Bottom line: when your salespeople learn and practice a shared structure, they can rely on sound communication and problem-solving to hit quota.