Why Online Sales Training is Superior to Face-to-Face

This article lists six benefits of online sales training over traditional classroom instruction for boosting sales performance. Any business that plans to offer sales training in 2022 should read this article.

Sales organizations of all sizes have seen an increase in the number of salespeople quitting during the previous few months. Sales quotas have risen even while a company's sales force has shrunk. This compels sales executives to think about two issues:

• How do we get more sales out of our existing salespeople fast?
• How do we get our new salespeople to ramp up to success faster?

Effective sales training is the answer to both of these questions. But what type of sales training is best?

Let’s take it as a given that the sales training content is comprehensive, focuses on the customer’s buying process, and provides meaningful concepts and skills to participants. That is, coming out of training, salespeople will know how to get prospects to define big needs and feel an urgency to take action. They will know how to design a customer-focused solution that is built on their differentiators. And they will know how to negotiate based on value rather than price.

If all that can happen, what’s the best delivery method? Should a company bring all of its salespeople together for a big in-person sales training event, or would it be more effective to implement an online sales training program with smaller groups of your salespeople?

Here are 6 reasons why an online sales training program is the best choice for increasing sales performance fast.

(1) It’s easier to master a 10-minute video than a 2-day seminar. Video lessons work seamlessly into your sales team’s day-to-day workflow. That leads to …

(2) Better retention of course material. According to Ebbinghaus’ “Forgetting Curve,” learners forget 90% of what they learn from an event-based sales training within 30 days. Most of that new material is lost within an hour or two. Spacing out the learning is one way to improve retention. Online sales training programs such as ours break up a long 2-day course into 9-minute engaging videos. So, salespeople learn a little bit at a time, over time. That allows them to digest and apply lessons individually rather than trying to recall a lot of concepts all at once. No more “drinking from the fire hose” when it comes to learning!

(3) Your salespeople keep selling during the training. More and more, salespeople favor online sales training due to its anywhere, anytime access that traditional classroom training can’t provide. Salespeople can fit in short videos with very little or no disruption to their sales activities.

(4) More effective sales coaching. Online sales training enables higher-quality sales coaching because the training program raises skills individually, one at a time, over time. This gives sales managers an opportunity to coach each specific skill, so it becomes a habit for salespeople.

(5) Online sales training creates the opportunity for enhanced learning through live webinars. Adding a live webinar component to online sales training at spaced intervals creates the opportunity for salespeople to share both learnings and their recent experiences applying that learning. In a classroom event, salespeople can only discuss their immediate insights because they haven’t yet had the opportunity to apply those learnings in an actual conversation with a customer.

(6) Your best salespeople resent having to leave their sales territories to attend a sales training event. They know they’re only going to remember one or two ideas afterwards due to their cognitive overload. Given how important it is for you to retain your best salespeople, why would you want to do something that they’ll resent?

Additional benefits of online sales training include:

No travel costs. No airfare, no hotels, no expensive dinners, no big bar tabs, which means no meeting planning.

Try it before you buy it. Salespeople are a tough audience for a live presenter. Have you ever been in an audience of salespeople and realized that the speaker is lousy? This sick feeling in the pit of your stomach usually occurs in the first 15-minutes of a two-day program. It can be very embarrassing for the decision-maker, and it can ruin the impact of your big investment.

That’s why leading online sales training providers allow your salespeople to complete a portion of the course before a commitment to purchase is made. This significantly reduces your risk of making a mistake.

The future of sales training is now—and it’s online. Use online sales training to help both current and new salespeople improve their skills and land more and bigger deals.

‍