Our Sales Training Guide Is Better Than Theirs [2026]

Last updated on October 18th, 2025 at 06:22 am

Want to take your sales training to the next level?

Here’s our comprehensive sales training guide for [2026]…

Target Audience Training

We believe that target audience training should be the foundation of sales training. Why?

Because if the salesperson doesn’t understand the potential customer at all, then they can have the best sales strategies and tactics and they still won’t be able to close the sale.

Meanwhile, if the salesperson understands the potential customer on a deep level, then they can make a bunch of strategic and tactical mistakes and still fumble their way into closing the sale. 

Of course, you want your salespeople to both have the ability to empathize with the potential customer and understand how to implement various sales strategies and tactics. 

But the former is much more important because ultimately, it all boils down to a human connection. 

Here’s what your target audience training should cover:

1. The demographic traits of your dream customers
2. The psychographic traits of your dream customers
3. The problem that your dream customers are struggling with
4. How your product can help your dream customers solve that problem
5. The language that your dream customers use to express themselves

Let’s take a closer look at each of these points:

Demographic Traits of Your Dream Customers

Demographic traits are objective demographic facts about your dream customers such as their:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Occupation
• Job title
• Religion
• Political affiliation

…etc.

Understanding the demographic profile of your dream customers is important because it provides context, makes it easier to qualify leads, and helps to establish rapport.

Psychographic Traits of Your Dream Customers

Psychographic traits are psychological characteristics of your dream customers:

• Identity – How do they perceive themselves, how do they want to be perceived by others and what does their identity revolve around?
• Values – What are their core values, what ideology do they subscribe to, and what is important to them?
• Fears, hopes, and dreams – What are they afraid of, what do they hope for and what do they dream about?
• Problems – What are they struggling with, not just in the context relevant to selling your product but also in general?
• Goals – What are their short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals? This is different from hopes and dreams because goals tend to be more specific. 

You want your salespeople to understand what’s really driving your dream customers so that they can appeal directly to that when talking to them. 

The Problem That Your Dream Customers are Struggling With

You should also make sure that your salespeople understand the problem that your product addresses.

• What is the problem?
• Why is it a problem?
• What negative events are associated with it and what positive events would be associated with solving it?
• What negative emotions are associated with it and what positive emotions would be associated with solving it?
• What is at stake here?

Ultimately, people’s buying behavior can be boiled down to two core motivations: 

1. Avoidance of negative emotions
2. Pursuit of positive emotions

Typically, they make purchase decisions based on one or both of these motivations, and then use logic to justify them. 

This means that if your salespeople understand the emotional context around the problem in question, they can appeal directly to relevant emotions (e.g. maybe the potential customer feels overwhelmed and your CMS software would help them reduce stress).

How Your Product Can Help Your Dream Customers Solve That Problem

You also want your salespeople to understand how exactly your product can solve that problem. What are the specifics?

At this point in your sales training, it’s enough to explain it in theory, then during product training, you should help them get some practical experience with it. 

The Language That Your Dream Customers Use to Express Themselves

Finally, it’s important to discuss the language that your dream customers use to express themselves so that your salespeople can incorporate it into their cold calls, discovery calls, and sales pitches. This includes specific words, phrases, and metaphors, as well as commonly used slang terms.

Your salespeople need to learn the jargon of the industry that you are targeting because it will help them communicate more effectively. It’s much easier to close sales when you speak the potential customer’s language!

Product Training

The next step after target audience training is product training. Its goal should be to help your salespeople develop an accurate understanding of your product.

Here’s what your product training should cover:

Features

What are the features of your product?

Make sure to discuss both the core features that matter to all customers and the minor features that are less important but may still come up during sales calls. 

Pros and Cons

What are the pros and cons of your product?

Businesses often make the mistake of focusing solely on the former while completely ignoring the latter. 

This is misguided because no product is perfect. Pretending otherwise is delusional and will come across as dishonest when talking to potential customers. 

Encourage an honest discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of your product and how it compares to various competitors.

Use Cases

Go over the most common use cases so that your salespeople would understand them. 

Ideally, you want them to actually use your product according to each of those most common use cases so that they’d have some practical experience, not just theoretical knowledge.

Say, if we were training salespeople to sell ClickFunnels software, we would get them to build a bunch of sales funnels so that they would know what it’s like. 

Case Studies

As we will discuss in the next section, social proof is an important principle of persuasion.

The best way to get people’s attention is to tell them how you helped someone like them get the result that they want to get.

