Sales Training + Development

10 Reasons to Be Excited About The Sales Bar

, ,

10 Reasons to Be Excited About The Sales Bar

If you haven’t heard yet, we’re telling you now! We at Factor 8 have officially launched a brand new e-learning platform where your reps and managers can practice and refresh those skills they learned in our Factor 8 onsite advisor training sessions! And, we couldn’t be more pumped to share it with you.

“Okay,” you’re thinking, “But why do I care? My teams are already receiving Factor 8’s training.” We’re glad you asked.

Here’s why The Sales Bar could be a big deal for you.

1. Effective and Convenient

Our learners are seeing immediate results. Tom, an SDR leader, says: “Historically, our team gets almost zero callbacks on voicemails. After taking the Factor 8 online course on effective voicemails, we received 25 call backs last week alone!”. Plus, there’s no complicated scheduling. Reps train at their pace whenever they’re free – at home, at lunch, in a box, with a fox…you get the idea. Our anonymous testers are calling it “Easy Online Flexible Training”, and that’s the goal – to make it easier to learn more!

“Historically, our team gets almost zero callbacks on voicemails. After taking the Factor 8 online course on effective voicemails, we received 25 call backs last week alone!”

2. Boosts Engagement and Rretention

Our testers think it’s “Friendly and Fun!” Learners are exposed to multiple styles of learning and have more fun completing training. Because we think learning only one way is boring (and so do your reps and managers!).

3. Measurable Comprehension

Because everything’s recorded digitally, leaders and managers can see exactly which reps are excelling and which need support and where. It’s like your own secret spy cam!

4. Refreshes Skills (Forgotten or Underdeveloped!)

Sales Bar supports the learning that goes on in our onsite training sessions by breaking down the same skills and offering diversified practice activities to keep them up to snuff long after the session has ended. Studies show that regular reinforcement of training is critically important to protecting your training investment.

5. Provides Ongoing Development

You can’t just do training once and expect your reps to continuously improve forever. They need practice and repetition so they can actually see daily improvement at their desks and on the phone. Diane Abraham, Sales Director at RedVector says, “…To me this is what it takes to coach up a team. Not just 4 days in a room but ongoing courses/content with a mix of self guided and manager assigned tasks. We call that blended learning in our world.”

6. Offers Real Results

You don’t want to waste time and budget on a product that doesn’t work! The Sales Bar ensures you experience more growth at end of month. For example, Mike, Director of Telesales, tells us, “We had a significant lift, +19% across the entire team on topline growth for the month of May [1st month using the Sales Bar]” And we like those numbers!

“We had a significant lift, +19% across the entire team on topline growth for the month of May [1st month using the Sales Bar]”

7. Developed by Factor 8

The same award-winning company you trust for all your inside sales training can also provide support when they aren’t there! (Hey, that’s us!) The Sales Bar is designed to supplement our onsite sessions, not work against them. You know us. We know you. You’ll get the best ROI because of it.

8. Easily Updated to Keep with Best Practices

You know as well as anyone how quickly the inside sales industry is changing (Overnight, it feels like). Newer, more effective techniques are being developed all the time, while others simply fall out of fashion. The Sales Bar ensures your employees are always on the cutting-edge. So, your teams are always given accurate information.

9. Offers Dozens of Reference Materials

Psst…it’s okay to cheat sometimes! We know those 3-second, handwritten notes won’t get your reps very far past the onsite training session. So, we’ve decked out The Sales Bar with great cheat sheets, guides, and script samples your teams can use everyday while on the floor!

10. Provides Consistent Information Delivery

Once the onsite training has passed, your sales reps are often on their own to practice and seek out feedback. And the quality of that feedback can vary manager to manager. With The Sales Bar, your entire sales team will receive consistent feedback and reinforcement, so everyone is best equipped to succeed.

The best part? You can try it out for free to see the difference for yourself!

Subscribe to our email list to receive new content, webinar invites, and training offers.


women in sales

, , ,

Apply to #GirlsClub. Stop Doubting.

Ladies, lean in.

Sometime in the last two months, you heard a voice.  No, not the crazy hearing voices kind of voice, but the future you, inspired you, the you-can-DO-this-and-you-SHOULD kind of voice.

I call it my little voice.  And every once in a while, she puts her foot down and she says, “MORE.” Not more please. Not more if there’s some left after everyone else gets some. More NOW, DAMMIT.

