Imagine this: You're the star quarterback leading your team into the biggest game of the season. 

The stakes are high, the pressure is on, and your teammates are looking to you for guidance. 

But as you take the field, you realize a harsh truth—your players haven't had any real coaching or training all year. They're winging it based on instinct and hoping for the best.

How confident would you feel in your chances of winning?

This scenario plays out every day in businesses across America. Sales leaders are the quarterbacks rallying their teams toward ambitious revenue targets. But far too often, those teams lack the proper training, coaching and development to consistently execute at a championship level.

The stats don't lie. According to research from RepVue, only 42% of sales reps hit their quotas in Q3 2023. Ouch. 

An underperforming sales force can be a company's biggest impediment to growth, costing millions in missed opportunities, lost deals, and diminished customer loyalty.

But don't throw in the towel just yet. There's a proven game plan for transforming your sales team into a high-performing, customer-obsessed powerhouse: Effective sales training focused on developing an advisor approach to the selling process.

At ASLAN, we've been pioneering this philosophy for over 25 years through our "Other-Centered®" methodology. It's a system built on putting the customer first, creating value, and fostering genuine relationships—not resorting to pushy tactics or product-pitching.

Intrigued? Let's dive into the winning game plan for developing a sales force that doesn't just meet quotas but blows them out of the water while truly serving customers throughout the whole buying process.

Building the Sales Training Foundation

Before implementing any sales training courses or initiatives, it's crucial to lay the proper groundwork by defining your ideal sales rep profile, understanding your sales process, and conducting a thorough training needs assessment.

Step 1: Defining Your Ideal Sales Rep

Think of your ideal sales rep. What skills, traits, and mindsets come to mind? 

If you're like most companies, product knowledge is probably high on the list. 

But here's the thing—while that's still valuable, it's table stakes in today's selling environment. The reps who truly outperform have a much more diverse and well-rounded skill set, including:

• Consultative communication: The ability to ask insightful questions, actively listen, and uncover the customer's true underlying needs and desired outcomes.
• Empathy and emotional intelligence: Understanding the customer's perspective, building rapport, and developing solutions aligned with their strategic goals.
• Negotiation skills: Creating mutually beneficial agreements focused on long-term partnership, not just aiming to "win" every deal.
• An "Other-Centered®" mindset: Putting the customer's interests first and serving as a trusted advisor, not a pushy salesperson.

At ASLAN, our whole philosophy is built around an "Other-Centered®" approach of serving the customer above all else. It's a core value that guides everything we do.

To attract and retain reps who embody this customer-centric ethos, your hiring and onboarding should screen for the right behavioral traits and cultural fit. Implement skills assessments, role-playing exercises, and behavioral interviews to find those shining stars.

Because at the end of the day, you can train someone on your product all day long. But if they don't have the innate drive to put customers first, no amount of training will make them a top performer.

Step 2: Understanding Your Sales Process

With your ideal rep profile defined, the next step is mapping out your sales process from the very first prospect interaction through to creating a loyal customer advocate. This involves:

• Outlining the key stages of the customer's buying journey and decision process
• Identifying qualification criteria and exit criteria for progressing opportunities through each stage
• Determining the optimal customer touchpoints, channels, content, and tools to leverage at every step

For example, ASLAN's sales methodology emphasizes strategies for converting “unreceptive” prospects – customers who may be uninterested or opposed to engaging with a salesperson initially. The process focuses on building trust through authenticity, creating value, and addressing the root of their resistance before ever attempting to sell.

Having a clear understanding of your sales process enables you to tailor training to the specific skills, scenarios, and tools your reps need to navigate each stage successfully. 

That way, the training is hyper-relevant, and reps can immediately apply what they learn to real opportunities.

Step 3: Conducting a Training Needs Assessment

We're not talking about some half-baked, check-the-box exercise here. 

This needs to be an in-depth, data-driven analysis to ensure you're addressing your team's true capability gaps and setting yourself up for success.

Why is this so important? 

Because investing in generic, one-size-fits-all training is basically flushing money down the toilet. Your sales team is unique, with its own strengths, weaknesses, processes, and growth objectives. 

An effective needs assessment allows you to design laser-focused, customized training that drives measurable results from day one by zeroing in on the skills and behaviors that will move the needle.