Ideally, you want to have a business case study for each customer segment, so that your salespeople could present them to potential customers as social proof.

Print out these case studies, get your salespeople to read them, and then discuss each of them in detail. 

This will help you ensure that they understand the situations described in these case studies, the results that the case study subjects got by using your product, and why those results were important to them. 

What if You Have Several Products?

If you have several products, you want to provide training for all of them and discuss how they compare to each other.

That way, when your salespeople are talking to potential customers, they will be able to recommend the product that is the best fit for that individual based on their unique circumstances. 

Sales Theory Training

Okay, so now your salespeople understand your product, but what is the best way to sell it?

We recommend teaching them general sales theory first and then showing them how to apply it to selling your product.

Here’s what your sales theory training should cover:

1. Psychology of persuasion
2. Classic sales theory
3. Modern sales theory

Let’s take a closer look at each of these subjects:

Psychology of Persuasion

Robert Cialdini, the author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, has formulated seven key principles of persuasion:

1. Reciprocity
2. Commitment and Consistency
3. Social proof
4. Liking
5. Authority
6. Scarcity
7. Unity

His book was first released back in the 1980s and was incredibly influential among salespeople. It is widely considered to be a must-read.

We recommend giving your salespeople copies of the new and expanded edition, encouraging them to read it, and then discussing it with them. These seven principles of persuasion should serve as the foundation to which they can later add various sales strategies and tactics. 

This is especially important if you are hiring people with no previous sales experience because they are likely to have serious misconceptions about how persuasion works!

Classic Sales Theory

Once you are done with Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, move on to the classic sales theory: proven sales strategies and tactics that have been around for decades.

Brian Tracy’s book “The Psychology of Selling” is a great resource for this. It was originally published back in the 1980s and remains popular among salespeople to this day.

We recommend giving your salespeople copies of the latest edition, encouraging them to read it, and then discussing what they learned, especially chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.

Earlier chapters address the “inner game” of selling, which is something that you can refer back to during the cold call training.

Modern Sales Theory

Daniel H. Pink’s “To Sell Is Human” is a great introduction to modern sales theory because the author discusses how widespread Internet access has changed sales by eliminating the information asymmetry between the seller and the buyer.

We recommend giving your salespeople copies of this book, encouraging them to read it, and then discussing what they learned, with a special emphasis on the importance of transparency.

This will help your salespeople understand why they should always be honest, set realistic expectations, and put the potential customer’s interests first, even if it means losing the sale. 

It can also help them realize that one doesn’t have to conform to the sleazy used car salesman archetype in order to succeed at sales, which is especially important if you are hiring people with no previous sales experience who might have various limiting beliefs and ethical concerns related to selling.

Lead Generation Training

Okay, so now that your salespeople know how to sell your product, it’s time to teach them how to get leads. 

The Classic Lead Qualification Criteria

Lead qualification is the first step because you want your sales team to focus on the leads who are the most likely to convert into paying customers. 

Here are the five classic lead qualification criteria:

1. Need – Start the lead qualification process by establishing whether the potential customer has a need for your product to begin with. 
2. Interest – Determine whether the potential customer is likely to be interested in your product. Say, if they just purchased a similar product from one of your competitors, then they probably won’t be interested in buying your product, at least at this point in time. 
3. Budget – Figure out whether the potential customer can afford your product. This is pretty easy in the B2B space because you can simply look up the company’s financials and media coverage. 
4. Timing – See if that potential customer is likely to make the purchase within a timeframe that works for you. In the B2B space, the general rule is that the larger the company, the longer the sales cycle you can expect. A solopreneur might buy your product after one call while closing the sale with a big corporation might take six months and a bunch of calls with different stakeholders. 
5. Authority – Make sure that the potential customer has the authority to approve the purchase. If it’s not possible to reach the decision maker without going through gatekeepers, identify the person that you can reach that is the closest to the decision maker and target them.

Your salespeople should get as much of this information as they can prior to making the cold call and then get the rest of it during the call. 

Proper lead qualification is extremely important because if a salesperson fails to qualify the lead prior to the discovery call, they might end up spending 30 – 45 minutes pitching your product to someone who would have never bought it anyway. What a waste of time!

Your Company’s Lead Scoring System

Analyze your sales data. 

What do leads that convert into paying customers tend to have in common?

You want to use those common traits to develop a lead-scoring system where you divide incoming leads into three categories:

1. Low-quality leads – that are the least likely to convert into paying customers.
2. Medium-quality leads – that are somewhat likely to convert into paying customers.
3. High-quality leads – are the most likely to convert into paying customers. 

