If you’re an L&D professional or sales leader and you are about to train your sales team for a new product launch, then you must be keen on providing effective and well-rounded training. Afterall your sales reps are the ones that are going to take this new product into the market and sell it successfully.

But, do you know what is important for a great training? Ans: Great content that serves the purpose of the training and meets your trainees’ expectations.

So how can you ensure a great training content? Ans: Pre-training surveys.

That’s right! Surveys can help boost the effectiveness of your training. Let me explain why you need to survey your trainees before their training begins.

Why use Pre-training surveys?

You spend a lot of time focusing on engagement within your training, and this is indeed critical. You need engagement when it comes to employee training. But, what you may be overlooking is how to engage learners before they begin the actual training. The trainees will come in with some expectations for the training.

They might want to acquire new knowledge or learn certain new skills and put them into practice as soon as possible. And, chances are that they will lose interest if your training is not relevant to their goals. This is where a pre-training survey can help you to ensure that the training you offer meets these expectations. Survey also helps to spark your learners’ interest even before the training and engages them with it.

Pre-training surveys can help in a number of ways, such as:

• Telling you more about the participants’ expectations

• Highlighting your participants’ abilities and backgrounds

• Focusing in on their needs and preferences

The pre-training survey gathers data that can inform you how to run the training, how to deliver it and what content to cover. According to the responses that you get from this survey, you can make changes or improvements to your training program in order to make it better. Overall, a well-written survey can boost the effectiveness of your training.

Quick things to keep in mind before starting with creating the survey

Before conducting the survey, introduce your employees to the new product and ask them to explore it by themselves. This will help you to get their perspective on the product in the survey. Also, have a mix of both open-ended and close-ended questions in the survey. While close-ended questions are good to get factual information, open-ended questions give you valuable insights that you wouldn’t otherwise receive.

Now, that we have established how important the pre-training surveys are, let us now look at what questions to include in a survey for a new product launch training:

The first step to the survey is to take the basic details of the survey takers like their Name, Department, Designation, Email Address, and Phone number. Then, dive into these questions below:

1. How many years of sales experience do you hold?

This question lets you understand the varied experience levels of people in the training group. This will help you customize your training content to match them. For example, if an employee has got just one year of sales experience then chances are that he might not have sold a lot of new products in his career and he needs both knowledge training and skill training equally. On the other hand, a salesperson with 5 years of sales experience will know the tactics of selling a new product. Therefore he would need more of the new product knowledge training.

2. Tell us if there is any toughest sales situation that you have encountered so far and what actions did you take? (Optional)

This question will help you to measure the attitude, dedication, and intentions of the trainee during the time of crises. You will be able to get a clear insight into the problem-solving skills of the trainees. However, keep this question as optional in case there is a sales rep who is new and doesn’t have such a story yet. Also, restrict the number of words in the answer to like 500 in order to avoid long stories. What we want here is a short and crisp answer that talks about the trainee’s skills.

3. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes and rate the new product on a scale of 1 to 10

Now that you are about to start the new product training, your reps must have already been aware of the new product on a surface level. With that experience, they can answer this question. Ask them to give their opinion on how the customers would receive the new product. As sales reps are the ones who are most connected to your customers they are the perfect source to understand how customers would react to the new product. This will also give you an idea about your sales reps’ impression of the new product.

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, how difficult do you think it is to take this new product into the market and sell it successfully? (1 being “Not difficult at all” and 10 being “Most difficult”)

This question gives an idea about how confident your sales reps feel about your new product.

5. According to you, is there any feature that we need to add to the new product to get a competitive advantage

This question will make your reps to do thorough market research and find out about the similar products offered by competitors. This way they will learn the differentiators and you will get quick feedback about the product.

6. When was the last time you have attended a skill-based training?

This will help you understand how up-to-date the trainees are with the latest sales skills and practices.

7. From the list below, pick 3 skills that you think you are most perfect in?

• Pitching a product

• Giving demo

• Probing

• Negotiating

• Objection handling

• Customer Research

• Cold calling

• Closing

This question informs you about the areas the trainee is most confident about.

8.From the list below, pick 3 skills that you think you need to improve?

• Pitching a product

• Giving demo

• Probing

• Negotiating

• Objection handling

• Customer Research

• Cold calling

• