PRIME+ Selling System Blog

How to Up Skill Your Sales Team to Win in a Post-COVID World

Written by Fox Selling System | June 14, 2021 at 12:00 PM

In our post-COVID world, we've come to realize that selling skill development training and coaching is the difference between your sales team's success or failure. More than ever before, it’s vital to ensure your sales teams are trained, supported, and positioned for success. Sales team development is not the only key when it comes to attracting talented salespeople, but it’s a critical factor in retaining your superstars. The pandemic created a seismic shift in the way businesses operates, impacting everything from how we manage to how we support our customers and how we train our sales teams. 

In the pre-COVID world, conducting in-house training was the norm, as there were no concerns about bringing your team together. However, now we require social distancing, limiting face-to-face interaction, and, in turn, the options for consistent, ongoing sales team training and development. The "new normal" dictates a paradigm shift in how businesses deliver training resources, coaching tools, and materials for enabling increased sales performance that are reliably and consistently accessible. Training your sales team post-COVID requires building confidence by implementing sales team training that leads to consistent, predictable, and repeatable results.   

Training & Coaching Your Sales Team Before COVID  

Before COVID, event-based training was foundational. Alcoholic beverage industry training has been heavily focused on events for the past 20 years, with 6-12 hours of training provided in conferences once per year. However, this type of training isn't as effective as it should be. Traditional, classroom-style sessions are an efficient way to deliver information to numerous people, but that doesn't mean it is an effective way to educate them.  

A mathematical formula by Hermann Ebbinghaus shows how rapidly people lose their memory of learned knowledge when there is no attempt to retain it. The results are plotted on the Forgetting Curve. Most people forget approximately 50% of newly learned information within an hour. That loss goes up to 70% within 24 hours and an astounding 90% within a week. 

When we think back to that annual 6-12 hour event-based training, it’s no wonder that it isn't effective. What humans require for retaining new information is the Three R's: retention, reinforcement, and rehearsal. Online learning increases retention by up to 90% by leveraging the Three R's. Fox Selling System reinforces subject materials in subsequent courses and sales tools like the Sell Sheet Generator for sales reps and Scorecard App for managers. 

Online Training Is the New Normal  

COVID created a paradigm shift where we are all forced to think differently about how we work, train, and grow our teams. Without live, in-person training, sales managers need other solutions. 96% of managers believe skills training is essential, particularly with millennial and Gen Z employees who value and actively seek out self-development and training opportunities. Since millennials and Gen Z'ers make up 46% of the full-time U.S. workforce, incorporating the training and development they want is imperative to attract and retain the best talent.  

Fox Selling System expands upon training, breathing new life into sales teams. This innovative learning and development program allows you to cater to different learning styles. Unlike the one-and-done event-based training of the pre-COVID era, you now get 30+ hours of online training for less money. And it's available when your salespeople need it. 

Fox Selling System Capabilities  

Fox Selling System gives you the ideal way of training your sales team post-COVID. It allows salespeople to learn and retain effective sales processes with multiple ways to access training resources, identify strengths and opportunities, and utilize tools that reinforce the skills that make them more effective, such as: 

  • Live training - 10 hours of virtual live training events enable peer-to-peer collaboration and the ability to ask questions and receive answers in real-time. 
  • Online courses - 8-10 hours of on-demand e-Learning modules with recorded webinars available when it is most convenient for employees. 
  • Skills assessment - Skill assessments provide 360-degree views of self and manager assessments that highlight areas of strength and improvement for individualized training paths.  
  • Sell Sheet Generator - The Sell Sheet Generator gives salespeople the ability to forecast the revenue impact of suggestions as a leave behind.  
  • Coaching Scorecard App - The Coaching Scorecard App allows managers to make on-site notes quickly via dropdowns, capturing the selling behaviors of sales reps during work-withs and aggregating them for annual performance reviews.  

Effective Training for a Post-COVID World   

If the pandemic taught us anything, it's that we must be more adaptable, agile, and ready to pivot at a moment's notice. That includes training your sales team. Fox Selling System has a process that will transform your sales team, setting them up to win in a post-COVID world and getting them consistent, predictable, repeatable results. Contact us today to request a demo of our comprehensive sales development and training modules.