Selling Your Sales Team on Training

No matter how much experience an employee brings to a company, training is still a vital part of the job, especially in sales. Interestingly a recent report from Brainshark revealed that nearly half (48%) of B2B training professionals say their organization’s sales training content isn’t engaging enough to work well. Moreover, a quarter say the materials their company creates doesn’t meet the sales teams’ needs, and only 32% describe their organization’s sales training programs as effective.

An infographic by Brainshark titled “The 2014 State of B2B Sales Training” reveals that only one in three sales trainers feel their current training programs are effective. In addition to the 48% who say the content just isn’t engaging enough, 61% find it difficult to coordinate schedules for in-person training and 45% think reps are too distracted and lack focus.

Constant market changes now result in frequent new products or upgrades, with more details for employees and sales teams to learn. Some of the most common sales training methods cited from the report based on data from a survey of 162 B2B sales training professionals (training managers, coordinators, instructional designers, etc.) at companies of various sizes include live classroom training for salespeople (80%); live web conferencing (65%); on-demand training (67%) and social learning (28%).

Additionally, videos can have a dramatic impact on the speed of employee education versus traditional training methods. Nearly half of organizations (48%) use video as part of their sales training and 45% plan to invest in video-based training in 2015. While 65% believe the ideal length of a training video is 10 minutes or less, the average sales training video is nearly 20 minutes long. Other training needs cited by respondents needs include investing more in ongoing sales training (63%); more coaching (62%); more performance support (47%) and more onboarding training (47%).

Bullets

• Articles top the list of content forms that B2B executives have found most helpful for a business-related matter during the past 12 months, with 71% citing them among their top-3 most helpful. Next up are research reports or special reports (51%) and white papers or briefing papers (27%). (marketingcharts.com)

• According to new eMarketer estimates, U.S. programmatic digital display ad spend will grow 137.1% to eclipse $10 billion this year, or 45% of the digital display ad market. Significant growth will come from programmatic direct, expected to reach $8.57 billion in spending by 2016, or 42% of the U.S. programmatic market-up from 8% this year. (emarketer.com)

• The number of iPad users in the U.S. grew nearly 30% in 2013, but this growth rate will drop to just 5.7% this year and continue falling through 2018. (emarketer.com)

• Native ads aren’t going away any time soon, with recent figures estimating US native ad spending would rise from $1.3 billion to $9.4 billion between 2013 and 2018. (emarketer.com)

• Customer marketing – defined as “pursuing revenue from existing customers” – is considered to be important by roughly three-quarters of respondents to a new Demand Metric survey. The most common activity is customer and/or user group events, performed by 61% of respondents, and followed by customer reference (testimonial) programs and online customer communities (each at 54%). (marketingcharts.com)