Choosing a Virtual Sales Training Course
If you inhabit the world of sales, chances are you’ve participated in multiple sales training lessons, or even online sales training courses, over the course of your career to learn and focus your sales skills as a sales professional.
As working from home becomes more commonplace and cost-effective, sales leaders and sales managers are likely thinking about taking their organization’s sales training online. If so, you’ll need to build a virtual sales training program or online lessons that will fit your sales leaders’ andsales teams’ unique needs, adding value as they learn to build/ develop new selling skills in a virtual environment.
Our online sales training programs and lessons can help your salespeople build their sales process and develop effective sales skills, win more sales opportunities, and accomplish their sales goals – but we also understand that you probably want to evaluate and explore all of your options before making this important investment in online sales training.
We often get asked by companies, “If not ASLAN, who would you consider for comprehensive sales training?”
You might not expect to get information about our sales training competitors here, but there are many things we’re doing that we didn’t expect to do a few months ago. So, why is this here? For two reasons:
1) Because everyone we talk to is learning about how to help their salespeople get better at virtual selling skills, especially those who have been in the field their entire selling career. Putting this key information in one place is meant to help you decide to work with us, or another business who can offer hours of sales training courses to improve sales skills.
2) Most estimates put the sales training industry at over $5 billion annually, so there’s plenty of room for everyone. Our role is to help you focus and make the best decision for your business, your sales leadership, and your salespeople, and accept that ASLAN may not be the best fit for everyone.
To help you focus your journey towards selling success in a virtual environment, we’ve gone ahead and compiled a list of the top 6 virtual sales training programs.
We’re all about the free and honest dialogue here at ASLAN Training and Development, both with our existing and potential customers. Let’s get into the research and highlight some of the best and most effective virtual sales training programs and providers.
The 6 Best Virtual Sales Training Providers
The following list is based on multiple factors:
- Company reputation
- Years in business
- Robustness of online course offerings (self-paced, video conferencing, online sales course, or virtual sales training)
- Depth and breadth of training and courses offered (key concepts, meaningful discussions)
- Innovative course offerings (specific sales training course, methodology, focus, or how they deliver training)
- Contributions to the sales training market
- Strength of client satisfaction
Each of the companies on our list offer onsite, in-person sales training sessions, and hours of virtual online courses, among many other options. Culled from our many years of sales training industry experience, and with the added expertise of Selling Power’s current Top 20 list, we hope this selection adds value and highlights what you may want to consider in your decision-making process.
Here is the list in alphabetical order:
1. The Brooks Group
The Brooks Group has been in business since 1977 and is a well-known and respected corporate sales training and sales management training company. Their primary focus is helping organizations develop high-performing salespeople. Alongside Richardson and ASLAN, they have earned a spot on Selling Power’s Top 20 Sales Training Companies every year since its inception. They also landed on Training Industry’s Top 20 Company Award for 2019.
The Brooks Group specializes in industrial manufacturing and industrial distribution markets. Throughout their company history, they’ve “helped hundreds of manufacturing and distribution clients transform their businesses with customized sales training, sales management, and sales hiring assessments.”
They offer live, Virtual Instructor-Led Training workshops (VILTs), as well as their IMPACT Selling® System, a public offering course that is completely online for those wanting to learn more.
They also boast a library with hours worth of digital online resources free to their customers, including video and exercises designed specifically for salespeople to learn and strengthen selling skills, close virtual sales, and build their business.
2. Janek Performance Group
Janek Performance Group trains and serves clients of all sizes, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. They offer not only sales training but sales coaching, sales consulting, and talent management services as well.
Selling Power has deemed Janek Performance Group a “Top 20 Sales Training Company” for six years running.
Janek’s sales training courses are offered in several formats for sales professionals in many different roles to learn and develop. These include onsite, virtual, or blended training sessions. The most currently relevant option is a Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT) session, delivered by an expert Janek sales trainer to your salespeople, team live and online.
They also offer a 2-day online sales training workshop course to help individual sales professionals continue their education and focus their sales skills from a home office.
About their approach to effective sales training and improvement of sales skills, Janek states, “We all want to be top performers. We invite you to rethink how.”
3. RAIN Group
Headquartered in Boston, RAIN Group is a global sales training company with offices across the US and internationally. They position themselves as a global expert on sales training, having served clients in 75 different countries offering industry-specific sales training programs.
RAIN Group also made the 2019 lists for “Top 20” from the Selling Power and Training Industry.
With RAIN Group Digital, sales organizations have access to VILTs, an eLearning platform, hours worth of courses, and online sales resources, as well as a calendar of live digital events for continued learning, to help sales professionals hone and focus their sales skills.
About RAIN Group’s virtual sales training offerings, their website says, “With the widespread acceptance of video meeting rooms, changes in micro-learning, collaboration, and virtual technologies, along with the advent of innovative offerings like RAIN Group’s Total Access® and Execution Assurance, virtual training now rivals, and in some cases outperforms, in-person training ineffectiveness and client results.”
4. Richardson
Richardson was founded in 1978 by Linda Richardson, a New York Times best-selling author who pioneered the Consultative Selling approach. Over the years, Richardson has dedicated herself to “helping sales organizations face their toughest challenges and drive to their number.”
