Negotiation training is a staple of the sales world. When you rely on your sales team to close sales and net lucrative contracts for your company, you need to invest in their professional skill development so you can get the results you expect. Negotiation is a delicate area; some people are naturally talented negotiators who seem to respond with grace to unpredictable situations. Others excel at one or two areas of negotiation but struggle to break outside of their comfort zones. Still others may be talented salespeople but struggle to go “off script” and feel lost when they encounter an unforeseen variable in a negotiation.
As a sales manager, it’s your job to identify your team members’ strengths and capitalize on them, but it’s also your responsibility to help them refine their skill sets and become more adept at negotiations. When it comes to negotiation training, online courses can be fast and effective resources for helping your team members enhance their negotiation skills in a cost-effective way. However, if you’re looking for a negotiation course online that can offer the value you expect, it’s vital to know the elements that make for a great online negotiation course.
1. The Course Should Be Engaging
Required trainings are a staple of the modern corporate world, and while they may offer a bit of a break from your team’s typical day-to-day activities, they can be tiresome and ineffective when they aren’t engaging. If your team isn’t interested in their training materials, the chance that members will absorb anything useful from them is quite low. If you want to invest in a solid negotiation course online, take time to research the provider and read reviews from other sales professionals. Did they mention that the material was interesting and engaging? Did they report positive results after their teams completed the training?
Taking time to research engaging negotiation training online will pay off tremendously. Your team will ultimately learn much more from an engaging negotiation course online than a run-of-the-mill slideshow presentation that is more likely to put them to sleep than it is to teach them anything useful. Engagement leads to better information retention, so choose carefully, and select a negotiation course online that offers a memorable and valuable experience to your team.
2. A Little Bit of Entertainment Goes a Long Way
Just like you want your negotiation training online to be engaging, you also want to keep your team interested in learning more from the provider. Look for a negotiation course online that offers a bit of entertainment. Professionalism is certainly important, but a training provider that can provide a bit of fun not only keeps your team more interested, but also increases the chances of them retaining the information from the course.
Entertainment in negotiation training online can take many forms, from mini games played through the browser to humorous training dialogue and cleverly designed examples. Consider taking advantage of trial editions or free trials of a negotiation course online to determine if it’s a good fit for your team, and one that will keep members entertained and interested during the training process.
3. Does the Training Program Use Breakout Rooms Online?
Breakout rooms are a sweeping trend across the nation. Teams are locked inside rooms and forced to explore, work together, and solve puzzles to escape. This concept translates fairly well to online training courses, especially those designed to build teamwork and offer teamwide skill building. Look for a negotiation course online that takes elements of what makes breakout rooms so successful and crafts it into an intuitive format.
A digital breakout room experience can allow your whole team to enhance members’ abilities to work together while simultaneously sharpening each member’s individual negotiation skills. If some members of your sales team excel in some areas that others are lacking and vice versa, these training experiences are fantastic tools for sharpening essential negotiation skills.
4. Find a Negotiation Training Course With a Live Facilitator
Many negotiation courses online feature prerecorded video clips from a course facilitator, but these are often detached and impersonal. These clips typically serve as introductions and conclusions to each training module and not much more. However, you can find negotiation training online that offers video with a live facilitator. This provides a much more in-depth training experience for your team and potentially allows members to ask questions and seek specific examples in real time.
A live facilitator automatically lends authority to a training program and offers a more customizable experience. Instead of engaging with a basic program meant to appeal to a broad audience without any specific focus, a live facilitator in a negotiation course online can address your team’s market niche and individual concerns.
5. Does the Program Involve Mobile Application Integration?
A good negotiation course online should offer some type of ongoing skill reinforcement functionality. Shapiro Negotiations offers a mobile app that’s currently available on Google Play and the Apple App Store that integrates seamlessly with our negotiation training online. Instead of approaching a negotiation course online as a “once-and-done” ordeal, your team can take advantage of ongoing learning with a robust toolset designed for engagement and better information retention.
Mobile apps are convenient, easy to access, and offer robust training tools that your team can access from virtually anywhere. If your team is traveling for a meeting, the mobile training tools can be great ways to spend the time waiting in airport boarding areas or between meetings abroad.
Find the Right Negotiation Course Online for Your Sales Team
There is no one single negotiation training online that’s perfect for every sales team. Instead of looking for the “best” negotiation course online, find the one that’s the best fit for your team. The negotiation training you choose should be a solid investment that helps your team overcome its biggest negotiation challenges, keeps members engaged, and offers customizable, ongoing training tools they can use in the most convenient formats for them. Shapiro Negotiations specializes in customized negotiation training online, and your team can pair browser-based training materials with our mobile application for a robust, custom-tailored training experience you cannot find from any other provider. Contact Shapiro Negotiations today for more information about our negotiation training online.