So what exactly should this comprehensive assessment involve? At minimum:

1. A no-holds-barred evaluation of current competencies: We're talking skills assessments, call recording analysis, stakeholder interviews, win/loss reviews - you name it. Dig into the raw performance data to pinpoint where your reps are excelling and where they're falling short. Don't just rely on anecdotes or assumptions.
2. A hard look at existing training effectiveness: If you've already invested in sales training, it's time for an honest evaluation. Gather participant feedback, get leadership’s perspective, analyze before/after performance metrics, and get qualitative input from reps and managers in the field. What's working? What's not sticking? You need these insights to avoid repeating past mistakes.
3. Laser-focus on strategic alignment: Your training needs to be purposefully aligned with your organization's overarching objectives, growth targets, and strategic initiatives. If the skills you're developing don't directly tie back to and support those top priorities, you're wasting precious time and resources.

The key here is to take a data-driven approach to pinpointing your team's development needs with precision. Don't just go on gut instinct or make assumptions about where the gaps lie.

And don’t forget—we're living in the future! Don't be afraid to get innovative with your assessment methods and try something new. Challenging your preconceived way of thinking can unlock new opportunities for growth.  

Leading sales organizations are exploring cutting-edge enablement tools like conversation intelligence platforms to augment their analysis of sales professionals. 

These AI-powered solutions can analyze call recordings at scale, providing real-time coaching recommendations tailored to each rep's needs and identifying broader team capability gaps.

Bottom line: Conducting a comprehensive training needs assessment is the foundation for designing and delivering training that actually moves the needle for your business. 

Step 4: Implementing Effective Sales Training

With a solid foundation in place, the next step is implementing an effective, comprehensive sales training program. This involves choosing the right training partner, building an impactful curriculum, optimizing delivery methods, and fostering a culture of continuous learning. (Don’t worry, we’ll cover that next.)

Choosing the Right Training Partner

For many organizations, partnering with an external sales training provider can be a more strategic and effective approach than attempting to develop comprehensive sales training programs entirely in-house. Experienced training partners offer several key advantages that you need to know about—read on to find out.

Deep Expertise in Modern Selling Methodologies

The most impactful sales training is grounded in proven, research-backed methodologies tailored to today's buyer expectations and selling environment. 

We’re committed to this practice at ASLAN. For example, our Other-Centered® Selling approach emphasizes developing a trusted advisor mindset focused on creating value for customers, not pushing products. 

This customer-centric approach aligns with how modern B2B buyers prefer to engage, with research showing 88% of buyers want a consultative "show, don't tell" experience.

An Aligned Philosophical Approach

Beyond just teaching techniques, it's important to partner with a provider whose core training philosophy aligns with your organization's values and goals around customer experience. This philosophical alignment ensures the training sticks by reinforcing the behaviors and mindsets you want to cultivate.

ASLAN's "Other-Centered®" model, for instance, is built around ethical selling principles of empathy, transparency, and putting the customer's interests first. This complements organizations aiming to foster a more consultative, value-based sales approach.

Customization to Your Unique Environment

One-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf training rarely drives meaningful behavior change or results. The most effective partners take a consultative approach to deeply understand your organization's specific competency needs, sales processes, growth objectives, and cultural dynamics.

They then tailor every aspect of the curriculum and delivery around your unique environment—incorporating real-world scenarios your team faces, aligning to strategic priorities, and contextualizing for your products/services and target buyer personas.

Proven Ability to Drive Measurable Results

Perhaps most importantly, you need a training partner with a demonstrated track record of delivering quantifiable performance improvements and ROI for clients. Reputable providers should be able to share detailed case studies highlighting the specific business impacts achieved, such as:

• Revenue growth and quota attainment increases
• Improvements in key metrics like average deal sizes and sales cycle times
• Higher customer satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value
• Clear ROI calculations on the training investment

This social proof gives you confidence that their programs can drive tangible business outcomes for your organization as well.

Comprehensive Training Reinforcement Capabilities

To maximize the lasting impact of training, you need a partner who provides robust reinforcement capabilities that extend far beyond classroom or virtual instructor-led sessions. 

Evaluate whether providers offer:

• Mobile-friendly microlearning modules for anywhere, anytime reinforcement
• AI-powered virtual coaching tools providing personalized feedback
• Integrated training reinforcement features within existing enablement platforms
• Advanced reporting and analytics to measure participation, proficiency, and business impact
• Consulting support for fostering an embedded coaching culture

These reinforcement components are critical for ingrained new skills through continuous learning and development.

