How to improve sales skills of the workforce in retail?

training sales skills

There’s simply no denying of fact that properly trained sales skills personnel deliver better results for the retailer. Unless of course your staff is better trained than the competition, armed with more product knowledge and strategies to solve client problems, your retail operation will compete on price. That’s not a good position for a retail speciality store to be in, because it is almost impossible to compete on price with the big box retailers and national chains given their enormous purchasing power and economies of scale. Sadly, retailers investing in marketing and advertising campaigns designed to drive people in their stores only to encounter personnel who do not have the right training. And that’s an outcome no retailer can afford for long.

Product knowledge training

Product knowledge is crucial for your workforces. They must know exactly what they’re selling in order to be effective salespeople. They should know the features and advantages of the products sold in the store. Mix this knowledge about the product and enthusiasm to help people lead to winning combination.

It is important to provide a sufficient amount of product information to workforces. If you are lacking info on the products, you sell call up your product vendors and reps and get them to provide the info you need. Start reviewing this info with your staff and make it obligatory that everyone learns it.

The way to sell efficiently

Here are some problems should cover in your weekly exercise sessions:

  • What are the best qualifying questions to ask a customer?
  • How do you determine customer needs?
  • How do you overcome customer objections?
  • What are the best ways to ask for the sale?
  • How do you use deficiency and urgency to close the sale?
  • How do you create additional sales by recommending products that complement other items?

Role-playing with staff is a fantastic way to give them the answers to these questions in a real-world context. But for role-playing, it is necessary to reserve the time by colleague or manager and schedules a good date. Another problem is the attitude of people who play the role of customer. If the same person does this role often is boring for them.

How technology helps training sales skills

Technology-based training programs provide self-paced employee directed learning. The use of technology-driven training delivers benefits to employees and organizations. Technology offers ease of use, learning retention, evaluate learners, the ability to reinforce learning, employee training convenience, replace role-playing.

You can use speech-based learning to teach your workforces selling better. Created scenarios in 3D environment help learners better gain experience in selling to customers and quickly apply them in the real world. With the mobile application, your workforces can be training anywhere and anytime.

It is an effective method of learning because learners interact with virtual customers by voice. And it is more natural for improving sales skills. The combination of speech and voice recognition technology and analytics module allows to testing product knowledge of your workforces, teach better-overcome customer objections and correctly ask questions.

MindBox VR is a first speech-based learning platform allows prepare courses for workforces by voice and speech recognition technology. With our solution, you can ensure role-playing for your workforces more often.

The Advantages of Technology-based training

technology-based training

Technology has revolutionized business. Nowadays, most people must learn more than ever before in the past. Particularly for global organizations, classroom-based training is becoming too pricey and cumbersome. Even when workers had the opportunity to attend all the classes along with seminars along with to read all the materials and reports, they need to stay up-to-date in their field of work. The price of such a learning is prohibitive. The need to save costs led to organizations to applied technologies in the learning process. The technologies are changing the way corporations and individuals obtain skills.

 

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The Influence of the Technologies on Education

The internet has become a major technology to influence learning. The rise of the World Wide Web, top capacity corporate programs and high-speed business desktop computers make learning accessible to people 24/7 hours around the world. Employees can then access training when it’s convenient for them, at home or at the office. When delivered via technology-based solutions, training is cheaper per end user as a result of scalable supply and the elimination of top salaries for coaches and advisers. According to Training Magazine, companies save between 50-70% if replacing instructor-led training with electronic content delivery. Employees may also enhance productivity and utilize their own time better, as they no longer have to journey or fight rush-hour traffic for at a course.  

Information can be retrieved just before it’s required, as opposed to being learned once in a classroom and subsequently forgotten. Technology-based solutions allow more room for individual differences in learning styles. They also supply a high level of simulation that may be tailored to the learner’s level of proficiency. With 24/7 access, people can understand at their very own pace along with review course material as frequently as needed.   

Higher retention

Trainees can tailor the learning material to their very own needs. They can more control over their learning process along with may better comprehend the material, leading to per 60% faster learning curve, compared to instructor-led training. The delivery of content in smaller units, called microlearning, contributes further to per more lasting learning effect. Whereas the average content retention rate for an instructor-led course is only 58%, the more intensive technology-based training experience enhances the retention rate by an additional 25 – 60%. Higher retention of the material puts per higher value on each dollar spent on training. In times when little instructor-led courses have a tendency to be the exception, electronic learning options can supply more collaboration along with interaction with experts along with peers, and a higher success rate compared to the live option. Distance education can be more challenging and encourage more critical thinking than a conventional large instructor-led class because it enables the kind of interaction that takes place most fully in small-group settings.     

The role of technology in the education of the future

Utilizing technology in the right way can help improve employees performance. The using technology-based solutions in training of employees has a huge impact on their skill development and employees performance improvement. Their utilization can benefit trainees by adding personalization and increase the interest of the learning.

New technologies like virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and voice recognition technology aren’t just changing the field for trainees, they’re shaking up the part of instructors to changing their role.

