Are they an outside sales person our an OUTBOUND sales person (phone sales… not a “call center” person)?

The difference is if they are an outbound phone sales person using the phone to prospect, lead follow ups etc… face to face classroom training is not necessary…. even if they are brand new to sales.

With today’s Web 2.0 technology, you can do live training online without the hassle of traveling to the classroom. You can have role playing break out sessions and you get instant feedback from a live instructor.

I would venture to say that in order for sales training to be effective, you definitely need a combination of classroom training blended with eLearning modules as long as it is understood that classroom training can and is done online as well. And it’s faster training for everyone (no traveling) as well as less expensive.

Hope this helps.

Our company is amongst other things a call centre provider, a large one with over 5,000 staff across 40 different clients. inbound, outbound, at home agents, off shore as well as providing multi channel contact – email/sms/mail etc… we acquired an established eLearning business to assist us with a few objectives we had. Things like attrition, speed to competence, cost of training, time off the phone, knowledge retention etc… As part of this strategy, our new Salmat Learning business has taken our very effective sales and customer training IP and developed an online program called Quality Conversations. 26 modules broken up into streams like Introduction (modules), Core (m), Customer Service (m) and Sales (m). The training is quite unlike many other eLearning programs. If we focus on the Sales for a moment some of the “tests” are very realistic, choosing an agents state of mind when they answer the call and then being offered different verbal responses (reflected by physical responses)that can be chosen during the sales call. Of course there is an offline aspect, but this is focused on forums, program champions, debriefs etc – all backend managed by our LMS.. We believe that there really is nothing of this type in the world today (or so we are told) – over 8,000 hours in development! Not pitching here at all, this is after all and forum to disucss effective learning and the feedback we are receiving from the learners, there managers and in the metrics i.e. less customer complaints and more customer compliments as well as many others such as more sales, less time on the phone, quicker speed to competence etc are telling us that this program is hitting the right pain points. I am more than happy to discuss, in the meantime please feel free to go to http://www.salmatlearning.com.au/qc/home.html if you would like to discover more and access some demonstration modules. We have worked very hard on this and would love your learned feedback. Many thanks and regards to you industry professionals
jamie.merriman@salmat.com.au