Ideally, incoming leads should automatically get assigned a lead score, forwarded to your sales team, assigned to a salesperson, and placed on their lead list according to their lead score (e.g. if this is a high-quality lead, place them above the medium-quality and low-quality leads). 

Explain this system to your sales team so that they understand what lead scoring is, what determines lead scores, and how they should prioritize leads. 

Focusing on the leads that are the most likely to convert to paying customers can help your salespeople make more sales with the same number of cold calls!

Cold Calling Framework

Speaking of cold calls…

You can’t just drop someone into a sales role that requires cold calling and expect them to wing it. 

They are going to fail miserably if they don’t have any previous cold calling experience. And it’s going to be your fault because you failed to prepare them for it!

Instead, you should give them a cold calling framework that they can follow. Sure, they will still need to think on their feet and improvise but at least they will have a call structure that they can use to orient themselves. 

We recommend teaching your salespeople this 5-step cold calling framework that was developed by Patrick Dang:

Step #1: Do your homework – Does this person belong to your target audience, have a high lead score, and meet the five classic lead qualification criteria? 

It’s not always possible to determine all that in advance but you should have a reason to believe that they are likely to convert into a paying customer. 

Step #2: Build rapport – If you want someone to listen to what you have to say, you first need to get them to like you. 

There are several factors to likability in this context:

• Energy level, tonality, and cadence of speech. 
• Demonstrating that you know who they are by mentioning some recent event (e.g. congratulating them on a recent product launch).
• Establishing common ground by mentioning something that you have in common (e.g. you both went to the same university). 

People who don’t have any previous sales experience often find it difficult to wrap their heads around the importance of likability so make sure to emphasize it to really drive the point home. 

You can refer back to Cialdini’s principle of liking, which your salespeople should be familiar with at this point. 

Step #3: Set the agenda for the call – You need to explain why you are calling, what you want to discuss, and what’s in it for them. 

Consider also setting a time limit where you only ask for a certain amount of time and then once it’s up you thank them for their time and end the call with a call to action. 

Step #4: Uncover pain points – Ask the potential customer questions to understand their situation better. This will allow you to uncover pain points that you can then use to pitch your product. It will also help you strengthen the rapport because it shows that you want to understand their perspective. 

Step #5: End the call with a call to action – Tell the potential customer what is the next step. Typically, this means scheduling a discovery call.

Here’s a video in which Patrick explains this framework and provides an example;

Roleplaying Cold Calls

You can help your salespeople prepare for the real thing by encouraging them to roleplay cold calls.

The idea here is simple: one person should play themselves and follow the cold calling framework that you provided and the other person should play the potential customer and bring up the most common objections, ask frequently asked questions, throw curveballs, etc.

Ideally, this should be done over the phone, meaning the person playing themselves should actually call the person playing the potential customer. 

You also want to record these roleplay cold calls so that you can then listen to them with your sales team, analyze them, and provide feedback.

Hearing how they sound on the phone can help your salespeople notice problems that can be difficult to catch otherwise such as coming across as low energy, talking too slow or too fast, overusing filler sounds and filler words, etc. 

Everyone cringes the first time they hear themselves on audio but listening to recorded roleplay calls can accelerate learning!

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Cold Call Quotas

We recommend setting daily, weekly, and monthly cold call quotas that your salespeople are expected to meet no matter what.

Then encourage them to focus on the process (meeting their daily cold call quota) instead of the outcomes (scheduling discovery calls). 

This focus on the process is empowering because how many cold calls they make is within their control while the outcomes of those calls are outside of it.

Of course, if they are meeting the quotas but aren’t scheduling any discovery calls and consequently aren’t closing any sales, that’s a problem that should be addressed.

However, assuming basic competence – which they should have if you have provided them with comprehensive sales training – sales is a numbers game. 

This means that if they make enough cold calls, they will end up scheduling some discovery calls and closing some sales. Then it’s all about optimizing their approach to increase their conversion rates. 

1,000 Cold Calls Challenge

When it comes to cold calling, it’s best to set realistic expectations, especially with people who don’t have any previous sales experience.

Picking up the phone and calling a stranger to pitch your product can be terrifying, which is why salespeople often end up procrastinating on it and making fewer cold calls than they could. 

Moreover, once you overcome that fear and make the call, you never know how it’s going to go. 

Maybe the potential customer was actively looking for the solution to the problem that your product addresses and will be happy that you called. 

