Time is money, and your sales force needs to be efficient in their work. Extended pitches can derail closing and waste time, while a laser focus on identifying customer needs and pain points is key to solving problems and overcoming objections.
However, achieving this is easier said than done, and training is essential for keeping your team sharp. They’ll need to focus on the skills that matter and deliver individualized coaching to ensure every team member has the opportunity to develop their skills in the most efficient way possible so it doesn’t interfere with achieving your larger business goals.
So, what should you look for in a training partner who can create the biggest returns in the least amount of time? Glad you asked—here are the areas they should focus on to keep your team firing on all cylinders and burning clean.
Long-Term Relationships Work
Training is not a one-and-done solution for any business. It works best as an ongoing process to grow skills over time in a supportive active coaching environment. The benefits of this type of long-term relationship are many for both the employer and employee:
- Increase employee confidence.
- Confidential sounding board for ideas and challenges.
- Improved awareness of other sales techniques and styles.
- Individualized training that leads directly to revenue.
- Durable skills that stand the test of time.
- Employees feel more valued, improving employment length, loyalty, and productivity.
- Solid training relationships that become more valuable over time.
All of these qualities lead to more efficient training programs that ultimately deliver increased ROI.
Customer-Centric Training
The program you choose should be heavily customer-centric instead of employee/product-centered. Survey data shows that when companies focus on improving the customer’s experience, 92% see brand loyalty improve, 84% see revenue increase, and surprisingly, 79% see cost savings.
To achieve these results, your training partner should prioritize teaching employees to find solutions to customer challenges rather than pitching products, and there are several areas to focus on:
- Active listening skills can dramatically increase sales team efficiency by improving their understanding of their customer and what they value and require.
- Techniques to identify customer needs and explore products and services that will solve those needs.
- Awareness of customer pain points is key to quickly qualifying customers and overcoming objections.
- Focus on bringing customers into the dealership with solid appointment-setting processes.
Sales Scripts
Sales scripts are essential for delivering optimized service that efficiently maximizes your revenue opportunities in the modern car sales environment. They give your sales team a roadmap to success, prioritize your business’s values and goals, and make it much easier to deliver for your customers.
Here are some great techniques your prospective training partners should highlight:
- Emphasize memorization of the script to make navigation easy.
- Practice the script sections out of order. This improves the durability of memorization and flexibility of message delivery when agents have to shift gears quickly.
- Give employees the freedom to tweak non-essential language for a more personalized and natural conversation.
These basic tips lead to more advanced tactics that your sales team will be able to explore over time. Also, as market dynamics change and evolve, your training partner will be in the perfect position to update scripts so your business can begin taking advantage immediately.
They Handle the Details
One of the most valuable benefits a great training partner delivers is that they will save you time and energy as well. Ideally, they can work with your managers and team members directly, and only engage you as necessary or to deliver reports. After all, management fatigue is a real thing, and you’re already overloaded.
By streamlining the training process from the top down, they free everyone up to focus on the things that lead directly to revenue—and avoid the complications that don’t.
Feedback and Analysis
There’s no efficiency without effectiveness, and any great training program will build in evaluations and feedback. However, not every approach is ideal for a unique sales environment like the automotive industry. It takes an expert consultant with years of experience in the business to know what works and what doesn’t—especially on the phone.
Training on real sales calls helps with this, but mystery shopping is the best way to check up on your sales team’s work. Your training partner should be using mystery shoppers to evaluate your employees’ work. Not only does this verify trained skills, but it gives coaches accurate feedback to focus on in subsequent training sessions.
Maximizing Efficiency with A Great Training Partner
When you find the perfect fit with a training partner, they’ll be able to achieve levels of sales team efficiency that give you a lasting edge over the competition. At Phone Ninjas, we’ve spent years honing our training program to routinely boost KPIs across the board for our clients. With one of the most efficient and effective training programs on the market, we’re able to increase appointment rates by 300%-400% over industry averages for our clients.
Our coaches work with your sales team in weekly one-on-one sessions that deliver valuable insights in less than 20 minutes per employee. This helps your team build skills that focus on improving your customers’ overall experience. Our mystery shopping team follows up to evaluate skills and target areas for follow-up training, and all of it follows the shortest possible path to raising your bottom line.
Call today so we can set up a free demo and two free mystery shops!
As the COO | Partner of Phone Ninjas, Chris delivers leadership, coaching, and mentorship to 55 team members providing software sales and phone skills coaching. He fosters powerful partnerships and collaborations with leaders across various business sectors, establishing expectations, communicating vision, and escalating performance to maximize productivity and effectiveness.
Chris is an innovation-driven business executive with over 25 years of experience delivering leadership to teams of up to 75 overseeing development, launch, and sale of website lead acquisition, reconditioning process software systems, and technology that support automotive dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