More. . . because I deserve it. 

Sometimes this is in a whisper.

You want more out of your career, and I built #GirlsClub to do EXACTLY that.

Now it’s time to apply.  This is NOT a time for doubt.  NOT a time to postpone.  NOT a time to be afraid to raise your hand internally and ask for the time and/or the budget to do this.  Rise up.  Fill out your application and book a meeting with your manager right now. Seriously, right now.

Explain your aspirations.  Give him or her a program information packet you downloaded.  Ask for his or her support.  Sit tall and ask.

That is step one.

It’s a big one.  But it’s critical.  And it is time to do it NOW.

YES, there are scholarships available.  I’m working my tail off so that you don’t have to ask for the full-boat budget.

How about we meet halfway?

You submit the application.  You ask for the budget.  You let them know everything it includes and why it’s worth it.  Let’s keep moving forward, and if we both get “no’s”, we will pull out.

But please, don’t quit now.  I need you to work as hard as I am to get you this new gig.

I can’t WAIT to see your application and your smiling face in this program.

Apply today!

Need help explaining the program?  Download the participant and mentor overview here.

Subscribe to our email list to receive new content, webinar invites, and training offers.


inside sales lessons

, , , ,

Three Inside Sales Lessons From A Six-Year-Old

Last week my son made his first sales call. For an inside sales thought leader, you have got to believe this was big in my house! My brave six-year-old D.J. read the school script to relatives & friends and got pledges for his APEX fundraiser.

READ: Sales Is A Confidence Sport

Watching a little human do this for the first time made ME nervous – and OH. SO. PROUD. It reminded me of a few truths we could all keep in mind when preparing new hires to take to the phones for the first time:

Don’t assume anyone can do this

ANY human will get nervous asking people for money over the phone. Let’s all keep this in mind when we ask for more dials and results. His brother BAILED after one call (and he’s the extrovert in the family!!).

Set up small wins early and celebrate BIG

The small wins he got (and we celebrated big time) energized him to make more calls. He was pulling aunties out of the woodwork! When we set up small wins early and celebrate BIG, they’ll be hooked.

Do a better job teaching rejection in new-hire training

When he got his first “no” he totally rolled with it and still wanted to make another call. Why? Because we set it up ahead of time that it would likely happen, why, and what to say. Special shout out to Uncle Shawn who agreed up front to say no to a six-year-old so we could teach this lesson (THAT wasn’t easy!). More “NO” in role plays and more help in why they happen and how to handle them.

Remember that just like a first grader, our new hires watch us to determine how to act. It’s good to show some nerves, to celebrate small wins, and to get right back up like a “no” doesn’t sting a little. I know that the next time I’m in class I’ll be a little less tough on the 23-year-old making their first calls.

By the way, my proudest moment was when he DITCHED THE SCRIPT and felt confident enough to use his own words. I can’t believe I didn’t record it! 

Subscribe to our email list to receive new content, webinar invites, and training offers.


, , ,

8 Signs That Your Rep Onboarding Program Is Broken

Do you mind if I start with the obligatory story? I think it’s one you might recognize. It’s the one about a busy sales manager frustrated with the under-trained newbie reps she got as “graduates” from her training department.

But this story is about me. I was the “undertrained newbie” – and the boss. I was twenty-four, and was brought in from the outside to manage a team of 15 outbound B2B Reps in tech. I’m new. My team is new, and we’re all “graduates” of the company onboarding program and all 100% clueless. (Yes, of course we turned it around and were the number one team within a quarter – cue the Rocky music here – but this isn’t that story.)

This is the story of being frustrated that you can come out of a 2 or even 4 week program and still have absolutely no idea how to do your job.

Who do I call first?

What do I say?

Why isn’t anyone calling me back?

What’s the product SKU for an IBM Thinkpad again?

Sound familiar?

Brace for it–now I’m going to hit you with some stats.

  • One in five sales executives are satisfied with their Rep onboarding program (Sales Architects 2014).
  • Fifty percent of reps selling today need to be retrained (or removed) (Bain / CEB 2016)
  • Organizations spend an average of 3x more on rep tools than on rep development (Inside Sales.com 2016) and 25X on recruiting (Training Magazine)
  • Attrition can be cut in half by a good training program (Training Magazine)

So, are you an unwitting accomplice to rep abuse? Let’s find out. Here are some top signs that your new hire training might be broken:

1. The majority of your attrition occurs in the first five months.
They like the company, don’t mind the job, but they’re not ramping up fast enough to make money and they’re frustrated. Time to pull the ripcord.

