Last updated on October 18th, 2025 at 06:25 am
Want to take your business to the next level in 2026?
These five game changing sales training methods can help your sales team get more leads, close more sales, and make more money!
#1: Target Audience Training
It’s impossible to be an effective salesperson if you don’t understand your target audience.
That’s why it’s so important to provide extensive target audience training when you are onboarding new salespeople.
Here’s what it should cover:
- Demographic traits of your dream customers – These are objective demographic facts about them such as their age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, location, education, occupation, income, religion, political affiliation, etc.
- Psychographic traits of your dream customers – These are their psychological characteristics such as values, beliefs, fears, goals, hopes, dreams, self-image, etc.
- The problem that your product addresses – Make sure that your salespeople understand what that problem is, why it’s a problem, and how your product can solve it.
- Language that your dream customers use to express themselves – What expressions, metaphors, and slang do they use when they talk about the problem that your product addresses?
- Common objections to buying – You probably already know what are the most common objections to buying your product. Go over them with your salespeople so that they would know what to expect.
We believe that this should be the foundation of your sales training. Why?
Because while everyone loves to focus on sales strategies and tactics, the reality is that none of them will work if the salesperson can’t relate to the individual that they are talking to.
Meanwhile, if that salesperson understands the potential customer on a deep level, then they can make all kinds of tactical mistakes and still close the sale. Ultimately, it’s the human connection that matters, not sales scripts.
In short, the better your salespeople understand your dream customers, the easier it will be for them to build rapport, pitch your product, and overcome objections!
#2: Product Training
Once you are done with target audience training, it’s time to move on to product training.
Its goal should be to help your salespeople develop an accurate understanding of your product.
You want them to know your product inside and out:
- What are its features?
- What are its pros and cons?
- What are its most common use cases?
- What are its limitations?
- What are the answers to the most frequently asked questions?
Give your salespeople access to your product, explain how to use it, and then go over the most common use cases.
Ideally, you want them to do whatever it is designed to do so that they would have the practical experience of using your product, not just the theoretical knowledge.
Say, here at ClickFunnels, we sell funnel-building software, so if we were training salespeople, we would get them to build sales funnels with it.
Also, if you are selling several products, make sure to provide product training for all of them, so that your salespeople would understand the pros and cons of each product.
That way, when they are talking to potential customers, they will be able to recommend the product that is the best fit for that person.
#3: Sales Training
Okay, so now that your salespeople understand your dream customers on a deep level and know your product inside and out, it’s time to move on to sales training.
7 Principles of Persuasion
Sales is just persuasion applied to business.
Robert Cialdini, the author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, has formulated seven key principles of persuasion:
- Reciprocity – We feel obliged to return favors.
- Commitment and consistency – We value consistency in others and want to be seen as consistent ourselves.
- Social proof – When we are unsure of what to do, we look at what others do in order to determine the best course of action.
- Liking – We are more likely to accept offers from those we like than from those we dislike.
- Authority – We tend to obey authority.
- Scarcity – We tend to value things that we perceive as scarce.
- Unity – We are more likely to accept offers from people that we perceive as being in the same “tribe” as us (shared identity).
Make sure to explain these principles to new salespeople when you are onboarding them, preferably using the examples from Cialdini’s book (we recommend the new and expanded edition).
This is especially important if you are hiring people who don’t have any previous sales experience. Why?
Because if they don’t understand how persuasion works in general, they won’t be able to persuade potential customers to buy your product!
Sales Tactics and Scripts
Once you are sure that your salespeople understand Cialdini’s principles of persuasion, you can start teaching them how to use these principles to sell your product.
Also, while your salespeople will inevitably have to improvise when talking to potential customers, you should do everything you can to minimize the need for it.
You can do that by equipping them with sales tactics and scripts for various common scenarios:
- How to start the interaction
- How to qualify the potential customer
- How to present your product
- How to pre-emptively address the most common objections
- How to end the interaction with a call to action
Otherwise, they might end up wasting time reinventing basic sales tactics through trial and error. Why not just teach them what they need to know so that they could start closing sales immediately?
Putting the Potential Customer First
Make sure to emphasize that your salespeople should put the interests of the potential customer first.
The priority should always be helping the potential customer solve their problem, not closing the sale by any means necessary.
Maybe your product isn’t the right fit for that person. In that case, your salespeople should be honest about it and recommend a more suitable alternative if they are aware of one.
This will help you avoid problems further down the funnel such as cancellations, refund requests, and bad reviews.
