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Companies willing to invest in sales training programs are only 57% more effective than their competitors–and continuous training is found to create a 50% increase in net sales per rep.
However, 26% of sales reps claim that their sales training has little to no effect, so not just any sales training programs will do. But with so many to choose from, how do you know which ones are the best sales training programs to help your reps excel, both collectively and individually?
You’ve come to the right place. This article covers the importance of sales training programs, highlights the best virtual sales training programs available, and answers commonly asked questions about sales training.
What are Virtual Sales Training Programs?
Virtual sales training programs are online-based, structured courses designed to help sales reps learn and develop new sales skills, techniques, and processes. The curriculum is usually instructor-led, with lessons that are either self-paced or live webinar-style, and feature some combination of video and written training materials.
Why are Virtual Sales Training Programs Important?
Now that roughly 80% of B2B sales are happening online and 58% of reps say it’s harder to sell remotely than from an office, virtual sales training programs offer reps the ongoing training necessary to keep up, using the very medium they need to master in order to stay competitive.
The best virtual sales training programs enable reps to go granular and hone in on the specific sales pipeline stages that trip them up the most. The result? Savvier sales reps and shorter sales cycles. They’re also a great way for seasoned reps and managers to stay up-to-date on emerging industry trends and incorporate them in an impactful way, such as using AI to create training content lightning-fast and prioritizing revenue enablement.
Types of Virtual Sales Training Programs
Virtual sales training programs typically fall under three categories. Let’s break down each type and who they fit.
Sales Training Programs for Beginners
Onboarding new reps involves a one-two punch of familiarizing them with your company’s specific sales pipeline stages and tech stacks, as well as helping them master the sales process in general. This ensures that everyone on your team has the same foundational knowledge and techniques from which to build from.
The best virtual sales training programs for beginners should cover topics like the psychology of buying, sales techniques, customer communication, and relationship building. But take heart: sales reps will have forgotten 90% of what they learned a week after onboarding.
To accelerate the initial learning curve and make it stick, virtual sales training should be ongoing and integrated directly into their workflow. Enter Spekit, an AI-powered enablement platform that empowers reps to learn as they go, providing them with the exact knowledge they need, exactly when and where they need it.
Spekit acts as both a centralized content management system and virtual sales training program through just-time-learning. It’s an ongoing learning and sales coaching approach that emphasizes the importance of continually developing your skills and knowledge to evolve in tandem with your job requirements.
This enables your sales reps to reinforce and build upon their initial training organically—and allows you to onboard them 50% faster.
See how Spekit works by booking a demo
Training Programs for Sales Representatives
Once reps have mastered the broad strokes of navigating your sales funnel stages and engaging with prospects, it’s at this stage that guidance becomes more granular. Training programs for sales representatives provide actionable guidance tailored toward addressing skill gaps and fine-tuning strengths.
The best virtual sales training programs for sales reps typically cover hyper-specific ways to level up their skillset, such as how to measure and analyze performance, practice consultative selling, and recognize buying signals.
To keep your reps aligned and at the top of their game, your team also needs to be kept in the loop on new product features and updates, as well as important workflow changes. Using Spekit, new information is broken down into bite-sized, contextualized pieces that surface as needed, directly where your sales reps are already working.
You can even track your team’s knowledge and improve retention with knowledge checks and send in-app alerts about crucial updates, all without disrupting productivity.
By slashing the amount of time spent searching for information, your sales reps can get back to doing what they do best—closing deals.
Sales Management Training Programs
The best virtual sales training programs for management and executive leadership focus on high-level sales concerns like strategic planning, performance metrics, and team management. Sharpening these skills enables sales managers to effectively reinforce training, pinpoint areas for improvement, and help reps hit sales targets.
Spekit features a comprehensive analytics dashboard that managers can use to streamline these processes and hit numbers faster. Identify gaps in knowledge and materials that your reps need to succeed, then create the content needed to guide them 10 times faster with Spekit AI.
