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What methods or tools do you use to deliver sales training effectively?

Aneri Shah
Ethos Head of Marketing, B2B | Formerly Meta, MicrosoftSeptember 27

Keep it simple, stupid. This is where many folks tend to overengineer in an unnecessary way. I find the following to work great, and have used this at both startups and Fortune 100 companies:

  • Use Zoom to deliver live trainings: You can figure out how to get the right group size for these trainings by segmenting them by team, region, vertical etc.

  • Post a recording of trainings & materials: Make sure these are easy to access for folks who can't attend live by sharing to a wiki, or posting in an easily searchable location.

  • Create a dedicated channel: Make sure people know where to come to discuss training & ask questions. This is likely a Slack channel or dedicated meeting/office hours.

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Holly Watson
Amazon Product Marketing SME, AWSSeptember 25

Multiple. People learn differently (hear, see, do), and repetition is key. When planning your training consider how you are offering multiple channels for the seller to learn. It's common for the sales team to have to understand the entire portfolio of an organization's offering, so make your training stand out by keeping it concise to what the most important things are to learn that will move the prospect forward. Keep in mind too, that you have to answer "why should the [seller] care?". Meaning, how are you addressing how they hit their KPIs/revenue goals by selling your new product in your trainings?

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Mandy Schafer
Mastercard Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Miro, Dropbox, Drmandbase, Autodesk, Oracle,September 27

This is bias, but having worked at Miro, I definitely having an interactive whiteboard experience is a great way to deliver sales training in a hybrid environment. A combination of Miro and Zoom/Teams/Google has been my go to method. I like the ability to include polls and have teams interact with stickies on a board. Keeping a sales training interactive is crucial to making sure information retains.

If there is the ability to be in person, I also find that much more effective. Again, creating a theme, right now we use a University type of training theme with 101, 201, 301 trainings and office hours. Following the education route, having breaks and interactive sections where you play Kahoot, or toss prizes at the crowd helps a lot again to ensure everyone is paying attention and retaining the information. I try to go through the entire sales training before stopping to take questions. You as the PMM worked hard to create a well designed training and it's important you have the opportunity to go through it. By stopping and taking questions along the way can easily throw off the dynamic and lose the momentum you want to keep as you deliver the sale training and narrative.

Questions should be either left at the end, or in another session (office hours) where you can keep things conversational and at this time also point back to your initial training to help answer questions. This also gives you more time to think through and work with the sales team on what's not working and what may have worked from the training.

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