The Sales Training Methodologies That Matter In 2024

Today we are going to share seven sales training methodologies that you can use to help someone who has zero previous sales experience become a successful salesperson. 

What Should You Look For When Hiring Salespeople?

How can you determine whether someone who has no previous sales experience has the potential to become an effective salesperson?

While it’s impossible to know for sure, you can look for certain personal qualities that tend to be predictive of success in sales. 

Here are the three most important ones:

Personal Quality #1: Perseverance

Sales inevitably involve facing rejection after rejection after rejection. 

Some of those rejections may be polite, while others not so much. In fact, if you cold call enough people, someone will eventually blow up on you. All this may not seem like a big deal in theory, but it can be a shock to the system in practice. 

People often get into sales hoping to make loads of money but then quit after a few months because they can’t handle the everyday grind. That’s why when you are hiring junior salespeople, you should select for perseverance first and foremost. Do they have a track record of persevering through hardship?

One of the most reliable clues is participation in competitive sports. If someone has experience with that, then you can be sure that they have at least some ability to persevere when the going gets tough. It doesn’t matter which sport it is, what matters is that they competed in it. 

Another reliable clue is completing personal projects. Say, if someone has self-published a novel, then they have at least some ability to persevere and do what needs to be done regardless of whether they feel like it or not. It doesn’t matter if the novel is bad, what matters is that they finished it. 

Finally, coming from a rough background can also be a clue, provided that the person managed to accomplish something despite it. Say, if someone grew up in an unstable environment, but was a straight-A student in high school, that indicates that they have at least some ability to persevere through hardship in order to achieve their goals.

Ultimately, what you want to see is that this person has been in situations where they wanted to quit but decided to persevere instead. This makes them more likely to persevere in sales as well. 

Personal Quality #2: Willingness to Learn

The second most important trait that you should select is willingness to learn. Do they have experience in adjusting their behavior based on someone else’s feedback?

Again, competing in sports is probably the most reliable indicator here, but anything where they had to learn a skill under someone’s supervision is a good sign. 

This is important because some people have perseverance because they are stubborn, but that same stubbornness makes them resistant to feedback and therefore uncoachable. 

Personal Quality #3: Career-Oriented Mindset

You also want to select for career-oriented mindset. But what does that mean?

It means that you should hire people who are interested in building a career in sales as opposed to simply looking for a placeholder job to pay the bills. 

Someone who is career-oriented will be more likely to appreciate the opportunity to get their foot in the door, work on their sales skills, and persevere through the inevitable hardships.

Other Personal Qualities That May Be Beneficial

There are also some additional traits that can be conducive to success in sales such as:

• Ambition
• Drive
• Competitiveness
• Extroversion
• Charisma

There’s definitely some truth to the type-A salesperson stereotype but it doesn’t mean that you should only hire those who fit it. People who are less intense can also do well in sales, especially in industries where their personality type is more common (e.g. tech). 

You should also be cautious to not get mesmerized by a candidate’s charisma. There are plenty of people who talk a good game at job interviews but then are unable to back it up when the time to perform comes. 

That’s why it’s important to select perseverance, willingness to learn, and a career-oriented mindset first. Everything else is just icing on the cake, including the stereotypical salesperson traits! 

What Should Your Sales Training Include?

Once you find a promising candidate for a sales job, we recommend hiring them for a trial period so that you can provide them with sales training and then see how they perform in that role.

If you are hiring people who don’t have any previous sales experience, it’s your responsibility to give them everything they need to succeed in their first sales job. You can’t expect them to just know stuff if they have never done sales before!

That’s why in this article we are going to discuss everything from target audience and product training to persuasion training to personal productivity training. Ultimately, it’s all sales training because it will help them do well in their sales role.

Okay, so with all that out of the way, let’s get into the sales training methodologies that you can use to help your new hires succeed:

Sales Training Methodology #1: Target Audience Training

You should start your sales training by introducing your target audience. Who are your dream customers?

