Without proper training and a constant flow of sales it’s almost impossible for any business to grow and scale. A decade ago, it was almost impossible to imagine top-tier training being produced, managed, and transferred online (via microlearning). In the era of DIY learning culture, microlearning provides a consistent learning experience for general education and field-specific tasks, such as sales rep training. Based on in-depth research of best practices we've compiled a collection of sales coaching micro- and nano-learnings that are available for you to watch anytime. In the Sales Microlearning Series we will discuss the best practices of:
- Cross-Selling
- Up-Selling
- Recommendations
- Building Rapport
- Complimenting Your Customer
- Actively Listening
- Disagreeing with Customers
- Choosing your Battles
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4 Best Use Cases for Microlearning in Sales Training
#1: Product Training
You’ve hired new employees or you have introduced a new product feature and need to quickly familiarize your sales team(s). Your sales reps need to know fine details about the product, its advantages, its strong and weak points, as well as how to present it to prospects. Find time for creating a microlearning once, and it will not only bring benefits for a long time but it also eliminates repetitive coaching's. Plus, most products will eventually be updated; a microlearning will enable the company to keep employees apprised of updates and new features; simply upload the information to the training platform and assign it to the staff members.
#2: Onboarding
To ensure newly-hired sales reps succeed, you'll need to organize the onboarding process holistically and develop an effective onboarding plan. The good news is onboarding is generally a standardized process, and microlearning is great for it.
#3: Standardized Best Practices
All salespeople in your company must be familiar with the standards and approaches applied at your organization and have the ability to utilize the core tools. For instance, if your sales team utilizes a CRM, produce a series of videos that show how to use it. With standardized microlearning programs, each and every salesperson is able to represent their company with the same language.
#4: Skill-based Learning and Training to Specific Verticals
Microlearning is great for passing on knowledge of skill-based sales training for your company or within the industry your company works in. Sales techniques are universally applicable, but the work of a salesperson differs significantly from one industry to another.
Real-Life Example #1:
SYKES’ client in Canada, a Fortune 500 telecommunications provider, had several locations across multiple geographies with inconsistent agent performance both internally and via Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs). SYKES wanted to drive best practices and coaching consistency across all sites to boost performance of each contact agent to the next higher category. Upskilling frontline agents was not happening in the most effective manner and could be improved by pushing micro-learning content to agents in between calls.
Agents would benefit from content such as, improving soft skills and increasing subject matter expertise, that is tailored to their persona and category of performance distribution. SYKES implemented the AmplifAI solution in North America and offshore locations, with significant success. Coaching sessions have increased by over 50%, and employee speed to proficiency has increased in parallel. Moreover, employee engagement has risen in tandem, pointing to the importance of empowerment through self-driven performance measures.
"The results have been stellar. Employee engagement, efficiency, and coaching responsiveness are up by double digits."
See how Sykes approached and executed successful micro-learning and coaching into their workplace.
Real-Life Example #2:
Sonic Automotive is an industry-leading automotive retailer committed to providing customers with an outstanding automotive experience that is delivered with professionalism, integrity and enthusiasm. The more people go to the dealerships, the more cars are sold. So, for Sonic Automotive the challenge was how to get more people into their dealerships.
When Sonic Automotive partnered with AmplifAI, new agents were given a tailored approach to coaching based on personas of each contact agent resulting in reduced handle time from previous benchmarks and were able to increase solves per day.
A core component of this improvement is through micro-learnings that are pushed to agents that match a persona. Results data from the first nine months using the platform showed a very positive picture. Sonic Automotive nearly doubled the number of sales appointments set per day and achieved the uplift in getting more people in the store that they were looking for from the platform. AmplifAI measures the performance of the agent both before and after the micro-learning to ensure the time spent learning a skill is spent wisely.
Zig Ziglar said at a seminar more than two decades ago, "Your input determines your output". That means, to get better engagement and performance outputs, despite all the increased complexities, we need to give our employees better, and different, inputs – make learning easy to access, with little effort required to build knowledge and skills, and available as part of their normal workflow.
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