Last updated on October 18th, 2025 at 06:27 am
You can’t just drop a new hire into a sales role and expect them to perform well. This is especially true for people who don’t have any previous sales experience!
If you want to have a high-performing sales team that can help you take your business to the next level, you need to be willing to invest in sales training.
After all, the better you prepare your salespeople for their jobs, the sooner they will start closing sales.
Here are six game changing sales training techniques that you can use to equip your salespeople for success…
- Sales Training Technique #1: Persuasion Training
- Sales Training Technique #2: Sales Strategies and Tactics Training
- Sales Training Technique #3: Target Audience Training
- Sales Training Technique #4: Product Training
- Sales Training Technique #5: Cold Call Training
- Sales Training Technique #6: Discovery Call Training
- Learn How to Scale Sales FAST With Sales Funnels!
Sales Training Technique #1: Persuasion Training
It’s probably safe to say that the average person has some major misconceptions about how persuasion works. And sales is just persuasion applied in the business context!
That’s why we recommend starting your sales training by teaching the seven principles of persuasion outlined in Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence”:
- Reciprocity – We feel obliged to return favors so we are more likely to accept a request from someone who has done us a favor in the past.
- Commitment and consistency – We want to be seen as consistent so when we accept a request for a small commitment, we become more likely to accept a request for a commitment that is similar in nature but larger in scope.
- Social proof – When we don’t know what to do, we look at what others do to determine the best course of action. Consequently, we are more likely to accept a request from someone if we know that other people have done so in the past.
- Liking – We are more likely to accept a request from someone that we like. And who do we tend to like? People who look good, are similar to us in some way and pay us compliments!
- Authority – We are more likely to accept a request from someone in a position of authority or someone whom we perceive to be an expert.
- Scarcity – We value things that are scarce so we are more likely to accept a request that has elements of scarcity and urgency.
- Unity – We are more likely to accept a request from someone who we see as “one of us”. This goes beyond likability, it’s about shared identity aka belonging to the same “tribe”.
You can give new hires copies of Cialdini’s book, encourage them to read it, and then have a discussion about these seven principles.
Make sure to get “Influence, New and Expanded: The Psychology of Persuasion” because only the latest edition includes the seventh principle.
Sales Training Technique #2: Sales Strategies and Tactics Training
Cialdini’s seven principles of persuasion will provide a foundation on which you can then build by teaching your new hires sales strategies and tactics.
We recommend going through:
- The lead qualification framework that you use in your business
- The sales framework that you use in your business
- The most common objections and how to overcome them
- The tactics that you have found to be most effective
- The closing techniques that you have found to be most effective
Discuss the theory behind each concept and then explain how to implement it in practice when selling your product.
Sales Training Technique #3: Target Audience Training
The better your salespeople understand your dream customers, the more effective they will be at selling your product to them.
Here’s what your target audience training should cover:
- Demographic traits – Share the objective facts about your dream customers such as their age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, location, education level, occupation, job title, income level, etc.
- Psychographic traits – Explain the psychology of your dream customers. What are their values, ideological beliefs, and overall worldview? How do they see themselves and how do they want to be seen by others? What are their hopes, fears, and dreams?
- General context – Discuss the overall life situation of your dream customers. Where are they in their careers? Are they single, in a relationship, or married? Do they have dependents such as children or elderly parents? How does all that impact their decision-making?
- Specific problem – Describe the specific problem that your product addresses. What exactly is the issue and what is the emotional context around it?
- Your product as a solution – Show how your product can help your dream customers solve that problem.
It might also be a good idea to bring in someone who meets your dream customer criteria so that your new hires can talk to them and ask them questions. This may not always be possible but see if you can make it happen!
Sales Training Technique #4: Product Training
Once you are sure that your new hires understand your target audience, it’s time to move on to product training.
The details are going to depend on the product in question but you want to give your salespeople an opportunity to try out your product, explore its use cases, and familiarize themselves with its strengths and weaknesses.
You need to make sure that they understand both the pros and the cons of your product if you want them to be effective at selling it.
You also want to go over the most frequently asked questions and provide scripted answers to each of them.
This will help your salespeople respond quickly and confidently when these questions come up in conversations with potential customers.
Sales Training Technique #5: Cold Call Training
Cold calling is arguably the most challenging part of sales.
There’s just something terrifying about picking up the phone, calling a complete stranger, and pitching them your product. And rejection feels horrible despite the fact that you will never talk to that person again!
You want to explain to your new hires that all this is completely normal, everyone experiences these negative emotions at the beginning of their sales career and it’s going to get better if they continue making those calls.
Also, let them know that cold calling will be a shock to the system and they will want to quit and then ask them to commit to making 1,000 cold calls no matter what. If they want to quit after that, they are free to do so (they probably won’t!).
That way, you’ll set realistic expectations, give your salespeople a goal to focus on, and hopefully prevent them from quitting too early.
We also recommend teaching them Patrick Dang’s five-step cold calling framework:
- Do your homework – Your salespeople should start by researching the person they are about to call.
It’s not always possible to determine whether someone meets your lead qualification criteria without talking to them but they should give it their best shot.
Beyond that, your salespeople should get some general context about that person, find something that they have in common with them, and take note of their most important accomplishments, especially the recent ones.
