How to Make Sales Training Stick

Colibri for Sales — great for making your sales training stick

If you are anything like me, you love the opportunity to step back from your day-to-day selling activities and spend time with a sales trainer/coach. These professionals always provide a great mix of training material and experiences about selling that we all know and love, but somehow have forgotten, as well as new approaches and techniques that we can try to ensure we don’t get that dreaded mid-funnel leakage. It can be simple things like ensuring the meeting agenda covers everything you and the client need it to, pre-meeting prep calls with your team (and the client), follow-up action lists, and scheduling the next meeting. But, it can also be the types of open-ended questions and pointed follow-up questions to dig deeper.

Sales Training is Hard to Remember

But, the thing that all of us who have been through sales training experience, is that 2–4 weeks afterward, we find ourselves slipping back to our old habits, forgetting in the crucible of front-line selling all that we had just learned. What if there was a way to make sure that never happens?

There is a Better Way

Here at Colibri.ai, we have included specific features into our flagship — Colibri for Sales to ensure that all those great lessons are not lost and you continue to reap the benefits many months after you have taken the training. There are 3 main ways in which Colibri for Sales can help ensure you put everything you learned into practice:

1. Pre-Call Meeting Prep

Before you get on your next sales call, you work with your Sales Trainer on the key talking points and probing questions that you want to cover during your call. If it is an initial call with your prospect, it may include things like:

• Asking about their role and responsibilities
• Asking about their current strategic initiatives for the year
• Asking about what problems are keeping them up at night

These are encapsulated into the meeting template, and as you go through the call, Colibri is listening to the conversation and automatically crosses the key meeting points off your list, so at a glance, you can see what you have covered and what is left to do.

Agenda templates ensure you cover the right things in the meeting

2. During the Call — Answering Questions

While you are on the sales call/Zoom meeting, Colibri for Sales is listening to the questions being asked by your prospect and automatically shows battle cards (that only you can see) with the answers to their questions. It works great for objection handling as well!

Colibri listens to your prospect and displays Battle Cards with answers to their questions

3. After the Call — Follow-up Actions

Colibri for Sales automatically transcribes the meeting allowing you to highlight key portions of the meeting while you go along. After the meeting is finished, it provides you with a summary of the key points discussed during the call as well as a list of follow-up actions, making meeting follow-up quick and easy.

Colibri for Sales automatically creates action items and next steps to make follow-up much easier.

Bonus Feature — Talk-Time

As a bonus, Colibri for Sales ensures the meeting does not get too one-sided and prompts you to stop speaking and ask a question.

Benefits for All

If we can help ensure that all of that money spent on sales training is more effective in the long term, wouldn’t that be great for everyone?

1. Sales Trainer — having salespeople not only love what you do for them, but for them to continue to use your teachings long after the training has finished will give everyone much better results that you can point to, as a way to justify your services.
2. Sales Manager — having your salespeople use the valuable lessons you have paid for them to learn, and seeing the results that the training drives, is the goal at the end of the day. Also, Colibri helps them track team performance and adherence to the sales playbook making it easier to identify the team members who need additional training/support.
3. Salesperson — anything that helps get you to ‘Yes’ faster and/or more consistently, with less opportunity fallout mid-funnel has to be worth the effort.

Let’s Work Together

If your company has just completed sales training, or is contemplating it in the near future, come talk to us here at Colibri.ai, where we can ensure that the sales training you receive is not only learned in the moment, but is translated into better sales calls and meetings for your entire team.

If you are a Sales Trainer, you should explore using Colibri as a way to ensure that the people you train are able to put your best practices into action, not only in the few weeks following the training, but long into the future. It’s a win all around!