Here’s what you should cover:

• What are the demographic traits of your dream customers? – This includes their location, nationality, gender, age, education, occupation, income, etc.
• What are the psychographic traits of your dream customers? – This includes their values, their religious beliefs, political beliefs, ideological beliefs, their short-term and long-term goals, their fears, their hopes, and their dreams.
• What is the problem that your dream customers are struggling with? – Describe the problem itself,  explain why it’s a problem, and discuss the emotional context surrounding it.
• How can your product help your dream customers solve that problem? – Provide a quick explanation so that your salespeople would have a general understanding of what your product does. They’ll have an opportunity to develop an in-depth understanding through practical experience later during product training.
• What language do your dream customers use when they talk about that problem? – Discuss common terms, phrases, and metaphors. It’s important that your salespeople learn to speak your target audience’s language.

The better your new hires understand your target audience, the more effective they will be at implementing the strategies and tactics that you are going to teach them later in your sales training.

Sales Training Methodology #2: Product Training

Then you want to move on to product training.

Here’s what you should cover:

• Most common use cases – Provide hands-on training where your salespeople learn to use the product in ways that your customers typically use it. This will help them understand its features, capabilities, and limitations.
• Frequently asked questions – Your salespeople should know what questions they can expect from potential customers and have prepared answers to them.
• Unique value proposition – Your salespeople should understand what differentiates your product from competing products.

You should also discuss the use cases where another product may be a better solution. 

That way, if after talking to a potential customer your salespeople realize that your product may not be the right fit for that particular individual, they will be able to recommend a more suitable alternative. 

This can help you avoid problems later down the road such as cancellations, refund requests, and bad reviews from disgruntled customers. Honesty also builds goodwill!

Finally, you should create customer case studies for the most common use cases and then get your salespeople to memorize the most important points so that they can use them as social proof when talking to potential customers. 

Sales Training Methodology #3: Persuasion Training

Sales is persuasion in the business context so it makes sense to lay the groundwork by discussing the general psychology of persuasion first.

We recommend using Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” as a blueprint for your persuasion training.

You want to go over Cialdini’s seven principles of persuasion:

1. Reciprocity – We feel obliged to return favors and are more likely to accept a request from someone who has done us a favor in the past.
2. Commitment and consistency – We want to be seen as consistent so we are more likely to accept a request if it is consistent with our past behavior. Getting someone to make a small commitment makes it easier to get them to make larger commitments in the future because that initial small commitment establishes a behavioral pattern that the larger commitments would be consistent with.
3. Social proof – When we are unsure of what to do, we look at what others do. We are more likely to accept a request if we know that other people have done so in the past.
4. Liking – We are more likely to accept requests from people that we like. Likability is determined by several key factors including good looks, having something in common with us, and paying us compliments.
5. Authority – We are more likely to accept requests from people that we see as authority figures.
6. Scarcity – We are more likely to accept a request if we know that the opportunity may not be available in the future because we value things that are scarce.
7. Unity – We are more likely to accept requests from people that share an identity with us and belong to our “tribe”.

You can use examples from the book to illustrate each principle, Make sure to also encourage discussion. Have your salespeople ever applied these principles themselves or seen them being applied in various contexts?

Cialdini’s principles of persuasion might seem like basic common sense to you if you have been doing sales for a long time. But you need to remember that people who don’t have any previous experience in this field often come in with wildly inaccurate ideas about how persuasion works. 

If you don’t correct those misconceptions now, your salespeople will struggle to follow what you are saying once you start teaching them sales techniques. If they don’t understand the psychology of persuasion, they won’t understand sales strategies and tactics that are based on it!

Sales Training Methodology #4: Sales Theory Training

Once you are done with the psychology of persuasion, it’s time to teach your new hires sales theory. 

Here’s what you should cover:

• The five classic lead qualification criteria (need, interest, budget, timing, authority).
• Popular sales methodologies such as SPIN selling, NEAT selling, solution selling, etc. with special emphasis on the methodology that your company uses.
• How to ask questions that help identify pain points and then use those pain points to position your product in a way that resonates with the potential customer.
• Best ways to pre-emptively address common objections over price, commitment, and logistics.
• Sales closing techniques such as now or never close, something or nothing close, the puppy dog close, etc. with a special emphasis on closes that make the most sense for your product.

You also want to discuss the psychology of buying. There’s a lot of research on what drives consumer behavior. Understanding the process behind purchase decisions can help your salespeople become more effective at closing sales. 

Note that the goal here is to provide an overview of sales theory and give your new hires some context, not teach them how to implement specific techniques to sell your products. You can do that later during the cold call and discovery call training.

