More often than not, training your sales staff is cheaper and more effective than hiring new employees.
Training magazine found in 2018 that it cost $986 to train a current employee. Meanwhile, according to the Center of American Progress, the cost to replace that employee with a new employee is 21% of the current employee’s salary. So, if you wanted to replace a sales manager with a $60,000 yearly salary, it would cost you $12,600 instead of the three-figure cost of training or retraining your current staff.
When it comes to educating existing employees, sales training videos are one of the best methods. Instead of spending resources to train employees on multiple occasions, you only have to produce a video once. From there, you can use that video repeatedly.
As time passes, you can maintain the training’s relevance without redoing most modules by tweaking the information, video assets, storyboards, and the training’s structure, which you will ideate after reading this article.
An animated sales training video is more cost-effective than traditional training
Traditional in-person training often demands more time, energy, and financial resources than training your staff through an animated sales training video does.
Companies formed by a physical team need to cover various expenses if they want to host in-person trainings. First, there’s the opportunity cost of removing employees from their day-to-day tasks. Each hour or day that your sales team spends in training is time they could spend onboarding a new customer or qualifying a lead. Because the event’s purpose is to enhance your team’s performance, you may also have to hire an external trainer and potentially fund their transportation and housing costs if the event lasts several days.
Like in-house companies, remote-first businesses need to handle opportunity costs and hiring fees. But because their team isn’t in a single location, they also have to rent physical space for the training and provide housing and transportation.
The costs to create sales training videos are much lower. You don’t have to invest in transportation or housing or take time out of your employees’ workdays. Instead, you ideate a curriculum—as you would for in-person trainings—create videos for each module, and then share them with your staff as many times as you want.
Animation allows you to produce your modules’ videos at a low cost. Unless you are a large enterprise searching for custom pricing, intuitive animation software like Vyond offers affordable plans that only require a three-figure investment to access their templates, beginner-friendly tools, characters, and props for an entire year.
Cost isn’t the only reason to choose video training. We collaborated with TRUE Global Intelligence to examine employees’ workplace thoughts and behaviors between January 2020 and February 2021. We found 56% of employees prefer to watch an announcement or communication on their own time versus attending a live session during this period, showcasing a preference for asynchronous communication over real-time interactions. Regardless of your sales team’s work modality, opting for video-based sales training is a cost-effective format to improve their performance.
3 steps to making a strong animated sales training video
Training your sales unit is especially important because your reps directly connect with potential and existing customers.
Salespeople must deeply understand your company’s value propositions, the nuances of your offer, and how customers make decisions. You can ensure you’re creating an animated sales training video that will enhance your staff’s skills by following three key steps:
1. Research why your team loses potential sales
Investigate why your team loses potential sales, so you know what information your sales training modules need to cover—including whether you’ll need to interview internal and external experts to create the training and determine the speed at which your staff should start learning the material.
Recordings from recent sales calls are an excellent place to research weaknesses, especially in terms of how reps deliver pitches. You might notice that a deck is unclear or that reps are using unnecessary jargon or expressing an unconfident tone of voice. Though you could discuss these flaws with your staff, recordings are a bias-free way to review their performance.
When you’ve identified areas to improve, schedule one-on-one meetings with team members to learn the reasons behind the undesired actions you noticed on the recordings. The goal of these meetings is to compare what you and the employee believe is causing the problem so that your training is based on real issues and not on assumptions. For example, you might assume an employee’s stumbling on a recording reflects a lack of confidence. But when you meet with the rep, you realize the issue is that they have a weak understanding of your company’s value proposition and positioning statement.
The last step during the research phase is to choose which problems your company will address first through video sales training. Build your training around issues that happen frequently. Two cases of employees’ stumbling are essential to look at, but minuscule compared to a hundred instances of failed objection handling; the latter demands more urgent training.
2. Draft your animated sales training video modules
Create the first version of your sales training videos based on the identified issues. A good starting point is creating a storyboard and script. The purpose of a storyboard is to represent how your classes will unfold visually, showing rough sketches of props, characters, or the training professor’s in-class activities. Storyboards are primarily visual descriptions of scenes, but they also incorporate notes of what each class will discuss, resulting in a script.
These two resources will drastically reduce the time it takes to produce your training and avoid misunderstandings between stakeholders. You can visit our guide to learn more about how to create scripts and storyboards.
When you’ve created a script and storyboard, you can use these resources to build your animated training. If you have never animated, consider creating your video on a platform that offers templates to jump-start your production process.
Vyond offers a wide range of easy-to-use templates that companies can use to create a sales training video. For instance, companies can use our Phone Skills for Successful Sales Calls template to teach employees the crucial skills they need to conduct successful phone calls with prospects.
To raise the likelihood that your videos can truly teach your staff new concepts, gather employees outside your sales team and ask them if they feel they understand the subject after finishing the course. Adjust your training based on this outside perspective, so your sales team is less likely to be confused by the training and more likely to find it valuable.
3. Asking sales reps for feedback on your animated sales training videos
After making your video, gather a small group of sales reps from your organization and ask them for feedback on each module. Unlike individuals outside your sales team, they know the nuances of sales and have the skills necessary to judge your training’s accuracy and potential impact.
When presenting videos to sales reps, ask them to write down portions of your training that are boring, redundant, or confusing. Reanimate those sections and rewrite their script to maximize the chances of creating an enjoyable, engaging training experience for your sales staff.
Sometimes, you can fix clarity issues by changing the course’s structure. But there are times when experts will find a portion of the video irrelevant. If you receive this feedback, explain that section’s goal and the problem it’s trying to solve. If your description doesn’t convince them of the section’s purpose, consider removing it.
Train your staff with animated sales training videos
Sales reps who have weak listening skills, unclear value propositions, and poorly timed follow-ups can cost companies hundreds of clients each year. Maximize the number of closed accounts by supporting your sales team’s skills with an animated sales training video.
The animated sales training video your company creates depends on your organization’s characteristics. However, regardless of your current state, animated video is an impactful, cost-efficient format for training your staff. It doesn’t require expensive gear, flying employees to a single location, or renting a conference room.
All you need is an animation platform like Vyond. From there, you can create cost-effective training videos that are just as effective at teaching concepts as in-person lessons are—if not more so.
Create a sales training video