Last year, Richardson claimed a spot on Selling Power’s Top 20 Sales Training Companies list, and became a new TrainingIndustry.com Top 20 Leadership Training Company.
They are best known for their customized sales training programs, now also offered online through their new virtual sales training programs. Each course provides hours of content to help sales professionals advance their selling process in these new industry norms.
Richardson instructors deliver new comprehensive sales training via VILT programs that hone in on the client’s particular course of focus. Their program includes access to their digital learning platform.
They also offer public online workshops, webinars, and hours worth of virtual selling content.
5. Sandler Training
David Sandler founded Sandler Training in 1967. Sandler realized the traditional selling model was broken, leading to the “Sandler Selling System.” Not only does it have that catchy alliteration, but Sandler’s training methods have been successfully implemented by their clients worldwide for over 50 years.
Sandler has been awarded Training Industry’s Top 20 Sales Training Companies in the US for ten consecutive years.
Salespeople can enroll in Sandler’s online sales programs, and self-paced professional development courses while retaining access to comprehensive resource libraries. They also offer online workshops and on-demand webinars.
Each course from Sandler Online is a “state-of-the-art platform designed to educate and support learners with a variety of content, tools, and applications with on-demand access.”
Tips for Choosing the Best Sales Training Course for You
Now that we’ve covered the basics of those companies and their virtual sales training offerings, we hope you feel a bit more informed and prepared to dive into the next level of your decision-making process to choose the right virtual sales training program for your sales organization.
Remember to keep in mind considerations such as:
– Reputation
There are many online sales training options and virtual sales programs now readily available to sales professionals, especially with the shift to an all-virtual way of conducting business. Just be sure you can find success stories and credible sources vouching for whichever sales training company you decide to choose.
– Area of Specialization
Most organizations have general offerings, and some choose to also specialize in particular focus areas: governed by industry or even a certain philosophy. Look for sales training companies with the right expertise and course offerings, a virtual selling program for example, to impart the sales skills your team needs to be successful.
– Program Sustainability
How does the sales training company plan to sustain the online training education they’ve delivered to your reps? What are their post-program offerings, online sales courses, and any ongoing support videos or resources/ exercises? How do they continue strengthening your team’s skills as they sell virtually and close deals in a virtual setting?
– Training Delivery
Consider the delivery format that will be most relevant, useful, and sustainable for your sales team. Think about the robustness of their online training course offering or virtual sales training program format.
Please feel free to check out our article on the price of virtual sales training for more ideas on the price you can expect to pay for a provider’s services.
Our primary objective here is to help you learn. You need to have all your options in mind when considering such a large and important investment of your organization’s resources and your people’s time. Many virtual sales training initiatives fail due to six main pitfalls, which we hope to help you avoid.
6. ASLAN Training & Development
Although you have multiple solid options on the table, ASLAN would appreciate the opportunity to be considered part of your search. We know we may not serve everyone, but we always relish the opportunity to uncover if our philosophy and methods might mesh well with your business.
Is ASLAN a Good Fit for You?
ASLAN was born out of an outsourced inside sales company that had great training for its own sales reps. At one point, Tom Stanfill and Tab Norris’ customers began asking, “Instead of us paying you to make calls for us, can you just teach our salespeople how to do what you do?”
After hearing this enough times, Tom and Tab began to form the idea for ASLAN Training & Development. It is important that you truly understand who you choose to partner with, especially when it comes to virtual sales training, so we invite you to take this opportunity to learn more about the ASLAN approach by reading Who We Are.
ASLAN’s proven methods, formulated since 1996, will help those transitioning from field sales to virtual selling. Through our virtual sales 5 module course, sales reps will learn to leverage technology to engage decision-makers and move them through the sales process to build value virtually.
According to a recent Gallup article, there are many ways to continue employee development during economic downturns and continue to build better sales capacity with new skills. We have always believed that a blended learning approach is of strategic importance. Classroom learning can be beneficial, but not everyone can learn by “seeing.” Many sales reps learn by taking action and through repetition, which is arguably done better and more easily through online sales training programs.
We offer hours of sales training content through multiple modalities. Whether your sales reps need a quick, self-paced online experience at a low price like our Other-CenteredⓇ Online Selling Program, or a more comprehensive online sales training like our Virtual Instructor Lead Other-CenteredⓇ Selling program, ASLAN has the tools to get your sales team developing new virtual selling skills at the next level. Our acclaimed Catalyst Leadership Development program can be delivered virtually, face-to-face and supported online through our free Catalyst Core app (CRM for Sales Managers and Leaders).
We are more than willing to help you navigate the complexity of this crucial decision and take action. As an industry leader for more than two decades, we’d love to engage in more dialogue with you and assist you on this journey to get the right fit for your organization.
We recognize that there are many great sales training companies with online, virtual offerings out there. We hope we have helped get you beneficial research, and we look forward to continuing the conversation, should you choose to allow us to serve you.
Feel free to contact us with your name, email, and phone number at sales@aslantraining.com or leave us your information, and we can get back to you. Best of luck.
ASLAN Training & Development
ASLAN teaches sellers an easier, better way to gain access & influence unreceptive customers, by eliminating the hard sell.
