There are plenty of old-school techniques for training your sales team that rely on outdated methods of reaching the customer. In a technologically connected era, sales teams must combine the strengths of in-person sales (if such sales even happen in your industry) with the essential skills of managing client relationships online.
Management of businesses need methods for both creating strong sales team trainings and for monitoring the progress of a new sales team, since every minute working with a new sales representative is money spent by the company. All of those minutes should be investments in getting the best possible sales force you can.
CRM Software for Monitoring Progress
Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, has become the most comprehensive way to make sure that a customer is treated well throughout the marketing and sales process.
While you can teach all the sales techniques and standards of your company, without CRM it can be impossible to see what kind of progress your fledgling team is making. With your access to the interactions they are having with customers through the sales training and CRM, you have the opportunity to target your comments to each salesperson based on the interactions you’ve observed in their work.
Tracking Prospects in CRM
The new sales representatives may have a hard time with gathering their first leads through networking, referrals, and prospecting. Representatives who are slow with prospecting can have a hard time generating results for the company. By tracking all prospects and leads, you can identify quickly which team members may need extra training to get their first successful clients in.
At the same time, Sales Training and CRM will allow you to see the big picture: someone who has a smaller funnel of leads but who is generating great conversion rates may actually be a better salesperson than other new hires. Having this bigger picture view allows you to avoid negative feedback when a sales representative is taking an unconventional but successful approach.
Evaluating Consultative Selling
In many cases, consultative selling requires a delicate balance. A sales agent 
must both listen carefully, respond thoughtfully, and also accurately diagnose the problem that the client wants to solve. At the same time, this consultation is always geared toward an eventual purchase of your company’s product. Potential customers can tell if someone is too eager for the sale, and management wants to know if their consultative selling is really just problem diagnosis that never leads to a sale.
Using sales training and CRM, you can make sure that your representatives in the sales team are paying the most attention to the prospects with the most relevant problems, and you can note how well they listen and respond. You can target further sales training based on your CRM software output, because sales representatives who are great listeners need more training on making the shift to the sale, while aggressive sales teams may need more training with active listening.
Make Pipeline Management Easier for Sales Teams
New sales teams, or even veteran teams dealing with new challenges, need incredible organization to make sure that no prospects, leads, and repeat customers slip through the cracks. CRM software provides the organization for them, making pipeline management much easier.
Training your sales people on how to evaluate their next logical move in the CRM can be helpful to making sure that long-term contact is sustained with loyal customers and potential customers alike; having a wide net of prospects can also encourage sales people to refer internally when a lead seems perfect for another area of sales expertise. CRM software also allows your marketing team to make sure they are attuned to the process by which marketing leads become sales.