If you’re involved in sales training, you know creating a training program is a multi-step and multi-person effort. It’s much more than creating a few webinars and quizzes. For sales training to be effective, you must:

Identify Specific Needs: This involves understanding the unique aspects of your product or service, the target market, and the skills or knowledge gaps within the sales team. Each seller has different strengths and weaknesses, so a one-size-fits-all approach will not work.

Create Engaging Content: Your sales training content must be engaging, relevant, and effective. It must capture the attention of sales professionals, who often prefer hands-on learning over theoretical material. It should also be practical and directly applicable to their daily sales activities.

Assess Knowledge: It’s important that you develop an effective and integrated strategy for assessing sellers’ knowledge of the training materials. This could involve quizzes, flash drills, and role-plays.

Ensure Skill Transfer: Sellers must be able to effectively apply the skills and knowledge they acquired to real-world sales situations. Furthermore, you need a mechanism to reinforce these skills over time to prevent decay.

Measure Effectiveness: It’s often difficult to directly link improvements in sales performance to training, as many factors can influence sales outcomes. Companies, therefore, need to establish clear training metrics and methodologies to evaluate the impact of their programs.

Not only that, but creating and running a sales training program involves multiple people—your sales enablement manager, sales managers, content creators, etc.—people who, like you, have packed schedules.

It’s a lot.

Generative AI is having a profound effect on sales training, helping to automate tasks, streamline processes, and create training materials.

You can’t clone yourself, and chances are, you can’t hire additional staff. What you can do, though, is tap the power of artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI (gen AI), in particular, is having a profound effect on sales training.

Gen AI can help you create sales content, for example. It learns patterns and styles from existing data and then generates new, original content based on that knowledge. Traditional AI, on the other hand, excels at specific tasks it’s been trained for.

Sales organizations use both types of AI to automate tasks, streamline processes, and create sales training materials, which frees up time for employees to focus on more strategic responsibilities.

5 AI-Powered Solutions for Sales Training

Several AI-powered solutions exist that you can use to create and run a sales training program that enhances the skills and performance of your sales team. Here’s a look at a few.

1. Gen AI for Sales Content Creation

Gen AI can produce a range of training materials, from written documents and presentations to interactive simulations and quizzes, all tailored to enhance the learning experience. This customization is particularly valuable in addressing the varied learning styles and needs of your different sales reps, making the training more effective and engaging.

Training program developers can use tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard to create materials. In addition, several custom GPTs are now available in the GPT Store, such as GPTs for Sales and GPTs for Sales Enablement and Training. Those GPTs have been trained using sales-specific materials, so your prompts are simpler and the chatbots walk you through the process, asking questions to formulate ideas and strategies.

2. Gen AI-powered Assessment Generator

Do your sellers have a full grasp of the training materials? You need ways to assess their knowledge before they go into the field. Because if they aren’t prepared, if the knowledge isn’t top of mind, they will struggle.

Revenue enablement companies such as Allego have added generative AI capabilities into their platforms that improve and speed up your ability to create assessment tools. For example, Allego’s platform can automatically build quizzes based on training videos and their transcripts. You decide how many questions to ask, what style they should follow, where the questions should be placed within the video, and which topics to cover, and the tool does it. Then you can edit, remove, and refine them as needed.

Now, instead of spending weeks reviewing training content and developing quiz questions, Allego can do it for you in just minutes.

3. AI Synthesized Search

If your sellers can’t quickly retrieve information from memory, the next best thing is to have a sales content management system that easily and quickly serves up answers for them. With most content systems, you enter keywords into the search bar and the tool gives you a list of assets. Gen AI-powered content management systems have changed the game.

Allego, for example, uses gen AI to synthesize all the assets in your sales library, analyze the content, and provide answers. Sales reps ask a question, and the AI gives them an answer. They could ask “What differentiates our product from the competitors?” or “What’s the starting price for our platform?” The AI scours through your sales content and provides the answers. Gone are the days when you have to open each piece of content and search to find the information.

4. AI-Generated Dialog Simulator

Role-play exercises are an excellent way for sales reps to practice what they’ve learned. Challenges arise, however, when sales coaches don’t have time to do the role-plays and when sales reps are in multiple locations. Not to mention in-person role-plays are expensive and time consuming.

An AI-powered dialog simulator is an excellent alternative to in-person exercises. Allego includes this feature in its revenue enablement platform. It uses AI to create a life-like avatar, then you give the simulator question and answer sets based on common scenarios sellers face. Your sales reps can then have conversations with the avatar. As a sales rep provides responses, the simulator uses gen AI to determine if the response is correct. And it can pause a conversation to give feedback and advice. Sales reps can use a dialog simulator to test their knowledge of a course, practice objection handling, work on their closing techniques, and more.

5. AI-Powered Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence tools leverage AI to help teams analyze audio and video sales presentations to gain insights, target strengths and weaknesses, and develop best practices to improve performance. They make it possible for sellers to practice their presentations skills and product knowledge and get feedback from coaches before talking with buyers.

With Allego’s Conversation Intelligence, for example, sellers simply record themselves and upload the video to the platform. The software then analyzes the recording and extracts insights such as topics discussed, pace of speech, filler words used, competitors mentioned, and much more. The tool allows you to surface and act on coachable moments. For example, it can automatically send a sales rep a learning program or a video of the manager giving advice if it detects the seller needs help with a skill. Plus, it makes it possible to coach many more sellers.

Gen AI’s Potential to Transform Sales Training

The integration of generative AI in sales training marks a significant shift towards more efficient and personalized learning experiences. Gen AI’s true potential lies not just in automating tasks but in its profound ability to tailor training to each individual’s strengths and weaknesses. This approach transforms training from a routine task into a dynamic, adaptive journey.

The innovation gen AI brings to sales training isn’t just about the technology. It’s about reshaping the entire learning process. It’s a journey worth embracing, one that will redefine the landscape of sales training and help you drive remarkable results.

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