Great sales people are made, not born. With the right sales training program, your business can boost sales figures and start bringing in more revenue. For new or underperforming sales professionals, it can boost confidence and help build the right habits.
The best sales training programs can even help experienced professionals get back to basics, identify areas of weakness, and help them improve on their past results.
There’s evidence to show that sales training works, too. A high-performing sales team is twice as likely to offer sales coaching as an average or low-performing one. Studies have found that training improves the sales performance of sales reps.
Training can help sales managers focus on mastering the sales process by taking advantage of new trends and implementing new tech, for example. These days, taking advantage of social media platforms such as Linkedin to utilize the technique of social selling has become a crucial component of any sales team. Due to the shifting sales environment and programs’ proven effectiveness, sales leaders now routinely offer training when they can afford to do so.
Best sales training programs
Sales training programs can boost the earning potential of your sales force by focusing on a range of skills, including how to book appointments, negotiate and sell for B2B, ace sales presentations, and master consultative selling.
If you’re looking coaching or training for your sales organization on improving sales conversations, building relationships, and mastering the selling process, here’s our ultimate guide to the best sales training programs.
We’ve divided the best sales training programs into the following three areas to help you find the sales training program that’s right for you or your sales force and sales leaders:
- Best Sales Training for New Salespeople
- Best Sales Training for Sales Leaders
- Best Sales Training for B2B
Best sales training for new salespeople
Sales training courses might be most effective early in a career, before bad habits have formed. By building the foundations of a truly effective sales rep at the beginning, you can boost the results you get from the very first sales cycle. Here are some of the best sales training courses for new sales reps:
- Imparta: Consultative Selling Skills
- Aslan Training: Other-Centered Selling
- DoubleDigit Sales: Proactive Prospecting
- Janek Performance Group: New Critical Sales Skills
- Kurlan Associates: Sales Training
- Mercuri International: Sales and Negotiation
- Miller Heiman Group: Professional Selling Skills
- RAIN Group: The Sales Mastery Program
- Sales Readiness Group: Comprehensive Selling Skills
- ValueSelling Associates: Sales Training
Check out our guide on the Best Lead Generation Companies
Imparta: Consultative Selling Skills
Imparta have an impressive list of clients. Intel, Cisco, Telefónica, Canon, Lonza and the WPP group all have used Imparta to build and improve the sales skills of their employees and consultants.
Imparta have a full curriculum of sales training for everyone from a new hire up to those at the pinnacle of sales leadership. They recommend the Consultative Selling Skills component of their core sales skills program for new salespeople.
The aim of the course is to train sales professionals who are customer-centric, able to win the interest of clients, create value for them, and communicate effectively. This course covers all the basics, and is regarded as the foundation stone of Imparta’s sales training offerings.
Aslan Training: Other-Centered Selling
One of the toughest challenges of starting out in the world of sales is cutting through the noise and getting your first clients or customers.
Aslan Training’s Other-Centered Selling programs focus on helping sales professionals succeed in the toughest part of the job; winning new accounts.
Aslan focus on shifting mindsets and challenge sales reps to engage prospects in new ways, breaking through emotional barriers and winning over contacts and decision makers who usual keep sales reps at a distance.
DoubleDigit Sales: Proactive Prospecting
New salespeople arrive on the sales floor with no track record to wow potential clients and customers, and probably little if-any experience in their market. For this reason, building a strong sales pipeline can be a challenge.
DoubleDigit Sales’ Proactive Prospecting training is ideal for new salespeople. It focuses on understanding your sales pipeline, win more meetings, the follow-up, properly prioritize prospecting, and helping salespeople learn the key numbers to track when gauging their performance and planning their next steps.
Janek Performance Group: Critical Selling Skills
Janek performance group is another multi-award winning sales training company with an impressive array of clients, including HSBC.
The New Critical Sales Skills program is based off of two years of extensive research into the practices of high-performing sales professionals. The focus is on training representatives in a proven methodology to improve the result of sales calls, building relationships, increasing sales conversions, and other crucial sales skills.
Trainees can either attend a workshop or private sales training can be scheduled at your offices.
Kurlan Associates: Sales Training
Rather than offering a single one-size-fits-all program, Kurlan associates off sales training customized to your particular organization.
Kurlan’s training first builds a foundation rooted in ideas contained in the best-selling book by Dave Kurlan, Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. It’s innovative, and the focus is on core principles rather than ‘steps.’
Once the foundation is in place, Kurlan build on it with exercises centered around role-playing, examples, problem-solving, tactics, and strategy.
Mercuri International: Sales And Negotiation
Mercuri International have been delivering sales training for half a century and have developed deep expertise in the essential components of effective sales.