Or maybe they just found out that their spouse was cheating on them and then you called and now they are going to blow up on you. 

Getting rejected already feels bad enough but if you keep making those calls, sooner or later you will inevitably encounter completely unhinged behavior, which feels even worse. 

Fortunately, if you get rejected enough times, you get desensitized to it. But you need to power through feeling bad to get to the point where nothing fazes you anymore, even the aforementioned unhinged behavior. 

That’s why we recommend explaining all this to your salespeople and then encouraging them to commit to making 1,000 cold calls no matter what. 

Realistically, cold calling is going to be a shock to the system, they will have bad experiences that make them feel terrible and they will want to quit. That’s okay. This is to be expected. 

Tell them they can quit after they made their first 1,000 cold calls. Chances are that by that point, they will have desensitized themselves to rejection, so they won’t have a reason to quit anymore!

Discovery Call Training

If your sales funnel includes a discovery call, then you should also provide discovery call training.

Discovery Call Framework

We recommend teaching your salespeople this discovery call framework:

Step #1: Establish rapport – Start with a small talk where you reference something that was mentioned in the initial cold call. 

Step #2: Set the agenda for the call – Go over the agenda for the call and ask the potential customer for permission to get started. 

Step #3: Make sure that you understand their situation – Reiterate what you have learned during the cold call and ask them if you understood everything correctly. 

Step #4: Explain how your product can help them – Use the pain points that you uncovered to present your product in a way that resonates with them. 

Step #5: Pre-emptively address the most common objections – Typically, objections tend to revolve around pricing, commitment, and ease of migration/setup/use. 

Then there are product-specific objections such as being concerned about the lack of a particular feature or integration. 

You should prepare responses to all of these objections in advance.

Step #6: Answer questions – This is where the importance of product training becomes clear. It’s not enough to have a vague idea of what the product you are selling is supposed to do, you need to know it inside and out so that you can answer any questions that the potential customer might have.

Step #7: End the discovery call with a call to action – The specifics will depend on how your sales funnel is structured. You might be able to close the sale right there and then or you might need to schedule another call to do a product demo or to talk with other stakeholders. Encourage the potential customer to take the next step, whatever that next step is. 

Roleplaying Discovery Calls

While cold calls tend to be short, discovery calls typically last between 30 and 45 minutes, which makes roleplaying them more complicated. 

Still, if you can give each salesperson an opportunity to go through the entire discovery call framework at least three times, it can help them prepare for real discovery calls. 

Ideally, they should roleplay using the same app that they will be using for real discovery calls (e.g. Skype, Zoom, Google Meet, etc.). This will allow them to familiarize themselves with the software.

Consider also giving them a standard operating procedure (SOP) checklist that they can follow to check their speakers, microphone, camera, etc. prior to each call in order to avoid technical mishaps. 

You also want to record these roleplay discovery calls so that you can then analyze them with your sales team and provide feedback. 

Watching recorded calls can help your salespeople spot problems with their body language, facial expressions, presentation, etc. that might be difficult to catch without seeing oneself on camera.

One-on-One Mentorship

It’s important to provide ongoing one-on-one mentorship so that each salesperson can continue improving their sales skills. 

You can either mentor them yourself or ask senior salespeople to do it. Either way, each salesperson should have a regular meeting with their mentor, ideally once a week but if it’s not possible then at least once a month.

During that meeting, they should discuss what’s on their minds, get feedback on their strengths and weaknesses, and come out of it with a clear understanding of what they need to work on until the next meeting. 

Providing one-on-one mentorship will require a significant investment of resources on your part but it should pay off in the long run. 

After all, it’s the best way to help your salespeople improve their skills. And the better they become at selling, the more sales they will close, and the more money they will make for your company!

Want to Learn How to Generate UNLIMITED Leads?

Let’s be real:

Cold outreach can be extremely time-consuming. 

That’s why lead generation is the most common bottleneck in sales pipelines. 

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get potential customers to come to you instead of chasing after them?

Well, guess what? You can do that by building a lead generation funnel for your business and then driving traffic to it! 

Of course, that is easier said than done. So where should you start?

We recommend joining our 5 Day Lead Challenge where our co-founder Russell Brunson will walk you through it step-by-step.

You will:

• Create your first lead magnet
• Build your first lead generation funnel
• Set up a six-email welcome sequence

…and launch your funnel in just five days!

So don’t hesitate. Take action now. Building a lead generation funnel can help you grow your business faster than you ever thought possible!

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P.S. This challenge is completely FREE!