Role-based Learning Journeys

Custom Training for Every Sales Role

Conductors know that their flutists don’t need to know how to play trombone, but they do need to know how to read music. It’s the same in sales. Each role within your sales team serves a specific, special function. Together, everyone must work in concert to achieve your desired outcomes. You cannot create a winning team with a one-size-fits-all approach to expectations or training. The individuals within each role must be masters of their crafts in order for the whole to succeed.

Role-based sales training is the key to aligning the correct knowledge and behaviors of your team members with their job requirements. Within your sales team the need for some core capabilities will certainly overlap – e.g., everyone on your sales team should be able to agily provide a positive, consultative experience to prospective customers – how each role fulfills on that need will vary based on the kinds of interactions and the purpose of those interactions within your pipeline and process. While an SDR’s depth of consultation won’t match that of a product expert’s, and you wouldn’t expect it to, we must train each role to understand and be able to recognize how to apply these skills to their day-to-day work.

Putting Role-Based Sales Skills Into Practice

If you ask the average sales leader, they’ll espouse the importance of meeting each prospective buyer where they are and adapting the sales approach to gain their trust, buy-in, and selection. But, will each equally – and as emphatically – detail the many reasons they must meet their team members where they are and work to empower and develop their skills based on their roles? It’s something to consider.

If the answer for your organisation is a resounding “yes,” then let’s get started developing the right curriculum to upskill the variety of roles that make up your team. Read on, however, if you’re still not sure and let’s explore together the idea of how one capability has many applications and why training must be crafted to help team members understand how to apply these capabilities to their unique jobs.

For example, in a flat sales training programme, everyone will learn about methods for gaining trust. Such as what knowledge you need to create rapport and what the signs are that you’ve succeeded or that you’re losing trust. The scripts and curriculum will follow a familiar cadence and flow; likely one that is most adapted to your Account Executives. These closers need to know how to build rapport and relationships in order to convert prospects into clients and win deals.

But, just like selling to the CIO isn’t the same as selling to the IT Director, building rapport and trust looks different across your sales team’s roles. SDRs may build trust in specific, process-driven ways as well as through conducting and illustrating accurate and thorough research (e.g., demonstrating understanding and knowledge of the industry they’re targeting). If their communication is timely and accurate then they establish an atmosphere of professionalism for your prospects, then they will create a foundation for trust to be built on. Your operational training and sales messaging will form the basis of what your SDRs need to help build trust.

In a dynamic, agile sales training programme, like Richardson’s Sales Performance’s, individualised role-based training relative to conversational challenges and opportunities may be just what these SDRs need to enhance their knowledge.

For Account Executives, however, building trust and rapport, along with understanding and recognising signs that it’s gaining, waning, floundering, or deepening, are all critical to each stage of their success; and they’re likely to need to go “off script” more often.

How do you put role-based training into practise? Instead of a blanket approach to communicating the importance of trust and rapport, you focus on the unique skills that each sales job requires and needs to be the best contributor within the larger team.

Learn more about role-based sales training for your team:

• Fostering Account Executives to Close
• Coaching Product Experts to Sell
• Giving SDRs the Power to Succeed
• The Keys to Retention: Training Customer Success
• Bringing Success Into Focus: Sales Management

Why Richardson Sales Performance

At Richardson Sales Performance we know what a mature, large, global sales organization should look like and how it should operate. Our approach and training curriculum are both broad and deep. In addition, our new digital sales performance platform allows for this innovative and rich content to be broken down and parsed any way our trainers need to in order to add value to your team’s training. To put it simply, we have built a system that offers easy access into the most innovative and useful sales performance educational materials available.

Richardson Sales Performance accomplishes successful role-based sales training through the use of learning journeys for each role, which are created and customised for your organisation by our team. The journeys are coupled with prioritised implementation plans based on our assessments and your unique needs. Not only is our training steeped in a behavioural science-backed role-centric curriculum, but we utilise research and data to ensure that the programmes align with the learners’ needs to create observable, measurable progress.

Let’s get started with your team’s role-based sales training today.