How to engage your sales team with online learning to improve productivity

Always Be Closing. It’s the unofficial motto for sales teams across every market. Salespeople want to maximize time spent selling, as that time is tied directly to sales team productivity. 

But selling time has to compete with critical learning time—which starts with onboarding and moves on to critical sales skills such as handling objections, building trust, and uncovering buyer needs. It takes 10 weeks on average to train new sales hires, and training needs to be effective to ensure those new hires become productive quickly. The most successful learning content is engaging, up to date, and easy to access. An online learning system can more than deliver with all three of those necessities, as well as help you provide online learning throughout your salespeople’s careers that helps them meet—and exceed—their quarterly goals.

Here are some ways you can use online learning to boost your sales team’s productivity, starting with onboarding and expanding to ongoing skills development. 

Speed ramp time with online onboarding

Instead of handing your new hires product manuals or sending them to shadow your salespeople, guide their learning and empower them to work at their own pace with an online onboarding program you’ve created to use with each and every new hire. 

One reason folks like creating online learning with Rise is the thousands of prebuilt lessons Rise provides to make publishing content fast and easy. And you can customize prebuilt lessons with your own content to meet the needs of your specific sales team, adding new insights and content as necessary. That way you can focus on optimizing training, rather than reinventing the wheel. 

Drive skill development through interactivity

Once your sales folks are up and running, provide ongoing skills development to improve employee engagement, boost productivity, and reduce turnover. Helpful topics might include market research, product specs, objection handling, relationship building, active listening, and communication.

It’s not easy to learn skills through lectures or reading alone. In any kind of educational setting, we pay more attention when we’re asked to participate in what we’re learning. Sales teams are no exception. Adding interactivity to an online lesson can be as simple as inserting flip cards. Or you can add more complex elements, such as a scenario—a sort of “choose your own adventure” experience, where learners decide the direction their lesson will take. These, and other forms of interactivity possible in online learning, can demonstrate desired behaviors and why they work—letting learners test how they’d respond to interactions with customers or sales colleagues.

No matter which stage of their employee journey, online learning supports sales teams

Even when salespeople are on the go, they can learn whenever they can, wherever they are. Rise online courses are automatically available, and look great, on any device, with no extra effort from you. Airports, hotels, commuter trains—they can all instantly become classrooms, leaving your team more time to sell when they’re meeting with prospects.

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