 

 

The platform like MindBox VR adapts to market demands and allows lecturers to easily apply new technologies in the training of employees in the company. With a combination of 3D environment, voice recognition technology and application (for mobile devices or virtual reality) is possible replacing the role-playing of the training process in the classrooms. Trainers can devote time to evaluate the training of any trainees and suggest training that they need.

 

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Effectiveness of virtual reality training

Can virtual reality trick your brain? Even if yes, why should we do it? A brain is an incredible tool capable of learning, adapting and coping with everyday challenges. But usually, first you need experience a challenge to be able to learn from it and adapt. And, of course, the first attempts are also not usually successful, right? So how can we challenge ourselves and so facilitate your skills, flexibility, and the capability to habituate to recurring stressful situations you encounter? Well, we can use some tricks and at MindBox VR, we made a little research and experiment.

Most everyday challenges stem from social interactions – giving a speech in a public or media, present a product, negotiate an important contract and so on. Actually, anxiety, fear, and worries related to such social stressors are the most prevalent in our modern society. Given these facts, we were interested whether it would be possible to trick our brain to respond adaptively and learn how to cope with such situations using virtual reality. Our idea was to take some of the well-established psychotherapeutic and coaching methods (e.g., systematic exposure, desensitization, training) and use them in the virtual environment to facilitate social skills and performance. What was the setup?

Experiment & Procedure

41 healthy young adults aged between 19 to 33 years participated in the study with average age 21,8 years. The experiment was attended by 13 males and 28 females.

The individuals were randomly divided into either control condition (15 participants) or a social challenge (26 participants) in virtual reality. Prior to any VR exposition, participants of the both groups completed three self-reporting measures in order to evaluate their degree of trait anxiety (i.e., an individual tendency to respond anxiously in stress or difficult situations), fear of negative evaluation (individual tendency worry about others’ evaluations and overestimate their impact), and state anxiety (the current intensity of self-perceived anxiety). Thereafter, the participants entered into virtual reality simulation while their heart rate was monitored and recorder. This physiological measure was used as an objective index of arousal and degree of challenge.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality was simulated using Oculus Rift and two touch sensors monitoring the relative position of participant’s hands.

Image 1: Oculus rift with touch controllers and sensors

Firstly, participants were provided 5 minutes to familiarize with the virtual environment and functionality. Next, they were comfortably seated and asked to relax for approximately 12 minutes. During this period a relaxing virtual simulation was projected. This treatment was introduced to let the participants’ arousal recover to the baseline level (the last 4 minutes of the relaxing period was used to estimate participants’ baseline heart rate).

Challenge group

After the relaxation, the individuals in challenge group was introduced into a simulated medium-sized virtual lecture hall filled with virtual audience.

Virtual audience preview

Image 2: MindBox VR virtual audience

 

Briefly, after the simulation started, the participants were required to:

  1. introduce themselves in front of the audience,
  2. describe their current occupation or field of study,
  3. evaluate how successful they think they are using examples, where they see themselves in 5 years and why,
  4. name three of their positive and negative personality traits that affect their job or university outcomes,
  5. describe how they react to and cope with workload or stress in their workplace.

The guided structured questions took approximately 8 minutes. This period was split into two 4-minute intervals that were evaluated separately.

Control group

The conditions in control group were kept as similar to the stress group as possible, with exception of the actual VR simulation. Instead of the interview in front of the virtual audience, participants in the control group were asked to provide their subjective feeling about a set of virtual scenes on using a simple scale. Indeed, this condition was much less ego-involving and evaluative.

Results

Interestingly, although both groups were equal in their levels of trait anxiety and fear of negative evaluation and although both groups felt equally anxious prior the stimulation, their physiological response to the virtual reality experience was substantially different! First of all, the heart rate – our measure of psychophysiological arousal – was the same at the end of the relaxation. However, when put into either the control or challenging simulation, their course of physiological arousal started to diverge. The individuals who gave an interview in front of the virtual audience responded with a sharp increase in physiological arousal, suggesting they were more challenged and perhaps stressed, which remained increased also in the second half of the interview. On the other hand, the group of participants which rated the virtual scenes responded only a mild physiological activation, which disappeared later on. With this results, virtual reality training focused on interpersonal communication and presentation can be more effective than ever.

physiological arousal chart

Image 3: Physiological arousal chart

Implications

What do these findings demonstrate and how to use them? Well, first, the findings suggest that performing in VR can mimic the real world challenges, which is neccessary for virtual reality training. But this is really important! By such exposures, we provide our brain with the possibility to adapt and habituate to such situations. When systematic, this virtual reality training can be used to desensitize our fears, concerns, and anxiety related to social challenges and hence improve our social skills and work performance without the actual experience of a failure or insecurity.

Acknowledgements

The experiment was implemented in collaboration with Department of Behavioural Neuroscience from Centre of Experimental Medicine of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Faculty of Arts from Comenius University in Bratislava.