Sales Training Methodology #5: Cold Call Training

Once you are done with sales theory, it’s time to get more practical with cold call training. 

Set Realistic Expectations

Cold calling is arguably the hardest part of sales.

That’s why you want to start your cold call training by setting realistic expectations.

Your new hires should expect that they are going to face endless rejections, there are going to be a lot of awkward moments, and they will also occasionally encounter completely unhinged behavior. Overall, cold calling is probably going to make them feel terrible and they will probably want to quit. 

Fortunately, the more cold calls they make, the more desensitized they will become to all of that until they eventually reach a point where nothing fazes them anymore. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel!

Set a Daily Cold Call Quota

We recommend setting a daily cold call quota and encouraging your new hires to focus on the process (meeting the quota) instead of the results (scheduling discovery calls and closing sales). After all, the former is completely within their control, while the latter isn’t.

Get Your Salespeople to Commit to Making 1,000 Cold Calls

You also want to encourage your new hires to commit to making 1,000 cold calls no matter what. They can quit after that if they want to. 

It doesn’t have to be a formal agreement, a simple informal challenge should be enough. 

In all likelihood, by the time they make their 1,000th cold call, they will have desensitized themselves to rejection and won’t want to quit anymore. 

The purpose of this challenge is to help them power through that initial stage where cold calling feels terrible!

Teach Your Salespeople this Cold Calling Framework

You also want to give your new hires a step-by-step cold-calling framework that they can follow when talking to potential customers. 

Patrick Dang, a sales trainer who has taught over 70,000 people worldwide, recommends this framework:

1. Do your research – It’s important to make sure that the person you are about to call meets your lead qualification criteria.
2. Establish rapport – You want to get them to like you before you start talking business. You can do that by bringing positive energy, paying them a compliment, and mentioning something that you have in common.
3. Set the agenda for the call – Once you are done with rapport-building small talk, explain why you are calling. Make sure to give them a reason to stay on the call until the end.
4. Uncover pain points – Ask questions to learn more about the potential customer’s situation, identify the pain points, and then explain to them how your product can relieve that pain.
5. End with a call to action – Say that you don’t want to take up too much of their time and ask whether they would like to schedule another call at a time that’s convenient for them so that you can discuss this further. Before you end the cold call, make sure to tell them what the next step is (e.g. you’ll email them a link to your appointment booking calendar).

Consider showing your salespeople this video where Patrick Dang explains this framework in detail:

Watching this video can help them understand not just the framework itself but also the energy that they need to bring to the call.

This is important because your new hires might have some misconceptions about cold calling that they have picked up from movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street”. 

High-pressure, aggressive sales tactics look great on the screen but in real life, such behavior comes across as obnoxious. People will simply hang up on you if you act like that!

Encourage Your Salespeople to Roleplay Cold Calls

You want to give your new hires an opportunity to practice the cold calling framework you just taught them by roleplaying cold calls with each other. Of course, that’s not the same as the real thing, but it can help them gain some confidence!

Organize cold call roleplaying sessions where one person plays themselves and the other person plays the potential customer. This should be done over the phone to make it more real.

You also want to record these roleplay cold calls so that your salespeople can listen to them later. This can help them spot issues that are difficult to catch without hearing yourself on audio such as low energy, wrong cadence of speech, use of filler words and sounds, and so on. 

You should listen to these recordings as well so that you can provide individual feedback to each salesperson. This can be really valuable because something that may seem like common sense to you might be a complete game changer to them!

Sales Training Methodology #6: Discovery Call Training

You should also provide discovery call training.

Teach Your Salespeople this Discovery Call Framework

We recommend teaching your new hires this discovery call framework:

1. Establish rapport – Begin the discovery call with rapport-building small talk. The easiest way to establish rapport in this situation is to reference something that you have discussed during the cold call.
2. Set the agenda for the call – Explain what the structure of this call is going to be and ask the potential customer for permission to get started.
3. Make sure that you understand the potential customer’s situation – Reiterate what you learned during the cold call and ask if you understood the situation correctly. Ask more questions if something is unclear to you.
4. Explain how your product can help them solve their problem – Target the pain points that you have uncovered. How can your product help to relieve that pain?
5. Pre-emptively address the most common objections – People tend to have objections related to the product’s price, the commitment involved, and the ease of use. On top of that, every product also has a set of common objections that are specific to it. You want to address all these objections pre-emptively, without waiting for the potential customer to bring them up.
6. Ask the potential customer if they have any questions – You should prepare the answers to the most frequently asked questions in advance.
7. End with a call to action – What is the next step that you want them to take? You may be able to close the sale then or you might need to schedule another call. What’s important is that the potential customer takes the next step in your sales funnel.