While cost is certainly a factor, the decision on a sales training partner should be primarily based on their ability to drive sustained behavioral change and measurable business results. With so much at stake in optimizing your sales force's performance, it's an investment that can pay exponential dividends when done right.

Building a Comprehensive Curriculum

To drive true behavior change, your sales training curriculum should provide a holistic development experience covering areas like:

• Foundational selling methodologies tailored to your sales process
• Mastering your unique product/service value proposition and competitive differentiation
• Relationship-building skills like consultative communication, empathy, trust-building, and navigating internal buying teams
• Identifying customer needs through insightful questioning, discovery, and opportunity qualification
• Positioning your solution's value to resonate with the economic buyer and align with desired outcomes
• Negotiation strategies focused on creating mutual success and long-term partnership valu

The most impactful training combines research-backed theory with ample opportunity to apply concepts through activities, role-playing, and working real-world scenarios the sales team faces daily.

It's also critical to build training around specific use cases, verticals, and deal types prioritized in your growth strategy. For example, if expanding into the enterprise segment is a key initiative, include modules focused on the unique skills for navigating complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise sales cycles.

Optimizing Delivery Methods

How you deliver training is just as crucial as what’s in the curriculum itself. To truly drive behavior change, you need to leverage a blended learning approach that is as dynamic as your sales team.

Here’s how:

• Self-paced eLearning training content and microlearning courses for anywhere, anytime reinforcement
• Virtual instructor-led training (VILT) sessions for interactive learning and skill practice
• On-demand video coaching and feedback tailored to individual reps' strengths and gaps
• Gamification and learning reinforcement tools to incentivize participation and knowledge retention
• Hands-on activities, simulations, and real-play assignments tied to active deals in the pipeline

By blending all of these interactive, multi-modal delivery methods, you’re catering to every learning style and proficiency level on your team. Engagement, knowledge retention, and practical skill development will dramatically improve.

Beyond that, integrate your training directly into the enablement and productivity tools your reps use every day. We're talking seamless access to reinforcement resources, coaching recommendations, and the ability to immediately apply those fresh techniques without missing a beat.

Driving Continuous Learning

Let's be real—one-and-done training events rarely create lasting performance improvements. 

To ingrain new skills and behaviors, training must be reinforced through a culture of continuous learning. This can take many forms:

• A coaching culture with frontline sales managers actively developing and coaching their teams
• Ongoing peer coaching, mentorship, and knowledge sharing through internal champions and communities of practice
• Incentives, gamification, and celebrating wins to motivate participation and reinforce desired behaviors
• Refresher training and learning opportunities aligned with evolving business needs

By making continuous development a core part of your sales team's DNA, new competencies become habitual and performance impact is sustained long-term.

It's also valuable to tie training participation, coaching activities, and skill development into compensation plans, career paths, and promotion criteria. This incentivizes reps to fully embrace the new methods rather than revert to old habits.

Maximizing the Impact of Sales Training

Even the best training can only take you so far.

To maximize its impact, you need to reinforce learned skills through coaching and empower reps with the right enablement tools and resources.

Establishing a Coaching Culture

Sales managers play an absolutely pivotal role in ensuring training concepts fully translate into consistent, measurable behavior change on the front lines. An embedded coaching culture with managers serving as active coaches and skill developers is essential. This involves:

Regularly Scheduled 1-on-1 Coaching Sessions

Rather than just reviewing numbers and pipelines, these sessions should focus on applying new skills from training. Managers review recent call recordings, deals, and opportunities with reps to provide targeted coaching on areas like:

• Applying consultative questioning and discovery techniques
• Positioning value to align with the economic buyer's priorities
• Handling objections through the new negotiation frameworks
• Leveraging new tools, templates, and enablement resources effectively

In-the-Moment Call Coaching

There's no better way to reinforce behaviors than real-time coaching on live sales calls and conversations. Managers should regularly join calls to provide in-the-moment feedback, such as:

• Coaching reps to ask more insightful follow-up questions
• Redirecting sales conversations back to focus on uncovering the buyer's needs
• Modeling examples of how to build rapport and position value
• Reinforcing desired skills as they're applied in real situations

Coaching Quality Metrics and Accountability

What gets measured gets done.