Discover how Spekit can transform your sales training program
Best Virtual Sales Training Programs
To help your sales team grow and thrive in a rapidly evolving market, sign up for the best virtual sales training programs below.
1. John Barrows Team Training
JB Sales offers customizable training programs designed to give sales teams the framework, strategies, and techniques needed throughout the sales cycle to drive urgency and close deals faster, while also positioning themselves for long-term success. Ongoing access to a content library and on-demand courses is provided, depending on the training package.
Pricing:
- JB Team Membership: $7,500 for 15 reps or $10,000 for 30 reps
- JB Flex: $25,000 for 50 reps
- JB Dedicated: $30,000
2. Consultative Selling Skills by Richardson
Richardson’s Consultative Selling Skills program teaches a customer-centric framework for planning and executing sales calls and customer meetings, providing reps with a consistent and repeatable process to effectively execute their conversations. The framework is fueled by six critical selling skills (prospecting, discovery, positioning, resolving objections, closing, and growing accounts) and how to use them to open more doors—and close more deals.
Duration: 2- or 4-hour virtual instructor-led workshops, pre- and post-digital learning
Pricing: Custom quotes available upon request
3. High-Impact Sales Management Training by Sales Readiness Group
The High-Impact Sales Management Training program by Sales Readiness Group highlights how sales management training shouldn’t be a one-time event, but an ongoing process. Skill areas covered include sales coaching, performance management, and sales projection, among others. It’s a complete system that includes assessment, customization, and ongoing reinforcement, so managers can successfully create lasting behavioral change that improves sales performance.
Duration: Self-paced
Pricing:
- Individual: $795 for instant one-year access
- Groups: Pricing available upon request
- Enterprise: Pricing available upon request
4. Foundations of Consultative Selling by RAIN Group
Foundations of Consultative Selling is a training program by RAIN Group designed to help reps lead impactful sales conversations, teaching skills like uncovering buyer needs and making impact cases that win sales. The program itself is fully customizable—with 85 portable, modular blocks to choose from, you can piece together the exact curriculum that suits your team’s individual needs.
Duration: Varies by training method
Pricing: Custom quotes available upon request
5. Critical Selling Skills by Janek Performance Group
The Critical Selling Skills program by Janek Performance Group covers the inner workings of how to engage customers. Learners acquire critical skills like planning for sales calls, uncovering customer needs, building trust, handling objections, and recognizing when to close. They’ll also learn how to differentiate themselves from competitors through a value-focused sales approach.
Duration: 4-hour virtual instructor-led workshops on two consecutive weekdays or self-paced
Pricing:
- OnDemand: $995
- Virtual Instructor-Led Workshops: $1,895
6. SPIN Selling by Miller Heiman Group
The Miller Heiman Group (now a part of Korn Ferry) offers SPIN Selling, a virtual sales training program that teaches reps how to overcome customer indifference and shorten the sales cycle. SPIN stands for Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff. It’s a consultative sales technique where reps lead conversations with certain types of questions, deepening interactions with prospects as they move toward a buying decision.
Duration: 8-hour virtual instructor-led workshop or self-paced
Pricing:
- Self-paced: $975
- Virtual Instructor-Led Workshop: $1,650
7. Scaling Sales Course by Spekit
The Scaling Sales Course by Spekit is a comprehensive, self-paced training program for sales enablement and RevOps teams. It’s a free course that covers topics essential to scaling sales, such as designing your sales playbook, building effective onboarding processes, managing change, choosing and maximizing sales tech, building growth models, and training and retaining your reps.
You’ll also score access to a rich collection of free content templates, playbooks, and guides you can use to enable and scale your sales team. Topics covered include sales prospecting, CRM usage, and sales processes. Specific tools are covered too, like Salesforce Lightning, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, HubSpot, and more.
