Trying to improve selling skills can deliver lasting results—provided you approach sales training properly.
One of the best ways to up your selling game faster is to follow proven sales methodologies and selling systems. Thanks to the brilliant minds behind them, you get a set of predefined actions and steps to follow that make it easier to reach your potential buyers and close deals.
Numerous sales methodologies have been established that sales representatives can implement to witness a rise in their sales, but one name that keeps popping up is Sandler Sales Training.
What Is Sandler Sales Training?
Sandler is a full-service professional development and training organization that offers a wide range of sales process training solutions to help both large MNCs and SMBs identify and eliminate sales, management, and leadership-related issues.
Sales process training is one of Sandler’s most popular customer solutions designed to help individuals and organizations sell more with ease.
Under the Sandler sales process offering, you’ll find various training programs designed to educate and support you with a variety of content, tools, and applications, helping you become a better sales professional. Topics include ‘Negotiation mastery,‘ ‘Sales Certification,‘ and ‘Sales Mastery.’
How Can Sandler Sales Training Help You Improve Your Selling Skills
The Sandler sales method claims to provide users with the knowledge and expertise to solve the toughest sales challenges. It teaches them how to break the rules, change the sales game altogether, and avoid common sales problems.
The motive here is to train customers to help them work smarter, sell more, and sell more easily. Here’s a closer look at some of the sales challenges their sales strategy can help solve for sales reps:
- Finding and Closing Enough Profitable Deals: If you’re struggling to meet high-quality prospects, convert these prospects into leads, and close enough deals on their terms, Sandler Sales Training can help you.
- Wasting Time Chasing Prospects Who Will Never Buy: If you’re always selling to prospects who don’t need your solution, cannot afford it, or face trouble deciding, Sandler Sales Training can help you.
- Giving Away Margins With Discounts and Free Consulting: If you feel your prospects are always using your expertise, trying to get a free quote to go back to the competition, or waiting for discounts and deals before closing a deal, Sandler Sales Training can help you.
Now that we’ve discussed the challenges that Sandler Sales Training strives to eliminate, let’s also quickly review its benefits for sales reps.
- Identify Your Best Prospects: The Sandler Selling System is specifically designed to help you identify your ideal clients, which in turn, will make it easier for you to weed out lower-quality prospects who won’t buy your products. You can then research your quality prospects to start more interesting sales conversations that drive them down the sales funnel.
- Hold Effective Sales Conversations: With Sandler Sales Training, you can learn to take charge of a mutually beneficial discovery process. The module will teach you how to easily discover your prospect’s motivation, budget, and decision-making process.
- Closing More Deals: Most importantly, you’ll know how to qualify a sales opportunity after holding a sales conversation. If the prospect is a fit, you can focus on closing the deal. But if they aren’t, you should close the file.
Deciding the Different Courses Under the Sandler Sales Training Umbrella
While other sales training shows you how to play the same saturated selling game, Sandler Sales Training takes a unique approach: it encourages you to break rules and sell more in the process.
You’ll have four online sales training courses at your disposal, namely:
- No-Pressure Prospecting: An introductory course to help you start sales conversations with decision-makers conducted by prospecting expert Sean Coyle.
- Social Selling Success: A four-part self-guided course, where Sandler’s VP of Online Learning Mike Montague teaches you effective ways to build your foundation, leverage social prospecting, and hold better sales conversations—moves that will eventually get you more referrals and introductions and help you sell more.
- Negotiating Mastery: A nine-lesson course led by Sandler President and CEO Dave Mattson that covers classic strategies of professional negotiators, plus the tactics they use to create win-win outcomes.
- The Sandler Selling System: You’ve probably already heard about this self-guided introduction produced by Cornerstone. This course is designed to help users rethink the sales professional profession and provide them with additional tips to secure the best results.
How Much Does Sandler Sales Training Cost?
Attending Sandler Sales Training can cost you anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 depending on your qualification, but the median cost is closer to the $3,000 figure. This cost is often too much for sales professionals themselves to implement this popular sales method as it also includes an up front contract.
But this pricing is well within the reach of companies that want to introduce the Sandler sales method to their entire business.
The Seven-Step Sandler Selling System
One of the primary components of Sandler Sales Training is the Sandler sales methodology.
Founder David Sandler proposed this seven-step process, where each step is like a compartment that you try to pass with a proper objective and criteria. Broadly, you can divide the seven steps into three stages:
- Establishing trusting relationships with customers
- Qualifying prospects
- Closing the sale
Let’s take a look at the seven steps involved in the Sandler sales method. Here are the seven stages of the Sandler sales module:
1. Bonding & Rapport
The first step is to build meaningful relationships and bond with your clients.
You may have discovered prospects through networking or active prospecting—perhaps a combination of these methods. Regardless of your approach, you need to spend some time getting to know your prospect and building trust.
Asking questions is greatly encouraged here. This way, you can identify and clarify your customers‘ product wants and needs.
2. Provide Upfront Communication
The next step is about setting prospect expectations.
Introduce yourself and your organization to the prospect. Explain your goals and your approach. Follow this up by discussing your prospect’s goals and expectations. Doing this will help you earn the prospect’s trust and gain a deeper understanding of their requirements and pain points.
3. Pain
This is the stage where you qualify the lead and determine whether they’d be the right fit for the product and vice versa.
Use open-ended sales questions and conversations to understand your prospect better. Find out more information about their company, their current pain points and the solutions they are looking for, and their end goals.
This will make it easier for you to determine whether the person is a good fit for your organization. If not, stop wasting your time and move on to the next prospect. If they are indeed a match, move on to the next phase.
4. Budget
In this stage, you figure out how much money the prospect is willing to spend and whether they’re willing to spend it on your product.
You’ve already qualified the prospect and know your product is a good fit for their company, so talking numbers shouldn’t be a problem. So ask the prospect about their budget. Of course, this has to be done subtly, but if you’ve successfully built enough trust up to this point, your client won’t mind telling you.
5. Decision
This is the last stage of prospect qualification, where you and the prospect identify whether your product or service is the right fit for them.
A decision has to be made after thoroughly considering all the past sales conversations and analyzing the prospect’s pain points. If things work out, you can qualify the prospect and move forward to closing the deal. But if you decide the prospect isn’t the right fit for your product or service, drop them.
6. Fulfillment
This is where you ensure the client is completely satisfied with your product or service, including their delivery.
Thanks to the knowledge you gathered about the prospect, you know exactly how to convince them to close the deal. Moreover, you also have the trust and have established a good relationship with your prospect. With everything looking good, you can finally send the proposal.
Before handing over the proposal, introduce the prospect to your core product or service. Sell your product—tell them how it will help solve their problems, give them a demo, talk to them about integration, and give them a breakdown of pricing.
Ideally, your prospect should already be a good fit, which when combined with mutual trust levels between you and the prospect, the proposal will practically sell itself.
7. Post-Sell
The concluding step of the Sandler sales system requires you to provide support and ensure the customer is totally satisfied with the purchased product or service.
This is also your chance to prevent the loss of the sale to buyers remorse or a competitive offer from your rivals. Nurture your clients through the final stages, taking care that they use your products or services effectively so that you can retain them for the longer term.
Want to kickstart your sales training but don’t have tens thousands to spare? Sign up for our Selling Made Simple Academy training program to learn effective selling tips and techniques and start smashing your quotas right away.