Encourage Your Salespeople to Roleplay Discovery Calls

Roleplaying discovery calls is more laborious than roleplaying cold calls because discovery calls are much longer (typically between 30 and 45 minutes).

However, if you can give each salesperson an opportunity to go through the entire discovery call framework at least three times, it can be really helpful to them. 

These roleplay discovery calls should be done with the same software that they are going to use for real discovery calls. 

Record these roleplay discovery calls so that your salespeople can watch them later. This can help them spot various issues related to their body language and facial expressions.

Make sure to also watch these roleplay calls yourself so that you can give each salesperson individual feedback. 

Sales Training Methodology #7: Personal Productivity Training

You should also give your new hires advice on how to maximize their personal productivity, especially if you are dealing with young people who may need some guidance in this department.

Explain Your Sales Workflow

You want to automate your sales workflow as much as possible with customer relationship management (CRM) software and Zapier. 

Once that’s done, explain your sales workflow to new hires and give them standard operating procedures (SOPs) that they should follow at every stage of the sales process. 

This combination of automation and SOPs will help your salespeople make fewer mistakes and be more productive. 

Encourage Your Salespeople to Set Goals

Obviously, if you have a daily cold call quota, meeting it should be their primary goal.

But they should also track their cold-call-to-discovery-call and discovery-call-to-sale conversion rates.

That can help them figure out how many cold calls they need to make if they want to make a certain number of sales in a specific period of time. 

It can also provide a way to measure whether their sales skills are improving. If they are getting better at selling, their conversion rates should increase.

You want to encourage your salespeople to use these metrics to set goals for themselves and then work towards those goals. 

Teach Them Stress Management Techniques

Sales can be extremely stressful, especially when you are just starting out. 

And if you don’t know how to manage that stress, one bad interaction with a potential customer can throw you off your game for the entire day. 

That’s why we recommend teaching new hires the 4-4-4-4 breathing technique which is also known as “box breathing”. 

The idea is simple: breathe in while counting to four, hold your breath while counting to four, breathe out while counting to four, and hold your breath again while counting to four.

This technique can help your salespeople calm their nerves before cold calling a potential customer or hopping on a discovery call with a lead.

It can also help them to regain their composure after unpleasant interactions with potential customers. A cold call went badly? Do some box breathing and then get back to work.

As time goes on and your salespeople become increasingly desensitized to rejection, they will need this technique less and less. But it can be a lifesaver during their first few months on the job!

Want to Learn How to Generate UNLIMITED Leads on Autopilot?

Cold calling can be a great way to get a new business off the ground. 

However, this lead generation method has some major drawbacks, which is why you probably shouldn’t rely on it forever.

One issue is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach people over the phone. Phone anxiety is a real thing and it’s becoming more and more common among Gen Z and Millenials.

Another issue is that when you call a complete stranger out of the blue, you create an unfavorable uphill battle dynamic.

Think about it: you just interrupted whatever it is that they were doing so they are probably already annoyed with you. Plus, they know that you want to sell them something, so they have their guard up. Not a great start!

Finally, cold calling gives you very little time to build rapport, pitch your product, and get the potential customer to agree to a discovery call. After all, they probably want to get off the phone ASAP and go back to whatever it is that they were doing before you called them. 

Building a lead generation funnel and then driving traffic to it is a much better way to get leads. Why?

Because instead of chasing after potential customers, you get them to come to you. That sets up a favorable dynamic right from the start.

We created our Five Day Lead Challenge to help you build your first lead generation funnel. 

It’s a super practical, hands-on online workshop where you will:

• Create your lead magnet
• Build your lead generation funnel
• Set up an email welcome sequence

…and launch your funnel in just five days!

So don’t hesitate. Join our Five Day Lead Challenge today. It can help you take your business to the next level!

Join Our Five Day Lead Challenge