How to Ensure Your Virtual Sales Initiative Gets Results

When companies invest in sales initiatives, they have specific outcomes they’re looking to achieve. Many sales leaders are trying to decide between (1) waiting for when they can schedule an in-person session or (2) moving forward now with a virtual training.

While there are benefits to flying your teams to one location, many sales leaders can’t risk the wait. The longer you wait to move forward with your initiative, the longer you wait to benefit from the changes and achieve the desired results.

The good news is there are specific things you can incorporate into a virtual workshop or training initiative to make it successful.

Virtual trainings drive great impacts and outcomes when they get these three things right:

Valuable Facilitators
Engaging & Memorable Discussions
Effective Pace & Content flow

We’ve outlined how each of these three concepts contribute to post-training adoption, performance and revenue numbers.

1. Facilitators who focus on outcomes:

Good facilitators who are committed to achieving outcomes are pivotal to driving impactful results from any training session, virtual or in person. You can tell you have an effective facilitator when they are able to engage with your participants in a way that holds their attention, tests their knowledge and makes them participate in their own learning process.

Here are specific steps facilitators can take to drive successful outcomes:

Provide personal anecdotes and real-world examples, not just lecture on the core content
Ask purposeful questions to drive participation and create discussions meant to improve adoption of core principles
Engage with each and every one of their participants to make sure everyone talks and participates
Test the group on their knowledge of what’s being delivered
Use multiple screens so they can monitor the entire group while presenting, to pick up the pace or slow down as necessary

Our facilitators use past experience and best practices to constantly improve their ability to facilitate virtual training sessions in a way that drives results for our customers. See how the strategies we use enable our facilitators to make a valuable impact in every virtual session.

2.Building Engagement with Your Virtual Training:

Engaging discussions and group exercises are effective ways to ensure reps are actually absorbing the content. We always say that it’s better to practice with each other, than with the customer. Ensuring reps can work with the methodology during the training will improve adoption. They leave the training with experience, critiques and exercises they can use to prepare for future sales conversations.

How to ensure the discussions will drive engagement:

Provide all participants with ways to ‘raise their hand’ and contribute to the session by taking advantage of polls, live chats and other digital features
Break out in groups, virtually, to have small group discussions that allow more people to talk and improve participation
Create exercises and generate discussions using practical applications that are relevant to your organization so your reps can begin to tie strategies to real use cases
Get managers and leaders to play a role in presentations to reduce listening fatigue and encourage additional participation from their sales reps

Review tried and tested best practices for driving engagement in virtual training sessions. As you weigh your options, make sure that your provider will incorporate these fundamentals. If not, you may want to reconsider.

3. Effective Pace & Content Flow

Words on the PowerPoint aren’t a great way to ensure your attendees are absorbing the material. Pacing and flow is critically important in a virtual session.

How to ensure pacing doesn’t kill the session:

Provide pre-work to your sales team participants to improve in-training pace and comprehension
Provide a pre-session run through to ensure that everyone presenting knows their roles and responsibilities
Provide time during the session for your participants to ask questions or voice concerns
Make sure the content, deliverables and outputs are customized to your company, buyers and marketplace
Manage the clock. Plan enough time to get through all of the content and exercises without going over time limits, skipping crucial topics or losing interest from your participants
Provide adequate breaks

See how we use custom content and other impactful tactics to deliver methodologies in a way that improves adoption and drives results for our customers.

Invest in virtual training that drives results

Get closer to your desired outcomes. Don’t wait to move forward in your initiatives. Invest in virtual training that drives adoption, allows your managers to improve reinforcement, and enables your reps to hit their numbers. Find an effective partner that can provide the training and methodologies you need to achieve your specific desired results and outcomes.

Start working now to improve next year's results. See how we're helping our clients maintain momentum through virtual delivery.