Just make it clear that they should stick to what that person has made public in a professional context – on their LinkedIn, on their blog, in their podcast interviews, etc. – and stay away from their personal social media.
Otherwise, they might accidentally mention something that they saw on the latter, which might creep the potential customer out! - Build rapport – Once that person answers their cold call, your salespeople should start with rapport-building small talk.
This is a good time to establish common ground by mentioning similarities that they share with that person (e.g. they went to the same university) and to give them a compliment (e.g. congratulate them on their recent book launch).
The aim here is to get that person to like them. Remember Cialdini’s principle of liking? - Set agenda for the call – Next, your salespeople should explain why they are calling and set the agenda for the call.
- Uncover pains – Then, your salespeople should ask questions designed to help them understand the potential customer’s situation better and uncover their pains.
Once they know what those pain points are, they can position your product in a way that addresses them. - Call to action – Finally, your salespeople should end the call by asking the potential customer to take the next step in your sales pipeline. Typically, that means getting them to agree to a discovery call.
Show your salespeople this video where Patrick Dang explains this framework and provides an example:
Give your new hires an opportunity to practice this script with each other in cold call roleplaying sessions.
These roleplay calls should be done over the phone, not in person so that your salespeople would start getting used to this medium.
Make sure to record these roleplay calls so that you can then analyze them with your new hires. Give feedback to each person. What is the most important thing that they need to focus on?
Sales Training Technique #6: Discovery Call Training
You should also provide discovery call training to your new hires.
We recommend teaching them this discovery call framework:
- Build rapport – Your salespeople should start the call by referencing something from the initial cold call.
- Set the agenda – Then, they should set the agenda for the call and ask the potential customer for permission to get started.
- Recap the cold call -Then, they should quickly recap what they have learned about the potential customer’s situation so far and ask whether they understood everything correctly.
- Ask questions – Then, they should ask more questions to understand the potential customer’s situation better.
- Pitch the product – Then, they should explain how your product can solve the potential customer’s problem.
- Address objections – Then, they should pre-emptively address the most common objections to buying your product.
- Answer questions – Then, they should answer any questions that the potential customer may have.
- Call to action – Finally, they should end the call by asking the potential customer to take the next step in your sales pipeline.
Depending on how your sales pipeline is structured, that can either mean asking them to buy your product or asking them to schedule a product demo.
You should give your new hires an opportunity to practice this framework with each other using the same software that they will be using for real discovery calls.
Just like with roleplay cold calls, you should record them, analyze them together and give each person feedback.
Learn How to Scale Sales FAST With Sales Funnels!
A high-performing sales team can help you take your business to the next level.
But this approach of relying on salespeople to sell your product has inherent limitations that you need to be aware of…
Why Scaling Your Sales Team Isn’t the Best Way to Scale Sales
Salespeople, no matter how effective they are in their roles, are human and therefore subject to human limitations.
You can expect to get around eight hours of work per day from the average salesperson, five days a week.
This means that if you want your team to work around the clock, you’d need three salespeople to do one eight-hour shift each in order to cover 24 hours.
And if you want your team to work around the clock seven days a week, you’d need to hire even more salespeople to make sure that the weekends are covered.
Now consider that hiring, training, and managing salespeople are all resource-intensive tasks.
Sure, in theory, you could scale your sales team to the point where they are selling your product 24/7/365.
But in practice, getting there would be a long, arduous, and exhausting journey full of setbacks.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative: sales funnels!
Why Sales Funnels are the Key to Scaling Sales FAST
Sales funnels are systems designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.
They can be either partially or entirely automated, depending on your business model.
In the former case, you’d use a sales funnel to generate leads and convert them to paying customers with an inexpensive offer and then pitch a more expensive offer to them via email and invite them to book a discovery call.
In the latter case, you’d use a sales funnel to generate leads, convert them into customers with an inexpensive offer, and then convert them into repeat customers with a more expensive one.
Sales funnels don’t have human limitations so they can generate leads and sell products 24/7/365 as long as you continue driving traffic to them.
Moreover, scaling sales with sales funnels is much easier than scaling your sales team.
Once you have optimized your funnel for maximum conversions, all you need to do in order to make more sales is drive more traffic to it. Simple!
How We Used Sales Funnels to Take Our Company From Zero to $100M+ in Annual Revenue
When our co-founders Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson launched ClickFunnels back in 2014, they had to grow their new business FAST. Why?
Because they bootstrapped the whole thing with their own money without taking any outside investment. It was a sink-or-swim situation with no venture capital safety net to fall back on.
Fortunately, they both had over a decade of experience selling products online with sales funnels, so they knew exactly what they needed to do.
Russell built a Value Ladder sales funnel and then started driving traffic to it, primarily by doing conference talks and hosting webinars.
As a result, he was able to take our company from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year. Crazy, right?
Since then, he has grown it to $100M+ in annual revenue!
Today, a decade after he and Todd launched ClickFunnels, Russell is widely recognized as one of the top sales funnel experts in the world.
He wrote a best-selling book called “DotCom Secrets” where he shares everything that you need to know in order to build a sales funnel that converts.
In this book, he explains the Value Ladder sales funnel, goes over its different variations, and shares the template for each of them so that you can easily implement these funnels in your business.
“DotCom Secrets” is available on Amazon but you can get it directly from us for FREE. All we ask is that you cover the shipping!