How far in advance do you perform sales training so that the sales force is competent by the launch date? We have a sales team of 12. How do you validate sales competency?

The more time in advance you can provide the sales team, the better. But you also don’t want to sit on new products / features that are ready to go, especially when you’re at a small and nimble company like yours. The key question is, when is the product far enough along that you know the final feature set, can demo it, and have certainty around the best positioning and sales narrative? That’s the earliest you could possibly host the training.I’ve found that doing training a week before a launch ...Read More

This depends when the product is being launched. Its hard to be competent if they have not “sold” the product. So usually 1-2 weeks ahead of large product launches. This also gives us time to collect questions, ensure we are answering as many FAQs as possible and preparing proper objection handling for the sales teams. Also we know it will take more than 1 training session to build up knowledge and capability. So repeating and doing follow up office hours or sharing snippets of wins from fellow ...Read More

The more time, the better! We just had a Tier 1 launch at the end of January, and we had our first enablement session back in October! Our GTM Crew always wants to know more information, earlier, so we always try to start early and include a steady drip of enablement sessions up until launch day. Depending on how big the launch is, you could have an enablement session every 4-6 weeks with topics like (1) Kick-off: [New product launch], (2) Messaging & Competitive, (3) Product demo & reso ...Read More

There's no quick answer here, but I'd consider the following factors when deciding how far in advance to enable the sales team. I would also caveat that this is less about how far in advance you train and more about how much repetition you offer to the sales team to learn about the thing.  How complex is the thing that is launching? More complexity requires more repeated training so I would suggest training earlier than later. How familiar is the sales team with the thing that is launching? If y ...Read More

When planning sales training for a launch, the timeline can vary based on factors like the complexity of the product and the experience level of your sales team. However, a rough guideline is as follows: Early Awareness (2-3 months before launch): Start introducing the upcoming product, its purpose, and its potential impact. This helps create anticipation and lays the groundwork for more in-depth training. Product Knowledge (1-2 months before launch): Dive into the specifics of the product – fea ...Read More