Implement a coaching scorecard to track leading indicators like:

• Rep engagement in coaching activities
• Coaching utilization metrics for frontline managers
• Impact on performance metrics like deal sizes and cycle times

This data enables you to analyze the direct impact of coaching on business results and ensure managers are holding reps accountable.

Manager Coaching Certification

But simply implementing coaching processes isn't enough. 

You also need to upskill and certify your frontline managers themselves as effective coaches. This ensures they have the skills to:

• Provide constructive feedback using specific examples and coaching frameworks
• Facilitate productive coaching conversations that drive action and accountability
• Customize their coaching approach to different learning styles and proficiency levels
• Continually develop their own coaching abilities over time

Investing in coaching certification programs helps ingrain an environment of continuous improvement where managers are empowered to bring out the best in their teams.

Empowering Reps with the Right Enablement Tools

Even a world-class sales force needs the right tools and resources to operate at peak performance. 

You can invest significant time and resources into top-notch sales training, but if your reps don't have the right tools and resources seamlessly integrated into their daily workflow, that training can only take them so far. It's like sending an athlete into a competition without the proper equipment or support staff—they may have the skills, but they won't be able to perform at their full potential.

A comprehensive enablement strategy provides the critical support reps need by seamlessly integrating enablement into their daily workflow, such as:

• Sales playbooks and battle cards for common scenarios, objections, and deal progression
• Customer case studies, success stories, and proof sources to build credibility
• ROI calculators, proposal templates, and presentation tools tailored to your solutions
• Content curation solutions surfacing the latest marketing assets and thought leadership
• AI-guided coaching from conversation intelligence for real-time skill reinforcement

Maximizing the impact of sales training is a comprehensive effort spanning coaching, enablement, and continuous reinforcement. With the right strategies and investments in these areas, you can ensure your training initiatives translate into sustained, measurable performance improvements.

Measuring the ROI of Sales Training

While qualitative feedback from participants is valuable, quantifying the ROI and performance impact of your sales training initiatives through hard metrics and data analysis is crucial. Sales leadership needs to see a clear return on their training investment to secure ongoing support and funding.

Establishing a Measurement Framework

The first step is establishing a measurement framework tied directly to your core business objectives. This framework should track metrics across three key areas:

1. Lead Conversion and Velocity Impact

• Lead conversion rates by source, channel, and sales stage
• Average sales cycle length from opportunity creation to closed-won
• Number of stalled or recycled opportunitie

These metrics reveal whether training is enabling reps to more efficiently qualify, progress, and close opportunities by improving their discovery, value positioning, and negotiation skills.

2. Economic Impact

• Average deal size/annual contract value
• Customer lifetime value and retention rates
• Revenue per rep

Analyzing these KPIs shows if training is empowering reps to capture more value, expand wallet share within existing accounts, and cultivate longer customer relationships.

3. Top-Line Revenue Impact

• Overall quota attainment percentages
• Total new bookings and revenue
• Revenue plan attainment

Ultimately, the goal of sales training programs is to drive top-line growth. Tracking these metrics ties your initiatives directly to the bottom-line business impact.

Benchmarking and Analysis

It's critical to benchmark and analyze these KPIs across consistent periods before and after the training rollout. For example, compare year-over-year (YoY) or quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) performance to isolate the impact of your training programs.

Quantifying ROI

Proving ROI with hard numbers is incredibly powerful for reps, team, leaders, and organizations alike. One ASLAN client was able to quantify a 475% ROI after implementing their "Other-Centered®" sales training, driven by a 37% increase in new revenue and a 27% reduction in customer churn and attrition.

Operational Metrics

However, the analysis shouldn't stop there. It's also valuable to dive deeper into operational metrics that provide insight into the underlying drivers of financial performance, such as:

• Faster sales cycles
• Acceleration in cycle times and higher conversions between stages
• Fewer stalled or delayed opportunities
• Improved forecast accuracy
• Higher pipeline reliability and accuracy of weighted forecasts
• Less variance between committed and actual results
• Higher customer satisfaction and retention
• Increases in NPS, CSAT, customer effort scores
• Reduced logo and revenue churn rates

Improvements in areas like these demonstrate the full, multi-dimensional business impact enabled by more effective, customer-focused selling skills and behaviors.