2. It takes your business development reps over 3 months or your account managers over 6 months to ramp to target.
There will always be a ramp, but a great new hire training program can cut this in half (and significantly impact your attrition, too).

3. Average call length is about 1:30.
These are voicemails, every last one of them. If your reps can’t get people on the phone, keep them on the phone, and get calls back, they need better sales training.

4. Your program is under 4 days or over 4 weeks long.
The first is an orientation, the latter is a firehose. Get them on the phones after two weeks and bring them back for the rest of it! Check out my video on “Just in time” New Hire Training.

 

5. Your reps have no clear plan of attack for their lead list / book / and/or day.
Ask them how they decide who to call. If they say they start at the “A’s…” then you’re missing a cohesive sales strategy – or your training department isn’t training it.

6. You aren’t training any business, customer, or industry acumen.
Forrester taught us that over 60% of buyers found their sales rep added no value to the buying process. College isn’t teaching them how, and we have to.

7. You’re using the same training as the field.
I get it, you had to use something and your org is new. But it won’t work and frankly frustrates reps to try this old-school model in their new-school world.

8. HR is teaching your reps how to sell.
85% of the best-in-class use a professional sales trainer or curriculum. When’s the last time HR sold your product?

How’d you do? Some of these might take a custom report, but trust me: you’ll be glad you had it created. Your training department needs to be your partner like marketing is your partner – no, scratch that, recruiting is your partner…wait, I can do better…payroll is your partner.

In a recent model I completed with Microsoft, we found that they could add over $50 million back into revenue by cutting new hire sales ramp time down to best-in-class – and nearly double what they could save by cutting attrition to the same. If you focus and invest here, it will quickly be like having another 1/3 of your headcount to help you hit the number.

Ready to fix your oboarding program? Learn the components of a World Class onboarding program that you can steal immediately. Read the article here.

Want more? I did a quick video on what good sales training looks like. What are you going to change in your onboarding program?

This article originally appeared on SalesPop!

 

 

Subscribe to our email list to receive new content, webinar invites, and training offers.


how much does sales training cost

,

How To Get Budget for Inside Sales Training

If your Inside Sales team is relatively new, chances are you don’t have a defined training budget at your disposal (am I getting warm?). I’d also venture a guess that your somewhat green team could definitely use some inside sales training. (Still warm?) Which means that either:

  1. You’re individually training each of them yourself (ouch!)
  2. You’re sending them to some form of field or other training that doesn’t seem to actually fit
  3. You’re pulling out your hair and ready for some help! (ooh! Now she’s hot! Ha ha)

We’re here to help!

STEP ONE: DETERMINE NEEDS

The average company spends around $1000 / rep / year on training. Companies that score in the “best practices” range for sales spend closer to $2K. This goes right next to your incentives and recruiting budget my friends. Every year. In the meantime, ask for the equivalent of $1750 / Rep. You have some gaps to fill. This should buy you a few days of training per rep.

STEP TWO: FIGHT FOR BUDGET

Enter the Big-Bad–Doesn’t-Want-to­-Spend-Money-On-Your-Silly-Little-Team-Boss:

“Why would I spend money on training! I heard that by the time you back to your job, you’ve lost 90% of what you’ve learned in training and 3 months later the rest is gone too. And by the way, these Reps will be gone in six months anyway, right?” (Whoa Boss Man!)

Don’t panic…we’re gonna get through this. Ready for your side of the negotiation?

You (Superstar Inside Sales Leader): Sure, sometimes that is true (with bad training) but did YOU know that:

  • A recent survey found that 40% of employees who receive poor training leave their positions within the first year (and site “lack of training” as a reason for leaving!)

So providing good sales training will reduce attrition!

  • A second study found that companies with training programs that “exceeded expectations” achieved 94.8% of quota – ten points above companies with mediocre programs (and X points above you today with no training???) – So providing good sales training will raise our performance to quota!
  • Best in class sales training improves individual performance by an average of 20% – So if we raise even 10%, we should recoup ____ $$ and pay for training in X months!
  • 85% of companies rated best in class in Sales use an outside professional sales trainer / curriculum – So we probably should buy this not build it. I’ll do the legwork…

STEP THREE: FIND YOURSELF A VENDOR

So, what does good inside sales training look like? How can you prevent the “fall out”? Check out my recent video for quick tips to get the most from that training budget you fought so hard to get!