Mercuri International offer a broad range of programs, but their focus on what they call the three main levers of sales performance make them particularly suited for delivering the foundational training of future top sales reps. These three levers are:
- The amount of effort from the sales team
- The quality of interactions with the customer
- The direction of effort – matching products with customers and identifying the right decision makers to sell to
Course attendees can take the virtual course online with members of other companies, or special in-house training sessions can be arranged.
Miller Heiman Group: Professional Selling Skills
Miller Heiman Group is a large training organization with expertise in a range of areas.
Their Professional Selling Skills course covers all the core fundamental skills of selling. As such, it’s useful as a refresher for more seasons salespeople, but is particularly well suited to newly minted sales professionals and teams.
RAIN Group: Foundations of Consultative Selling
RAIN Group have a deserved reputation as one of the leaders in modern sales training. Their clients include organizations like Toyota, Citi, PWC, Lowes, and Canon. They have a track record of helping these companies realize the potential of their sales teams and keep up with the latest innovations in sales.
RAIN Group’s Sales Mastery Program is an exceptional online sales training course designed to give a new salesperson everything they need to succeed.
This online sales course covers everything from filling a pipeline and mastering sales conversations, to closing the deal.
Sales Readiness Group: Comprehensive Selling Skills
The Sales Readiness Group (SRG) offer several training programs suitable for different types of sales professional and have experience delivering training to quality clients like AIG.
The Comprehensive Selling Skills program gives attendees a solid grounding in the key skills necessary for success in a sales career. Skills covered include qualifying leads, improving win rates, objection handling, and avoiding discounting.
ValueSelling Associates: Sales Training
ValueSelling Associates may less well-known than some of the major sales training organizations, but they were still named one of the 20 best sales training organizations by SellingPower.
ValueSelling Associates offer a deeply customized training experience that involves consultation with senior leadership to understand the needs of the company. The modular training can be delivered in-person, and emphasizes the role of competing on value rather than price.
Since new salespeople lacking confidence are often tempted to drop their rates to win deals, this training could be very useful for new hires.
Best sales training for sales leaders
Sales managers, principle consultants, or other sales leaders face different challenges to new hires, but that doesn’t mean their selling skills can’t be further refined. Here’s our rundown of the top sales training programs suitable for sales leaders:
- Carew International: Excellence in Sales Leadership (ESL) Workshop
- The Brooks Group: Sales Management Training
- Integrity Solutions: Discovery!
- Richardson: Sales Leadership Training Program
- Sales Performance International: Sales Management and Coaching
- Sales Readiness Group: High Impact Sales Manager
- Wilson Learning: Coaching the Counselor Salesperson (CCSP)
Carew International: Excellence in Sales Leadership (ESL)
Carew International have already trained over 250,000 sales professionals in over 40 countries, which makes their 99.6% client satisfaction rate particularly impressive.
The Carew International Excellence in Sales Leadership workshop is designed for sales managers moving up and transitioning into sales leaders. It focuses on leadership, covering areas like managing team dynamics, motivating sales representatives, boosting team win-rates, and building an environment that enables great results.
The Brooks Group: Sales Management Training
The Brooks Group is an award winning provider of training courses focussed on mastery of B2B selling. They’ve been delivering innovative sales training programs for decades, and many big brands like Volvo rely on The Brooks Group to upskill their sales force.
The Brooks Group offer a range of solutions they can tailor to the specific needs of any company. Whether its customized sales training aimed at improving the sales performance of individual sales reps, sales management training, or performing sales hiring assessments, The Brooks Group have a sales training course suitable for virtually any need.
The Sales Management Training course it tailored to sales managers and leaders. It’s an eight-step course that deals with the real issues faced by sales leadership professionals like front line sales managers or even VPs of sales everyday.
That could mean dealing with hiring mistakes, handling forecasting, coaching sales reps, or any of the multitude of important activities handled by senior sales professionals.
Integrity Solutions: Discovery!
Integrity Solutions are a specialist sales training company who focus on training salespeople with at least some experience.
Integrity Solutions’ Discovery! training program is for already effective sales executives who want to level-up their skills. This program focuses on encouraging high-impact behaviors common among top-performing sales executives.
The three-month program begins with a six-hour workshop which is followed by a “six-week proprietary follow-up process”, and features technology-assisted coaching.
Richardson: Sales Leadership Training Program
Richardson has a history of delivering training to sales leaders going back over 40 years. In that time, they’ve expanded across multiple continents and developed a reputation for professionalism.
The Sales Leadership Training Program from Richardson is for sales leaders who want to develop real depth of understanding about the meaning of leadership and management, as well as get serious and passionate about encouraging growth in their teams, both personal and professional.
Sales leaders can experience this program as a one-day instructor-based training program, as ongoing coaching, or via Richardson’s e-learning platform.
Sales Performance International: Sales Management and Coaching
Sales Performance International is among the elite group of sales training companies who have demonstrated their ability to get results for major international clients, such as Mastercard, Microsoft, and Verizon.
