March 25, 2024 | Sales Best Practices

How Important Is Continuous Sales Training for Your Company?

In medical and pharmaceutical sales, having the right skills is paramount to achieving quality results without exposing the parent company to risk. Medical salesforce training is one of the key tools that companies use to achieve their goals.

With a robust training program to help build sales skills, companies can avoid medical sales performance issues and mitigate risks. However, sales training programs are often treated like a “one and done” solution when they really shouldn’t be. Instead, it’s important to provide continuous training that keeps sales skills fresh.

Why It’s Important to Maintain Ongoing Sales Training for Your Team

Why should your company spend money on putting its team through sales learning programs several times instead of simply focusing on passing a course once and calling it a day? There are several reasons to maintain continuous sales training programs, such as:

  • To Improve Information Retention. The “forgetting curve” is a common phenomenon in education circles—and sales training is not exempt from it. In short, it’s the tendency for people to forget what they’ve learned after any kind of training program. One of the most effective ways to combat this loss of information is to hold repeat training sessions instead of treating employee education as a “one-off” thing.
  • To Keep New Hires and Existing Sales Team Members on the Same Page. If sales reps are only given training during their onboarding process, there is a significant risk that reps who have been with the company longer may not be as up to date as newer hires. Meanwhile, new hires may miss out on the insight and experience provided by existing sales team members. So, to encourage the best sales skills and knowledge development, it’s important to have continuous training that pairs both newer and older reps together to pool their knowledge and provide updates.
  • To Limit Liability and Risk. Because regulations change periodically, it’s important to have training sessions to keep sales rep knowledge up to date with these changes. Failing to keep sales rep knowledge current on the dos and don’ts of medical and pharmaceutical sales could provoke a very expensive and time-consuming legal battle in the future. Continuous training helps to minimize the risk of a sales rep accidentally violating an important regulation.

Types of Sales Training Resources

What are some of the resources that you can use in your sales training program? There are a lot of different options you can include with your training program, such as:

Books/Blogs/Other Publications

Sales books, blogs, and other publications are a perennial favorite choice for ongoing sales training programs. Finding a great book of sales tips, management advice, or marketing tips can help sharpen your sales team’s skills.

Best of all, when everyone is drawing from the same sales skills development books, you can help make your sales process more consistent.

Sales Podcasts

Instead of sitting down and reading a book, what kind of sales training tool could you provide to your sales reps to sharpen their skills during their morning commute? One great option is sales podcasts.

There are countless podcasts out there on topics ranging from medical sales industry updates, to selling tips, motivational guides, marketing advice, and more. That these podcasts can often be streamed to your sales reps’ smartphones makes it easy for them to listen whenever they have some spare time.

Sales Training Videos

Not everyone will remember everything they hear, but they also might not engage strongly with books or other written media. How can you provide engaging training experiences to these people so they can sharpen their skills?

Sales training videos are often a solid training option for introducing reps to new concepts while providing strong visuals that make remembering the lessons just a bit easier. With pre-recorded videos, you can also allow sales reps to take in training materials at their own pace instead of having to block off set time periods for a live training session.

Live Seminars

Part of creating a memorable training experience that makes it easy to retain information after the training is done is making that training interactive. Few training tools make this as easy as having a live seminar with an expert or trainer to walk sales reps through a topic and having reps ask questions throughout the seminar or participate in live roleplay with them.

Whether they’re held in-person or conducted via a teleconferencing solution, having a live person conducting training remains a highly effective training tool. While live training does require you to block off time for all participants to join, it’s less reliant on individual reps being self-motivated to complete training—though it’s really important to find self-motivated people to represent your company to customers.

Online Classes

Especially after the COVID pandemic, the value of online training courses has never been more readily appreciated by sales managers and reps alike. Online courses make it easy for sales reps to complete complex training courses on their own time, watching videos, reading supplemental materials, and taking tests on the information they’ve learned at their leisure.

With emailed training course confirmations or online training dashboards, some online courses make it exceptionally easy for sales team leaders to track who has completed training (and when they completed it).

How Ongoing Sales Training Is an Integral Component of Outsourced Sales

You may be wondering: “Axxelus is an outsourced sales company, why are you so concerned about sales training?” Well, the primary reason is that ongoing medical and pharmaceutical sales training is a large part of how we ensure that the outsourced sales talent we pair our customers with are all able to perform at their best.

At Axxelus, we provide our full-time sales reps with ongoing sales training to keep their sales skills up to date with the latest regulatory changes and industry best practices so you don’t have to. This way, you can save some time and energy while maintaining a fully skilled salesforce for your medical/pharmaceutical business.

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