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Advanced sales training allows you to win bigger deals, navigate complex negotiations, and engage prospects with forward-thinking techniques.
This form of advanced training for salespeople is perfect for organizations:
- Currently have an underproducing sales enablement strategy
- Are looking for a way to sharpen senior sales agents
- Want to empower team members with the latest sales techniques
Below, we discuss what high-level sales training entails and how it can benefit everyone, including your clients. Our experts even reveal a proven solution for overcoming major challenges to sales training. Let’s dive in.
Without a solid foundation in sales training, salespeople may not be able to adequately grasp the concepts being relayed to them. Therefore, many organizations choose to upskill their senior salespeople and top performers with more advanced skills through targeted training.
Upskilling is one of the many tactics that you can use to motivate your sales team.
Advanced sales training differs from more basic upskilling efforts in that they focus more on the customer experience. Advanced sales training allows agents to move past the financial implications of a deal. Instead, these skills allow them to build a rapport with clients so that they can influence their purchasing decision.
Advanced sales techniques to skyrocket revenue
Here are a few of the most popular advanced sales techniques:
- Improving nonverbal communication
- Use social media effectively
- Practice active listening
- Negotiate intelligently
- Be assertive, not pushy
- Focus on the customer
- Ask the right questions
- Let the client define value
1. Improving nonverbal communication
According to the University of Text, 55% of communication is nonverbal. During advanced sales training that focuses on nonverbal communication, agents will learn the importance of physical cues, facial expressions, and the tone they use.
Improving nonverbal communication can help display professionalism, interest, and general understanding of the customer's pain points without saying a word. This will keep the conversation about the customer and not about how the salesperson feels.
2. Use social media effectively
An incredibly effective sales strategy is to implement social media selling. However, your team members may not be leveraging social media platforms to their full potential. In light of this fact, many organizations create advanced sales training courses focused on enhancing each agent’s social media skills.
When used strategically, social channels are a great way of establishing stronger personal connections with prospective clients. By maintaining an active social media presence, you can increase brand awareness and create a sense of familiarity with the client. During that first meeting or call, sales agents can use this “familiarity” to their advantage.
In addition, agents can use social channels like LinkedIn to research their prospects, identify pain points, and tailor their sales pitch to address the potential buyer’s most pressing concerns before reaching out. This strategy saves a lot of precious time during these meetings and helps your employees be brief and get right down to the matter at hand.
3. Practice active listening
Younger or less experienced agents may be so eager to make a sale that they inadvertently over talk prospective clients. Fortunately, you can use advanced sales training to enhance their communication skills and teach them to listen to clients actively.
While there are many ways that agents can practice active listening, a proven selling technique involves restating information provided by a client. They can reiterate a prospect’s concerns to ensure everyone in the conversation is on the same page.
Active listening will help agents get a feel for each lead’s mindset and manage the conversation accordingly.
4. Negotiate intelligently
When composing advanced sales training programs, many organizations like to include content on intelligent negotiating. High-level sales agents are concerned with much more than simply closing a one-time deal.
The best negotiators are forward thinkers that view the initial sale as a stepping stone toward a long-lasting partnership. While giving a brand-new client a great deal may not seem ideal at first glance, it generally encourages them to make additional purchases in the future.
With that being said, most negotiations are won long before the sales agent ever sits down with a prospect. During advanced sales training, team members will learn the importance of knowing their audience. This means understanding the prospective client’s budget, needs, and business goals.
5. Be assertive, not pushy
Another common advanced selling technique is helping agents understand the balance between being assertive and pushy. During a client meeting, agents must set clear boundaries and be firm on important topics. However, they must do this without making the prospect feel rushed, as this can create friction and ultimately cost the agent a sale.
After particularly tense negotiations, agents must follow up with prospective clients to smooth things over and hopefully salvage the sale. Your agent should express their interest in making a deal and reiterate that they value the opportunity to have them as a client.
6. Focus on the customer
In the heat of the moment, less experienced sales agents may get caught up talking about the product or service they are marketing. While there will come a time for that eventually, the majority of the conversation should be about the client's pain points and needs.
Advanced sales training is designed and reserved for your more seasoned agents to develop this skill. It serves as a reminder that every meeting should be about the client’s needs first and the sale second.
7. Ask the right questions
While asking questions may be considered to be a rudimentary aspect of the sales process, this is simply not the case. Asking the client questions is a genuine art form that introductory level and intermediate sales agents may not have mastered just yet. From the moment an agent introduces themselves to a client or makes a phone call, it is essential that they are asking carefully curated questions.
For instance, starting a phone conversation with the question:
“Did I catch you at a bad time?” decreases the chances of booking a meeting by 40%.
“How are you doing today?” makes agents 3.4x as likely to book a meeting.
Questions should not only be meticulously structured but also used judiciously and sparingly. Bombarding prospects with questions can make the entire conversation seem bland and overly regimented. During advanced sales training, team members will better understand how to incorporate meaningful, open-ended questions into sales conversations.
8. Let the client define value
Typically, entry-level and intermediate sales agents dedicate a portion of their pitch towards discussing the ROI of their product offering. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, letting the client articulate what they consider to be valuable is far more effective.
Sales agents can set the stage by asking questions like “What are the biggest pain points your business is facing this quarter?” They can follow up by asking how resolving those issues would increase the organization’s profitability.
After the prospect provides detailed answers, the agent can explain how the product resolves the described challenges. Since the client (not the agent) provided the “value-added” number themselves, they are more likely to treat that information as fact.
