Training Your Sales Team: The Dirty Little Secret to Great Training

Training Your Sales Team: The Dirty Little Secret to Great Training

There’s a secret that some industry trainers don’t want you to know. It’s a secret about how to provide the best training possible for your team. They don’t want you to know it because it’s 100% free and available to you any day you choose to use it.

The secret? You. You’re the dirty little secret to great training that some don’t want you to know.

Outsiders Can’t Do the Heavy Lifting

Industry trainers can’t be everywhere all the time. For your dealership, this means someone on your team needs to do the heavy lifting when it comes to sales training. It’s fine to hire an outside trainer to provide some motivation and a new perspective. However, if your managers don’t reinforce that message early and often, your team will settle back into mediocrity within a couple of weeks.

An interesting fact about great sales training is that it doesn’t have to be elaborate or expensive. It just requires two things:

• First, it has to be regular. It has to happen on at least a weekly basis. The beauty of this is that if you have four sales managers, they each can be assigned a topic & a Monday Morning Meeting where they’ll present that week’s training. Assign these in advance & they’ll have weeks to prepare a solid lesson.
• Second, it has to be reinforced. This means that if you just trained how to get 100% TOs and a salesperson just lost an Up whom they didn’t turn, it’s important to reinforce this immediately with that salesperson.

Truthfully, that’s all it takes. Oh, and the weekly lessons don’t need to be more than five minutes long. A best practice, of course, is to provide daily sales training, with a new five-minute lesson each day.

Where Can I Find the Best Sales Training?

I’m certain you don’t have the time to write 300+ five-minute lessons a year to deliver daily training to your team, so you’ll need to lean on some free and inexpensive resources for this. Let’s start with free.

There are plenty of places to find great sales training that’s offered for free online. From the daily lessons on CBTNews.com to my free sales training website to just doing a search on YouTube, you should be able to quickly find short lessons that you agree with and can reinforce. (Yes, simply playing these for your team – instead of recreating these lessons – is perfectly acceptable. In fact, I recommend it! Hearing these lessons from you is one thing; but, when an outsider delivers them, most salespeople tend give them more weight.)

You can also take snippets from industry magazine articles – when these actually provide a lesson and aren’t just a vendor sales pitch – and incorporate them into your daily lessons.

Once you’ve exhausted the free resources, I (selfishly) recommend you pick up a copy of my book, Assumptive Selling. Yes, it’s a $50 investment, but it contains dozens of word tracks and helps your team overcome more than 60 common objections. I guarantee you’ll be able to easily create 100 or more five-minute lessons from this 400+ page book.

Lessons, by the way, that you’ll have to reinforce if you expect them to stick.

Good selling!

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About TheManager: Steve Stauning is the author of Assumptive Selling: The Complete Guide to Selling More Vehicles for More Money to Today’s Connected Customers; as well as a respected automotive industry veteran and founder of pladoogle, LLC – a leading training & consulting firm – and the free sales video training website SteveStauning.com. Prior to his involvement with pladoogle, Steve served in various automotive leadership roles, including as the Asbury Automotive Group’s (NYSE: ABG) director of ecommerce, the director of the Web Solutions division of Reynolds & Reynolds, and as the general manager of Dealer Web Services for Dominion’s Dealer Specialties.