With a data-driven approach, sales leaders can build supporting evidence for their training initiatives. Hard numbers and proven results make securing ongoing leadership support and investment far easier than relying on anecdotal evidence alone. 

Securing Leadership Buy-In

Implementing a comprehensive, transformational sales training program is no small undertaking. It requires significant investment, change management, and commitment from the highest levels of leadership. After all, the costs and risks of an underperforming sales organization are simply too severe to ignore.

We're talking about missed revenue targets and growth opportunities, lost deals to the competition, reduced customer lifetime value and retention rates, and a major drain on productivity. 

According to research by CSO Insights, companies with underperforming sales teams see their revenue plan attainment drop by over 10% compared to their counterparts. That's a multi-million dollar impact for most businesses that can quickly erode profitability and shareholder value.

Clearly, developing a high-performing, customer-centric sales team needs to be treated as a top strategic priority. 

But how do you secure buy-in and support from senior leadership? 

By building an airtight business case that quantifies the immense upside potential.

Communicate the ROI 

Don't just share vague statements about needing to improve sales performance. Get granular with the hard numbers and areas for improvement, as we discussed in the previous section, such as:

• Percentage of reps consistently missing quota and the associated revenue shortfall
• Average length of sales cycles and potential for acceleration
• Lost deals and customers to competitors with superior sales approaches
• Reduced customer lifetime value and retention rates due to poor customer experience
• Opportunity costs of stagnant or declining market share
• Outline a Comprehensive Change Management Plan

Leadership needs to see that you have a clear, well-defined strategy for implementing training and driving sustained behavior change across the entire sales organization. 

This plan should detail:

• How training will be customized to align with specific competency gaps and growth priorities
• Processes for continually reinforcing learned skills through coaching, peer collaboration, and enablement tools
• How training participation, skill development, and coaching activities will be incentivized through compensation plans and career paths
• Timelines, milestones, and leading/lagging KPIs to measure progress and impact
• Identify vocal executive sponsors

Having senior leaders who are committed, hands-on sponsors and participants in the training initiative is crucial. Identify executives who will:

• Actively participate in training kickoffs, workshops, and coaching sessions
• Communicate the "why" behind the program and generate enthusiasm
• Ensure the training has appropriate staffing, budgeting, and cross-functional support
• Hold the sales leadership team accountable for driving adoption and results

When the C-suite is visibly bought in as advocates and even participants, it sends a powerful signal about the initiative's importance.

Share External Proof Points

It can also be incredibly impactful to share external data, research, and case studies that quantify the immense upside potential of developing a world-class, customer-focused sales organization. For example:

• Customer-centric brands report profits that are 60% higher than those that fail to focus on CX. 
• Customer experience drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, outperforming brand and price combined, according to Gartner. However, over 70% of business leaders struggle to design projects that increase that coveted loyalty metric. 

Numbers and proof points like these make the investment case for transformational sales training programs incredibly compelling.

At the end of the day, securing leadership commitment is about building an ironclad business case that clearly demonstrates the immense costs of maintaining an underperforming status quo. With the right data, change management plan, and vocal executive support, you can generate the momentum needed to truly transform your sales force into a competitive advantage.

The Unbeatable Competitive Advantage of Customer-Centric Selling

There's no sugar-coating it—developing a high-performing, customer-obsessed sales force takes work. It requires the right strategy, investment, reinforcement, and commitment from top leadership.

But the payoff is huge. We're talking accelerated revenue growth, increased customer loyalty and lifetime value, competitive differentiation, and attracting top talent. Not to mention avoiding the nightmare of missed quotas, lost deals, and stagnant growth.

By following the steps outlined here—defining your ideal rep, understanding your sales process, conducting a needs assessment, implementing comprehensive training, maximizing impact through coaching/enablement, measuring ROI, and securing leadership commitment—your organization can cultivate a sales team that consistently delivers outstanding results.

Of course, continuous improvement is essential as customer needs and selling best practices constantly evolve. That's why partnering with a world-class sales training provider like ASLAN is so valuable.

With our Other-Centered® philosophy and track record of transformational results, we can help you build a customer-obsessed sales force that outperforms the competition year after year.

Ready to take your sales team's performance to new heights? Contact ASLAN today to learn how our customized training solutions can empower your reps to become trusted advisors who create value and exceed customer expectations on every engagement.