The Sales Management and Coaching program is suited to sales leaders and managers to solidify their understanding of the key skills their seniority requires, such as:
- Forecasting future sales accurately
- Managing sales team pipelines
- Reviewing potential sales opportunities
- Developing team member skills
- Insightful opportunity coaching
The program also includes skill development tools that attendees may find helpful.
Sales Readiness Group: High-Impact Sales Manager
Sales Readiness Group (SRG) offer several training programs suitable for different types of sales professional and have experience delivering training to quality clients like AIG.
The Comprehensive Selling Skills program gives attendees a solid grounding in the key skills necessary for success in a sales career. Skills covered include qualifying leads, improving win rates, objection handling, and avoiding discounting.
Wilson Learning: Coaching the Counselor Salesperson (CCSP)
Wilson Learning have over 50 years of experience delivering sales training, and were among 20 companies singled out as the best sales training providers by SellingPower.
Coaching the Counselor Salesperson is a modular program with a flexible structure, providing sales managers with the soft-skills they need build and maintain a high-performing sales team, with an emphasis on coaching.
Best sales training for B2B
Globally, the business-to-business (B2B) sales market is twice the size of the business-to-consumer (B2C) market. B2B selling is a little different from B2C sales and usually requires a different sales strategy to succeed.
Businesses, sales leaders, and entrepreneurs who want to crush B2B sales should consider the following sales training companies and programs:
- IMPAX: Accessing Senior-Level Decision Makers Workshop
- The Brooks Group: Sales Negotiation Training Program
- RAIN Group: Business Development Training for Professionals
- Revenue Storm: Sales Training
- Richardson: Prosperous Account Strategy Training
- Wilson Learning: Managing Competition
IMPAX: Accessing Senior-Level Decision Makers
Any good sales professional knows that to make deals you need to talk to the decision makers. The higher level the decision maker you build a relationship with, the less resistance you’ll encounter when you push to make deals at their company.
The Accessing Senior-Level Decision Makers sales skills workshop from IMPAX – a leading sales training company named the top sales training company by SellingPower and trusted by big names like DHL – focuses on building selling skills crucial to finding, getting in front of, and winning over the senior decision makers crucial for long-term B2B sales growth.
The Brooks Group: Sales Negotiation Training Program
The Brooks Group’s Sales Negotiation Training Program is excellent for business-to-business sales, primarily due to the focus on the complex negotiations that accompany high-end deals between companies.
This program would be particularly useful to headhunting or executive recruitment agencies who want to boost margins and make more sales at the highest prices.
RAIN Group: Business Development Training For Professionals
RAIN Group – a high-profile sales training company – have developed a sales training program specifically for professionals who primarily work outside of sales, like lawyers, accountants, IT professionals, or developers.
The Business Development Training for Professionals program is perfect for professionals selling their services to other businesses. It covers the essentials that non-sales specialists need to know while also giving a detailed overview of B2B sales.
One of the most valuable skills this course offers that others are missing is how to balance service delivery with business development time. This can help professionals avoid the heavy dips and troughs that often trouble service providers involved in their own sales.
Revenue Storm: Sales Training
Revenue Storm is an exciting sales and marketing training organization with a mission to transform the way businesses sell.
Revenue Storm offer customized training solutions that focus on areas like buyer-led processes, developing inbound sales, and positioning the seller and their company as thought leaders. All of these areas have been identified as the next significant developments to build strong B2B sales.
Richardson: Prosperous Account Strategy Training
Richardson is known for providing great value as sales training professionals to businesses large and small. Their website is loaded with valuable resources that are useful to sales professionals even if you don’t sign up for any of their training programs.
Richardson’s Prosperous Account Strategy Training is designed to provide salespeople with the expertise they need to perfect account management.
Examples of the kinds of business that might find this useful for their staff include accounting firms, recruitment agencies, advertising agencies, sales firms, and PR companies.
This course focuses on maximizing the impact of the actions taken by sales staff, whether it’s prioritizing different actions, deciding who to contact, how to maximize value to clients, and develop relationships effectively.
Wilson Learning: Managing Competition
Wilson Learning have developed a reputation over 50+ years for delivering excellent sales training to client companies of various sizes and industries, winning multiple awards in the process.
Wilson Learning’s Managing Competition training program focuses on helping sales professionals learn how to operate in a competitive market environment, where their clients and accounts are constantly under threat of being taken over by rivals.
This is useful in B2B environment, where attractive accounts with large, profitable companies require keen skills to win and then retain them.
How to choose sales training
When deciding on sales training programs to send your team members or sales executives on, make sure to talk with other members of the sales team and consult with them closely about where they feel their skills can be improved.
By talking with your team and getting a sense of what they think they need and comparing it against what you already know, you’re more likely to select sales training that meets the needs of your sales force and your business.
