With the right support, you can transform your sales staff into qualified commercial professionals who can hit and exceed targets, achieve the highest possible level of performance, and be a true ambassador for your business.

To be able to do this, your sales staff need to develop all of the core knowledge, skills, and competencies of an outstanding sales professional.

So how can you supercharge your sales team’s knowledge and set them on the path to excellence?

The Crucial Role of Communication in a Sales Role

Without communication, sales teams can’t nurture leads, negotiate with customers, or turn prospects into clients.

There are several ways to improve communication, including practising Active Listening and learning to identify the best method of communication based on the situation.

Communication is an essential, fundamental part of any role, especially sales. (With this, we are hosting a free webinar all about ‘Using the Most Effective Form of Communication’)

The Current Sales Skills Gap Crisis

A concerningly large proportion of sales staff, especially in SMEs, haven’t had any professional training. In fact, 41% of companies have allocated zero budget for sales training, and of the 59% who do have a sales training budget, half of them are delivering only generic management training, nothing specific to sales.

Communication is only one of many essential skills that your sales staff may be missing if they haven’t had any professional formal training.

• When was the last time you did a skills gap analysis for your sales team?
• Are they achieving their full potential?
• Could you be leaving money on the table because your sales staff aren’t performing as well as they could be?

We appreciate that it can be challenging to get existing staff into a learning and development mindset where they want to constantly refine and improve their skills and knowledge. However, the sooner you begin building this development momentum, the sooner you will be on the path to having an exceptional sales team. After all, employees that do the best are the ones that continuously seek opportunities to improve, such as a professional training programme.

If you are looking to develop your sales staff into high-achieving commercial professionals, have you explored ESFA-funded sales training programmes? 

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Usually, we see an appetite for these programmes to be implemented in existing teams to solidify their knowledge and help take their performance to the next level. We find that even people who already have sales skills and experience benefit from going over fundamentals. Not only does this refresh their knowledge and solidify their abilities, but it also helps prevent expert error.

• Expert error is where we do something so often that we perceive ourselves as experts, and can sometimes forget or overlook the basics resulting in a lower than anticipated outcome

Even if your sales staff do always hit their targets, are they truly satisfied with their job? Progression opportunities are critical to employee engagement and job satisfaction, with 87% of employees saying that professional development and career growth opportunities are very important to them.

Ultimately, unless you’re a senior sales rep with a high-level degree, you would greatly benefit from a professional sales training programme.

Our ESFA-funded Sales Executive Training Programme

From our years of experience at Nine Dots, outstanding sales trainers are extremely hard to come by as the best in the trade typically focus on actually selling, rather than teaching others to sell. We searched high and low for the best of the best and, after extensive research, we decided to source our sales trainers through one of our partnerships who specialise in Sales training - these trainers are qualified industry experts with years of experience behind them. 

Over 18 months, our Level 4 Sales Executive Apprenticeship Programme covers 54 topics (split into 5 modules), giving your staff all of the knowledge, skills, and competencies they need to become outstanding sales professionals.

Not only will your sales staff walk away from the programme with new, relevant and easily-applicable skills, they will also gain ISM membership, which is recognised across the nation and is a fantastic achievement for them to be proud of.

Whilst we do typically use this programme to develop existing staff, we can also help you hire a new staff member for your sales team through this scheme.

In yesterday’s Daily Dot article, we explained how we combine government grants and the apprenticeship funding available to create a  more sustainable and effective recruitment process that delivers high-achieving employees for a fraction of the price. We also provided you with a quick 10-step guide to recruiting through an apprenticeship, which you can click here to download.

Currently, as of August 2021, this programme is 95% funded by the ESFA, and there is a £3,000 government grant for employers that hire an apprentice. This government grant is ending on 30th September 2021 and there is no certainty as to how long the funding will be available so if putting any new or existing staff through an apprenticeship is something you’re interested in, contact us today to get the ball rolling and take advantage of the current funding scheme.

You can download our Sales Executive Apprenticeship brochure by clicking here, call us on 01332 527 905, email us at enquiries@ninedots.co.uk, or click here to request a call with one of our training experts.

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In our next Daily Dot article, we will begin to explore what National Apprenticeship Week is, its mission,  and what we want to achieve this N.A.W.

Until next time...