Duration: 7 hours over three weeks
Pricing: Free
Sign up for Spekit’s Scaling Sales Course
Of course, Spekit doesn’t just offer this top-notch course on scaling sales, but an AI-powered just-in-time learning platform to help you achieve it.
Spekit fuels revenue at every touchpoint. How? By centralizing your sales content and leveraging the power of AI to instantly surface the exact answers, content, and training your reps need—in any tool or workflow.
Book a demo with Spekit
8. Insight Selling by RAIN Group
Insight Selling is RAIN Group’s advanced consultative selling program, and is based on the premise that buyers value sellers who bring them new ideas and insights—yet, most sellers don’t have the skills to do this consistently. The course equips reps with the skills needed to set themselves apart based on the value they offer, drive demand for their solution, and encourage prospects to think about their businesses in new ways.
Duration: Varies by training method
Pricing: Custom quotes available upon request
More About Sales Training Programs
Find answers to your most pressing questions about sales training programs.
What should sales training include?
A high-quality sales training program should include several important elements, including:
- Product Knowledge: Reading up on the product or service, including its features and benefits, what sets it apart, and the voids it can fill for prospects.
- Sales Techniques: Learning essential skills, such as qualifying leads, addressing customer concerns, negotiating, and closing strategies.
- Customer Communication: Mastering techniques like active listening, empathy, persuasion, and relationship-building.
- Tech Training: Becoming one with the sales enablement software and other tools the company uses for its sales cycle.
Sales training programs should also be equal parts flexible and interactive, so that reps can learn at a pace that works for them and fine-tune their new skills (say, through role-playing) before applying them in the real-world.
What kind of training does a salesperson need?
The kind of training a salesperson needs is usually specific to the company they work for, but some of the more universal forms of training that can help sales teams excel include:
- Soft Skills: Communication, collaboration, problem-solving, teamwork, and adaptability.
- Hard Skills: Product knowledge, policy knowledge, remote selling, social selling, and identifying KPIs.
Just as important as supplying your reps with the training they need is making sure what they’ve learned is consistently reinforced. You can do this by using a centralized CMS, like Spekit, which offers AI-powered content recommendations so reps can surface the exact training materials they need, when they need them.
Which sales training is most often used?
The sales training most often used is on-the-job training. New reps typically go through an initial onboarding process, where they’re provided with foundational knowledge about a company’s products and services, sales funnel stages, go-to selling techniques, and tech stacks. Being able to clock in right away enables reps to immediately apply what they’ve learned, boosting both adaption and retention.
And by adding a centralized sales content platform like Spekit to your tech stack, on-the-job training becomes part of the workflow. The result? Faster ramp times and shorter sales cycles.
How can I find sales training near me?
To find sales training programs near you, try the following research strategies:
- Check with local institutions. Local colleges, universities, chambers of commerce, even event spaces, might have leads on upcoming in-person programs.
- Connect with professional associations. Sales-centric associations, like the National Association of Sales Professionals and the National Sales Network may have a chapter in your area that hosts training programs.
- Do a web search. Visit your go-to search engine and use the search query “sales training programs [location]”.
- Ask for recommendations. Crowdsource in-person sales training program recommendations via social media platforms, like X and LinkedIn.
Are Virtual Sales Training Programs Worth It?
There are many perks that come with investing in virtual sales training programs. They give reps the breathing room to learn incrementally, resulting in less time lost on the job. Virtual training is also more targeted—by improving one core sales competency at a time, this makes it easier for reps to retain the information and execute on what they’ve learned.
The one shortfall of even the best virtual sales training programs, however, is they tend to be a one-off experience. You earn your certification, and the learning stops until you manage to squeeze another round of training into your already packed schedule.
Whatever sales training programs you offer your reps, you can use Spekit to seamlessly integrate this new knowledge into their day-to-day. With real-time quizzes, in-app alerts and SmartSend technology, your reps can use the power of Spekit AI to surface the exact content and training they need right when they need it, in any tool or workflow.
Ready to accelerate your sales pipeline? Schedule a demo today
