Importance of training for customer service and sales

By Gilberto Quesada
President of Grupo Kaizen and Consultant on Management Integrated Systems

There are three key elements for any kind of professional who wants to make a successful sale:

1. Training on products or services sold.

2. Knowledge on how to understand customer needs.

3. Development of negotiation abilities.

Before thinking about a training on selling techniques, every person who is about to provide customer service should be well trained on the products and services provided by the company. A customer who is indecisive or unsure of what to buy expects the person attending to him/her to have specific and extensive knowledge because this will make him/her feel in the hands of an expert.

The training should cover a series of company products, additional services on how to make the best use of them and how to make a smart purchase. Moreover, he/she should know the company he/she is working for, its mission, vision, and values.

Another aspect is to be able to recognize the different characteristics that make a customer buy something. If a potential buyer is accompanied by someone else and this other person might influence the sale, he/she should be recognized. Before making the sale, we are presenting a service, if the person attending to us is very understanding, this will be very beneficial. A good salesperson should have "big ears and a small ego;" he/she should know how to listen rather than bothering the customer with unnecessary details.

Most of the training we have received as salespeople does not deserve our trust because it is focused on what we should do with people, thus making our customers and partners our enemies whom we should win over.

Successful salespeople behave as partners for their customers and share a common goal with them: encourage customer success through products or services. Their dynamic is not "me against you" but "you and I against a challenge."

One last aspect is the negotiation ability; therefore, the company has to properly handle prices and mostly the periphery of its products so that its salespeople can skillfully give the best treatment possible for the benefit of the customer and the company. A professional salesperson should meet the following requirements: make a good introduction to establish the chemistry with the potential buyer. The following step is a good analysis of customer needs, by using everything we pointed out in the previous paragraph. Then, we have the "give and take" by providing the customer with alternatives to achieve the highest benefit, which even though the benefit is to sell, obtaining a customer is more important.

These three elements allow a person to face the selling process successfully through training. This is what makes the difference between a good or bad salesperson, and what makes training important is to provide tools to achieve a better performance.

Contribution of Aura e-Learning to customer service and sales:

With over 150 projects and 100.000 users trained in the region, Aura Interactiva has helped several organizations conduct virtual training on customer service, product and service knowledge, and sales in a fast and highly effective fashion.

The main value added of Aura e-Learning is that it includes consulting, development, implementation, and support for all its solutions. In the case of customized e-Learning, Aura Interactiva takes business information and expert experience in critical areas such as customer service and transfer them to students based on a proven methodology to have a direct impact on their performance.

Through the simulation of cases based on customers and decision-making processes, the student is able to improve his/her ability to negotiate because he/she has an adequate knowledge on the products, company mission and vision, and the kinds of customers that are part of their target market. While experts are productive in other company areas, the rest of the employees are trained at their own pace and with no need to spend on traditional training.

Based on an extensive experience in different kinds of industries, Aura Interactiva is able to offer an e-Learning entirely focused on the needs of each sector.