How to Effectively Train Your Internal Sales Team

Written by Rick Loy. Rick is a sales strategist and training specialist with more than 20 years of experience as a Senior Executive in direct selling. As an Associate with Strategic Choice Partners, Rick helps companies update their sales efforts in a way that works in today’s direct selling climate while also taking into account the quickly moving landscape from a regulatory perspective.

How to Effectively Train Your Internal Sales Team

Most companies in direct sales have an internal sales support team. While the roles vary by company, there is a case to be made for maximizing the skills and field influence these team members can provide. If they are well and specifically trained, monitored and treated as valuable players, they can be welcomed contributors to the efforts of the company and the field salesforce.

Over my career, I’ve personally seen the massive impact an internal sales team can have on a company… both positive AND negative! When your internal team knows what they’re doing and has gained the trust of the field, there’s nothing better. When it doesn’t…

The Truth: An internal sales team can be a great benefit, but there are risks to address. Like any other field-facing effort, we take nothing for granted and must pay attention to detail. The brand and corporate leadership can’t afford missteps here. Field leadership sees and assesses every step we make, and they expect a standard of excellence that undergirds their efforts.

What Can Go Wrong, or Right:  Having led this internal effort for many years in a respected company, I learned what “fit” and what didn’t. It’s easy to speak of the “wins,” but they are accompanied by the losses and lessons learned.

In this article, I want to point out a few key reminders to incorporate when you’re hiring and nurturing your company’s internal sales team.

To start, let’s first talk about who you’re hiring to begin with.

Direct Selling Experience, or Fresh Outside Perspective?

• If you hire direct sales veterans for this role, understand and monitor the tendency of those new hires to default to what they learned and practiced elsewhere. That is not a criticism, but it is a fact. After all, you probably hired them because of that experience. But if their past experience in any way contradicts or even offends the company and field culture, they may never even have a chance to make a difference. And, if they happen to be friends (from a prior company, or from within the industry), your job will be more challenging; you’ll need to re-train them in almost everything in order to the maintain consistency of your company’s messaging. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn’t. I had to exit four team members because they wouldn’t stay on our messaging and methods.
  One tip for you: Get this on the table immediately with a potential hire with crystal clarity. It can work! Just remember, every message that goes into the field matters; be sure everyone is on the same page.

• If you hire “newbies” for the internal sales team, your challenges will still be present, but different. You’ll enjoy their fresh thoughts, energy, vision, and the privilege of guiding them into meaningful work with good people. Your challenge will be to entertain ideas respectfully, but focus dominantly on training the team in the basics. And this training will take time. I suggest you begin by training the concepts of direct sales first; what it is, why it matters, and how it helps people. Then, train the compensation structure until every team member is fully conversant and comfortable with it. This sends the message of “substance” versus just being a “nice person.”  When newbies go into the field, the first thing veterans want to see is continuity in the messaging they have come to know, and credible voices presenting useful insights. And, of course, your challenge right now is knowing how to train these core concepts in the midst of seismic shifts in our channel overall!

Be the Model to Follow

Regardless of your team’s background, the process will certainly challenge your own patience and focus. Here are some quick reminders that I constantly point out to myself when working with an internal sales team:

• Be Wise: When investing in a support team, you’ll want to be ready for some push-back from some upper level veteran field-leaders. Respectfully, these warriors know their businesses inside and out. So, creating a corporate group of “rookies” and / or seasoned “newbies from other companies” may set off alarms for your field leaders. Be a good partner with your leaders, giving them not only the “why, how, who, and when”, but also the vision for the value it can bring to their teams over time. The veteran leaders know their plates are full and their time is precious. An effective corporate sales team can support and strengthen what they are doing.

• Set The Bar: The “bar” is excellence, especially when putting the company name on the shoulders of those who may have little background in the business. We all want corporate team members who are personable, articulate, and likable, but those traits won’t matter if the team is not exceedingly well trained (your job) and able to give wise counsel to field business builders. And, again, veteran field leaders will know in a heartbeat if the internal team members are “for real.”

Every company and scenario has its own unique components, but I see 10 essential competencies the internal sales team must master to earn trust with the field:

1. Select team members carefully; time, money and reputation make this imperative. Look first at substance, not “style.” Watch and listen closely for those who may not be a fit.

2. Immerse them in the company vision, values, business model and compensation plan. These are the foundation of success.

3. Equip them with understanding of what new associates are likely to experience. New associates come with energy, doubt, fear, hope and many questions. They are “volunteers” working with discretionary time, and they may have very busy schedules; the sales team must understand all of that and more. You might invite veteran leaders to train and equip the team further in these matters; they surely know it well.

4. Train them to deliver a simple sales presentation with clarity and certainty. Coach this carefully, ensuring integrity of the messaging. This supports consistency of messaging over time; everyone saying the same things, especially in a heightened regulatory environment.

5. Train how to identify emerging leaders via reports (sales, sponsoring, rank advancement, and consistency.) The future for any company must focus on emerging leaders; dig deep to find them, and partner with them. Give emerging leaders as much attention and support as possible, as early as possible. Acknowledging them halfway through the comp plan tiers is way too late.  By then far too many are already disengaged, so find them fast.

6. Train the difference between “busy work vs. productivity”. The target for associates is result-producing, goal-achieving engagement. When the internal sales team is trained, they can save the associates a lot of wasted time. Many, if not most, new associates will miss the difference, but some will follow the lead of the internal team. Again, all of this messaging needs careful and continuing review from the home office. The consistency of messaging (“This is how we train here at XYZ company”) can prevent some of  the “ideas of the week” that confuse and frustrate young associates.

7. Train the internal team to establish accountability relationships with the field sales force. Your internal team will over time likely start seeing increased requests for help from the field. That’s a good thing! But serving the field without employing structure and accountability will become unfruitful blocks of time in conversations that become repetitive and unproductive. Teach to action and “next steps now,” and empower the internal team to offer help as long as the associate is working productively.

8. Train the internal team to set real-world expectations for the new associate. The new associate has enthusiasm, some fear and a lot of wonderment. Train the team to paint realistic expectations, such as: “Let’s work together for 90 days; you’ll have some wins, some ‘no’s’, some disappointments, and a lot of learning. EVERYONE goes through it, and I’ll be right here to walk through it with you. It’s a process and a journey, expect that.” Too many associates are not aware of the ups and downs, and decide they can’t do this. We can interrupt that and retain some of those folks if they know what to expect.

9. Train the internal team to notify veteran leaders when an emerging associate is showing success and consistency. A brief text is sufficient, and it demonstrates respect and support for the leader.

10. Train the internal team to teach associates a simple, brief sales conversation. This will be different for each company, but the old adage still stands, “You can make a sale without making a friend, but if you make a friend you might end up with a lot of sales.”

In addition, here are some basic tips for your team to master… Role play until it’s totally natural:

* Teach associates what to say, and what not to say.
* Be authentic. Be the same “you” as you’ve always been. Authenticity connects.
* Relax. We reduce tension or build tension in conversations. People sense tension.
* Own what you know and have experienced. Own what you don’t know.
* Speak to your personal experience and satisfaction.
* Ask if he/she would like to know more.
* Don’t “press” for a sale in an initial conversation. Walk gently.
* Answer questions that are asked. If you don’t know, say so and get the answer.
* Whatever happens, protect the relationship.

 If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Well

I’m so grateful that I was able to work with and form a 7-member internal team that learned, and earned the respect of our most successful associates. And, over time, I was very proud and blown away by what they accomplished. Each of them have gone on to great careers… Some will be CEOs one day soon. So, go and build your team… It will be worth it!

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