Hope this helps you Super Star Inside Sales Leaders out there!
Cheers!

Subscribe to our email list to receive new content, webinar invites, and training offers.


, , ,

Why Rep Ramp Time Lights Me Up (VIDEO)

In the twenty years I’ve been at this, I’ve found one singular topic that lights me up the fastest:

Rep ramp time.

I wish I could tell you that every client and every event focuses here with me, but the truth is they don’t. I’m a bit of an island on this one, but I think that’s only because we’re not all exactly sure just how much slow ramp is costing us (or could be saving us) – more on that in a second. According to the most recent research from my friend Trish and her team at The Bridge Group (full report here), the average ramp time for an Inside Sales rep is 4.4 months. Let’s be honest, Trish works with awesome tech companies, and they’ve been doing Inside Sales longer than anyone. If you’re a distribution company, an outsourcer, big box retail, or manufacturing, chances are you average 6 months until Reps start paying for themselves (or “six months ramp”). If your training department is less than 5 years old and/or reports up through HR instead of sales, chances are you’re north of 9 months. When you are spending 2-3 times the rep’s annual salary to onboard him, every extra week it takes to get him to start paying that back is a big deal. Especially when 1/3 to 1/2 of them will be gone within the year. So which costs more…attrition or ramp? Well this blog is about rep ramp time, so I hope you guessed it. Man I bet you were surprised. But wait till you hear how much more!

We modeled it for a little company called Microsoft.

They were hot about the cost of attrition with some outsourcers, so we ran a model comparing the cost of their industry-average attrition vs. best in class, and then compared that against their industry-average onboarding vs. best-in-class. It’s basically a magic wand question – If you could fix either, which saves you more?

Cutting the ramp time saved nearly DOUBLE than cutting attrition

(BONUS ALERT: help reps make money faster, you’re also going to impact attrition). The money is in the green seat. The what? The cost of having your customers worked by a rep ramping. The same book or leads worked by a tenured rep produces double or triple that of a green rep. Multiple that by the six months that your rep is green. Ouch. NOW assume that 20-50% of your floor is “green” due to attrition, and we’re talking big dollars. I don’t know your numbers (email me if you want to plug them into our model). But I’m betting big money that cutting your ramp time in half would be like adding an extra sales team to your numbers.

So, how do we do it? GET TO IT LB, right?

Well, I often like to blame your training team, but ramp time is a function of a lot of different groups: Are you recruiting the right candidates? Is your hiring process designed to identify the attributes that align with your most successful reps? Does your new hire training provide practical experience that mirrors what reps will see when they hit the floor? Here’s one trick that I think is CRUCIAL to cutting ramp time: Use Call Recordings! But not the way you think. They don’t even have to be those green Reps’ calls; any calls will do. When used right, recorded calls simulate experience. Months and months of it! It’s the reason all Factor 8 sales training uses call recordings and live floor time: simulate real experience. (Here’s the secret sauce folks)

Simulated experience is crucial because the key isn’t really about WHAT skill to apply. . . it’s about WHEN to apply it.

This is what takes so darn long to collect and thereby ramp.

So infuse it as often as possible using the Pause Game. Check out the video on how to do this:

(I think I filmed this one in my front courtyard, so enjoy the stupid plane overhead that just wouldn’t land!)
Personally, I’m a fan of hands on engagement from Sales leaders here. Have your Supervisors grab a bunch of recorded calls and pull your new hires into a room for a few rounds of The Pause Game. Then sign them up to do it every day during new hire training. The more real life situations you can expose new reps to, the faster they can build up their bank of experiences. That experience bank is what will get them ramped and producing faster. Man this was a long one. I’ll work on that. I hope this is helpful!

ACTION suggestions:

  • Forward this to your lead Manager / Supervisor and tell them to make it happen
  • Forward this to your New Hire Training Manager and tell them to make it happen
  • Ask both of them to invite you to the first one.
  • Email me if you want to plug in your own numbers or learn more ways to reduce your ramp
Here’s to you (and your ramp), LB

Subscribe to our email list to receive new content, webinar invites, and training offers.


Newer Entries »