How to Train Your Sales Team More Efficiently

If training your sales team makes you want to pull your hair out, you’re not alone!

Training and onboarding a new sales rep can definitely feel like a chore, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, it’s possible to essentially have new employees train themselves.

How, you ask?

In this post, we’ll tell you how standardizing your pricing and using standard operating procedures will make your training process easier and more efficient than ever.

The first step: standard pricing

Standardizing your pricing is the first step to making your training process more efficient.

It’s easy to make pricing mistakes, but that doesn’t mean your employees should constantly be making them.

Your sales reps are the first people your customers are going to associate with your business, and when they’re not able to answer questions about prices without consulting someone else it reflects badly on your business.

The best way to make sure your sales team can function on its own is to standardize your prices.

Does this mean that the same service or product always has to have the same price? No, depending on your field, there will more than likely be circumstances that affect your estimate/price.

But it does mean that your service or product has consistent pricing and your sales team can confidently explain your prices to your customer.

Providing your sales team with standardized prices to work with not only makes them more efficient, but when combined with standard operating procedures can make them almost entirely self-reliant!

What is an SOP?

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a detailed set of instructions that explains how to carry out a specific task. They’re detailed rules that everyone can follow and should eliminate any ambiguity about what needs to be done.

An SOP is a concise and to-the-point how-to guide, and it can be used to coordinate almost any work task. People use them to assist with operations, business growth, finance, legal matters, and other aspects of their businesses.

SOPs are great for:

• Providing consistent employee training.
• Creating systemized company processes.
• Documenting the steps that lead from idea to completion in order to plan and launch projects and services.
• Performing quality checks by providing standard company process check-lists.

A good SOP is well-written and easy to understand. Just like the instructions that come with Ikea furniture, SOPs use short and simple steps—usually presented in a multi-media flow chart or clearly labeled text document.

How SOPs improve employee training and management

When you have standard operating procedures in place, it’s much easier to hire and retain employees.

Communication and efficiency are aided by SOPs. By sharing an SOP, managers can save time training new hires, and workers will still have a reference point for step-by-step instructions on how to complete specific tasks.

SOPs can also be used by new employees to learn important information about your company. They'll be able to determine how often processes must be completed, how long it takes to complete a process from beginning to end, and how everyone in their department contributes to the process.

And to make your life even easier, you might consider integrating some kind of collaborative tool or software to build out your SOP.

Using software that allows your team to collaborate—and you to monitor their work—ensures that your SOPs are being followed. And when the software is customized to your business' specifications, you can rest easy knowing that all of your employees are producing the same high-quality work.

An SOP can be a tool that allows new employees to catch up on their own time and relieves you of the burden of holding their hand during their training. You'll be able to spend fewer hours training and allow more time for both the new hire and everyone on your team to adjust.

As a result, employees will be more productive and less likely to make mistakes in their work, and you’ll save money on overtime fees for extra work.

Overall, the SOP will ensure that everything runs smoothly and serve as a guide for everyone on your team to improve.

Proven efficiency

What it comes down to is: standardized pricing + SOPs = more efficient employees

Think about how much time is wasted when your team isn’t on the same page or able to answer their own questions.

The simplest of tasks can take 10 times longer than it should if your employees have to float a question up the chain of command. And while we’ve all heard the saying, “There are no dumb questions,” it can be tiresome when eight different people ask you the same question in one day.

And your salespeople are likely wasting time if they’re not sure about pricing. The key to fast and accurate estimates is standardized prices. Utilizing estimation software like ArcSite makes this even easier!

The takeaway

When in doubt, standardize! Standardizing your prices and your operating processes will make your training process easier and more efficient and lead to a more effective sales team.