If you want your business to succeed, what's one thing you need to do?
Make sales.
This simple truth is so foundational to a company's success, yet the process of achieving it is often overlooked. In many companies, you don't see business leaders investing in their sales team's training, even though it's crucial to bringing in more deals.
You might reasonably assume that developing a high-performance sales team ranks among the highest priorities within an organization. Yet somewhat inexplicably, sales training is one of the most overlooked aspects of developing sales organizations, resulting in a constant churn of sales professionals that ultimately cost businesses time and capital.
- Bryce Conlan, How to Build a World Class Sales Team
Without proper training, sales reps will cost you more than they're bringing in, leaving your business in a position to crumble. Fortunately, that doesn't have to be your reality. If you want your company to thrive, all you need to do is coach your reps to succeed using sales training software. There's one catch, though. The tools you use must be engaging. Otherwise, what's the point?
If your sales team doesn't listen or pay attention to your training, all of your hard work will go out the window, and that's not an exaggeration. Studies suggest that 84% of sales training is forgotten within three months. To avoid being in that situation, you must invest in tools that keep your reps engaged, focused, and excited to learn.
Here are 6 sales training software that can do that while giving your team the education it needs.
Slides With Friends provides interactive decks designed to keep your sales team's attention while delivering key knowledge to help sharpen their skills. The decks resemble PowerPoint slides, so they're easy to navigate and understand. However, the slides aren't boring or meant to be simple presentations.
Instead, Slides With Friends offers multiple features to equip and engage your sales team like:
One of the best things about Slides With Friends is it's easy to use. You don't need to be tech-savvy or have a tech background to enjoy or build a slide deck. After creating an account, all you have to do is the following steps to get started:
Slides With Friends works for in-person, hybrid, and remote workforces. This flexibility has attracted many brands, like FedEx and IBM.
Brainshark wears many hats. With its sales enablement and readiness platform, the software company helps brands communicate with, educate, and motivate their sales teams to achieve high performance. One way it accomplishes this is with its training and onboarding program.
The program works by doing the following:
Brainshark also allows you to build a custom library with skills and topics that align with learning activities. With this, you can monitor activities and see who's acquiring critical skills like account planning, product knowledge, and forecasting.
Also, Brainshark offers 5 unique features that users typically enjoy:
As with many sales training software, Brainshark has drawbacks. Some people think the platform isn't intuitive for less tech-savvy reps and the reporting isn't that granular.
EdApp is a mobile-first tool, meaning it runs on mobile devices. With this standalone app, you can publish, distribute, and gamify your training resources. Specifically, you can build your sales training content from scratch, convert existing training from PowerPoints into microlearning modules, and use the premade library complete with resources and guides.
Another great thing about EdApp is that it can integrate with other learning management systems like Canva, Zapier, and Cornerstone. Some other key features include the following:
While a great software, EdApp does have one major drawback: Because it's designed to operate on mobile devices, EdApp is not a great solution if your reps spend most of their time on a desktop or if you want team members to decrease time spent on their cell phones.
Bigtincan is one piece of a greater sales training stack and focuses on providing robust training to sales teams. The resources on its platform are designed to deliver foundational knowledge and sales skills reps need to sell effectively.
Bigtincan is a good platform because it avoids offering long, generic sales training presentations and instead provides engaging, custom learning experiences to team members. Bigtincan also has the following features to help your sales team:
Another great thing about Bigtincan is it's accessible whether reps are online or offline. Additionally, the platform can integrate with CRMs like Oracle, HubSpot, and Salesforce.
Still, Bigtincan does have a few drawbacks. Some users claim the interface isn't user-friendly, the dashboard is difficult to customize, and the tools and documents are hard to navigate.
If you want to build a content library that mirrors your company, Mindtickle may be a great option. With this sales training software, you can house your resources in one place and track how team members are progressing and performing on training modules. It's a great platform for keeping sales reps updated on critical information.
The tool also comes with the following features:
One of the drawbacks of Mindtickle is that it doesn't support just-in-time learning. Also, this platform doesn't integrate with other software.
Spekit is a sales enablement and training software. It provides easy-to-access, bite-size resources that are available during team members' workdays.
It's also beneficial because it doesn't require reps to access a separate training hub. With Spekit, employees can use the platforms they log into the most. Primarily because Spekit integrates with Slack, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Salesforce, and more.
Additionally, key features of Spekit include:
Of course, there are some downsides to Spekit. Some users believe certain tools are redundant and the prompts that appear after downloading the extension are annoying and distracting.
Improving your sales team starts with training them effectively. You can't expect results and more customers if your reps don't know how to bring in more money. So use one of the platforms in this article to get your team members up to speed in a fun, engaging way. With good training, your sales reps will not only hit goals but exceed them.