Building a Successful Sales Training Program: Revenue’s Jake Spear on Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Revenue.io’s Senior Manager of Sales Operations, Jake Spear, recently appeared on Sales Enablement PRO’s podcast with Shawnna Sumaoang to discuss his tips and experience with building a successful sales training program.

Jake covers how onboarding is a crucial moment in a sales reps’ tenure with your organization, and how it can make or break their performance. Onboarding via sales enablement needs to be thorough, but also relatively quick. You don’t want to hire a crop of new reps, then wait months for them to be fully operational.

Jake recommends starting with your new reps’ strong points, and build off what they are already good at. During onboarding, you should cover, “everything from general business acumen, to objection handling, to reflective listening, and then furthermore to your own personal elevator pitch that needs to be the standard across your sales reps.”

One of the most effective tools that Jake has used during sales training is a call library. Call libraries are archives of calls from your existing or past sales reps. These calls serve as examples as specific things done correctly. It can include examples of perfect pitches, excellent objection handling, pricing negotiations, qualification questions, and so on. New reps can listen to these libraries for specific things they need to practice or improve, and find what is most impactful for them to use. Jake also suggests the time-tested approach of role-playing and has seen great success with it.

Jake and Shawnna also discuss the negative impact that a company’s growth and success can have. When a sales team becomes larger and larger, it can crush a coaching program under its weight. For growing sales teams, Jake’s biggest piece of advice is to provide unified messaging and sales advice across managers and teams. “it’s really important for leadership to develop a clear-cut, concise message that all sales managers know and know how to coach to,” says Jake.

As for ongoing training and what to do after onboarding is over, Jake says to watch out for sustained performance. There may be losses but over time, revenue generated by each rep should be up and to the right. One great way to measure a rep’s confidence in their performance and training is to see if they are willing to train new reps.

To listen to the full interview, go to Sales Enablement PRO, here.