Corporate Sales Training: What Makes a Program Work

A wise person once said, if you think you’ve got nothing left to learn, you haven’t learned a thing. Let’s face it, there’s always room to improve one’s game. Even your sales team. Sales training plays a pivotal role in shaping the success of any sales team. When done well, it equips sales professionals with the required skills and strategies to maneuver difficult sales situations and close deals.

What is corporate sales training?

Corporate sales training is training a company provides to build its sales team’s skills, from presenting and persuading to listening and negotiating, delivered through workshops, coaching, online courses, and on-the-job practice. Whether incorporating storytelling into pitches, mastering objection handling, or taking advantage of technology, the goal should always be centered on boosting performance and delivering sales results. Corporate sales training programs should cover topics like:

• Communication
• Persuasion
• Listening
• Relationship-building
• Negotiation
• Strategic thinking

But not all corporate sales training programs are created the same. Let’s get into what makes some approaches stand out, what traps to avoid, and how to make the most of your sales force as you review programs for skill building.

How is corporate sales training different from sales enablement?

Corporate sales training builds the skills of individual sellers, while sales enablement is the broader system of training, content, tools, and strategy that supports the entire sales process. Sales enablement can take the form of pitch decks, presentation systems, or other sales and marketing-aligned efforts to unite a company in its elevator pitch and offerings. Our guide to sales enablement covers the full picture, and our Sales Presentations work helps teams build the shared story and decks their sellers carry into every deal.

What makes a corporate sales training program good?

Of course there are the obvious factors like cost, duration, and credibility of your sales training provider to consider. But as you think about corporate training for sales, keep these additional characteristics in mind as you consider sales training programs:

1. Personalization

The ability to tailor and customize a corporate sales training to the specific needs and challenges of your sales team is a huge buying factor. While generic approaches may offer strong coverage of the basics, finding a sales training that can personalize its case studies or use-cases for your company’s sales environment will catapult your sellers’ skills.

2. Interactive learning

Interactive workshops, role-playing exercises, and practical simulations are a way to help participants stay engaged and encourage skill application. Too much learning strictly delivered in a lecture-only format may result in a disengaged sales force. And when you’re disengaged, you’re not retaining the training.

3. Practical application

Successful corporate sales training is grounded in reality, with actionable strategies proven to work in the field. Practical tools, models, systems, templates, and frameworks help sales professionals better apply the new learnings.

4. Ongoing support

Learning something once doesn’t mean you’ve actually learned it! Opportunities for additional or continuous coaching, feedback, and reinforcement are critical for creating lasting change. Look for a corporate sales training program that offers ongoing support so your team can continue to improve.

What formats does corporate sales training come in?

Corporate sales training can be delivered in various formats to cater to different learning preferences and operational constraints.

1. In-person/onsite workshops

Classroom-style training remains a staple. In-person workshops make room for hands-on activities, role-playing, group discussion, and immediate feedback from instructors, and they build camaraderie among sellers who don’t often get time together.

2. Virtual/online training

Live virtual workshops and webinars use chat, polling, and breakout rooms to keep sessions interactive. They work well for sales teams spread across regions or training in smaller groups throughout the year.

3. On-demand courses

Self-paced courses and video tutorials let sellers learn on their own schedule and revisit key concepts before a difficult sales presentation.

4. Coaching and mentoring

One-on-one coaching gives sellers personalized feedback and practical advice tied to their own deals and development goals, and it keeps skills sharpening long after a workshop ends.

5. Consultants and external experts

External partners bring specialized knowledge and a current view of industry benchmarks and best practices, which can complement what your internal team already does well.

Duarte has a variety of sales training opportunities

Duarte offers skill-based training for sales teams, delivered in person, virtually, or on demand, whether your sellers need to build scalable pitch decks, bring storytelling into the way they sell, or listen more closely to customers. Here’s an overview of the offerings most relevant to sales professionals.

Train them on presentation delivery

Delivery plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of sales presentations. Our focus on presentation delivery encompasses techniques for engaging audiences, managing nerves, and delivering messages with confidence and impact. Our Presentation Delivery Training blends theory with practical coaching to enhance sales professionals’ speaking prowess and help them gain the confidence and communication skills to influence and engage any audience effectively.

This training can increase your salespeople’s ability in every speaking setting, from virtual meetings to live sales pitches. At the end of the day, they’ll learn valuable principles to persuade others not just by what they say, but how they say it.

Teach them how to connect and persuade customers

If you’re looking to uncover winning strategies to help sellers better connect to their customers, or to take their persuasion skills to the next level, our workshop Storytelling for Business Presentations™ will help your salespeople do just that, and with your sales pitch deck.

In this training, your sales professionals can bring their sales presentation with them and come out of the training with a transformed mindset to sales pitch decks. Or, if they’re feeling pretty good about their sales presentation template and how to handle a sales pitch in person but need to brush up on their virtual selling skills, our Presentation Delivery Training will do just that.

Equip them on how to win buy-in with data

In today’s data-driven business environment, the ability to effectively present and interpret data is paramount. Our Data Storytelling Training for Teams equips your sales teams with the skills and tools to transform complex data into compelling narratives that drive decision-making. This training teaches your sales teams a research-based methodology for explaining data in a way that moves people to action, which fundamentally is the basis of a sale.

Upskill them with better listening skills

Your sales professionals need to stay focused on their customer. Great salespeople get better results because they put their customers’ needs before their own. But needs are shifting, and customers won’t get what they need unless salespeople can uncover insights first.

Adaptive Listening™ is a goal-oriented way to process and respond in a way that matters to the customer. Learning to adapt the way you listen across the sales process gives sellers more influence over the outcome if they adapt to each customer’s need. The principles of Adaptive Listening will help your sales team answer the question, “What does my customer need from me right now?” Our Active Listening Training builds that habit across your team, and our guide to five listening habits that improve your sales shows what it looks like in a deal.

Turn your internal training into an effective course

Companies that have homegrown their own training methodology but need to build it out into a more effective format, and with data-backed learning objectives, can work with our Communication Consulting team. Let us translate your content into an eloquent and persuasive training experience. Our experts can work closely with you to create the right exercises, craft the most resonant examples, and develop your content into a memorable experience.

How to work with us for your corporate sales training

Corporate sales training is one piece of the bigger picture of sales enablement, the ongoing work of giving your whole team one story and the tools to tell it. If you’re not sure where your deals are losing ground, our Are Your Sales Deals Stalling? guide is a good place to start. Talk with our team and we’ll help you find the right fit for your sales training objectives.