It can also help build goodwill. Someone who doesn’t need your product now may need it in the future. And they will probably feel inclined to trust you if your salespeople were honest with them in the past.
#4: Cold Calling Training
Cold calling is arguably the most challenging part of sales. So how can you prepare your salespeople for it?
Set Cold Call Quotas
The more cold calls they make, the sooner they will desensitize themselves to rejection.
After all, everyone gets upset the first time a potential customer curses them out and hangs up.
But by the time you make your 1,000th cold call, rejection doesn’t bother you, even if it comes with completely unhinged behavior. You simply move on to the next lead on your list.
That’s why the primary goal of cold calling training should be to teach people how to power through those initial cold calls that make them feel horrible so that they can get to that point where nothing fazes them anymore.
We recommend establishing daily, weekly, and monthly cold call quotas and encouraging your salespeople to focus on the process (meeting the quota for that day) instead of the outcome (scheduling discovery calls).
You might also want to encourage them to commit to making at least 1,000 cold calls no matter what. This will help them to resist the temptation to quit, which they will inevitably feel once they get started with cold calling.
Provide a Cold Calling Framework
You also want to provide a step-by-step cold calling framework that they can follow.
Consider using this 5-step framework that was developed by Patrick Dang, an international sales trainer who has taught over 70,000 students in 150+ countries:
- Do your research to make sure that the person you are about to call meets your dream customer profile.
- Start the call by establishing rapport. You need to get them to like you if you want them to listen to what you have to say.
- Explain why you are calling, what is the value that you can provide, and why they should stay on the call until the end.
- Ask them questions to understand their situation better. What are they struggling with? Position your product as the solution.
- End the cold call by encouraging them to take the next step in your sales funnel. Typically, this means getting them to agree on a discovery call, where you’ll pitch them your product and hopefully close the sale.
Here’s how Patrick explains this framework:
Keep in mind that people who don’t have any previous sales experience often come into this field with a misguided belief that cold calling is all about high-pressure sales tactics.
This is understandable because that’s how cold calling is portrayed in movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street”. The problem is that this approach doesn’t work in real life!
So make sure to emphasize the importance of establishing rapport, asking questions, and listening to the potential customer.
There’s a real human being at the other end of that call and they will simply hang up if the salesperson comes across as pushy and obnoxious!
Roleplay Cold Calls
The only way to get good at cold calling is to pick up the phone and start making those calls. There’s just no way around this.
However, roleplaying cold calls with colleagues can help your salespeople prepare for the real thing.
The person playing themselves should follow the cold calling script that you provided and the person playing the potential customer should throw the most common objections and frequently asked questions at them.
Talking to someone face-to-face and talking to them over the phone is not the same thing, which is why it makes sense to encourage your salespeople to roleplay over the phone.
#5: Discovery Call Training
If the next step after the cold call is a discovery call, then you should also provide discovery call training.
Discovery calls tend to be less scary because the salesperson and the potential customer have already established rapport during the initial cold call. Consequently, there isn’t as much need to teach people how to manage their emotions in this context.
The real challenge lies in structuring the call in a way that allows the salesperson to close the sale at the end of it.
We recommend using this discovery call framework:
- Start the call with small talk, ideally referencing something mentioned in the initial cold call. This helps establish rapport.
- Ask the potential customer if it would be okay to get started and then set the agenda for the call.
- Reiterate what you have learned from the previous call and ask them if you understood their situation correctly.
- Ask questions that can help you understand their situation better and see if they meet the five classic lead qualification criteria (need, interest, budget, timing, authority).
- Determine if your product is the right fit for them. If you believe that it is, then explain how it can help them solve the problem that they are struggling with. Make sure to position your product in a way that addresses the pain points that you have uncovered.
- Pre-emptively address the most common objections. Typically, they tend to revolve around pricing, contracts, and ease of setup/migration/use.
- Answer any questions that the potential customer might have. This is where product training should come in handy.
- End the call with a call to action. If you can close the sale now, then do that and let the customer know what is the next step (e.g. maybe you will send them a contract that they need to sign).
Discovery calls tend to be much longer than cold calls, usually lasting between 30 and 45 minutes.
This means that your salespeople won’t be able to roleplay them as much, but you still want to give each salesperson an opportunity to go through the entire discovery call framework a few times.
This should be done using the same software that they will be using for real discovery calls (e.g. if they will be using Zoom, they should roleplay on Zoom).
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!
Join Our 5 Day Lead Challenge Today!
P.S. This challenge is completely FREE!