Given the rapid pace of technology and the efficiencies of working from a home office sales people are spending more time in the field working with their customers.
Mobile sales teams are disrupting a lot of the ways we have traditionally managed sales reps, including how we train them. Sales training has historically been event driven and conducted in a formal classroom setting.
Simply stated, it is just getting too expensive and time consuming to fly mobile teams to a central location for training on a regular basis. Maybe you can train your team once a year at the annual sales meeting, but those “training events” usually aren’t very effective.
To address these challenges, companies should leverage technology and make training ongoing as opposed to event driven. One great example of this type of technology is the live virtual classroom which can be used for training and sales team motivation.
With live virtual classroom technology, small groups of sales people are taught sales skills by a live facilitator using their computers or mobile devices. These virtual sessions are short and spaced out over time, highly interactive and have proven to be very effective. In addition, the training sticks because live virtual training makes it easy to provide on-going reinforcement.
This is why I encourage you to consider virtual learning to better develop your mobile sales team, and making continuous learning one of your sales training goals.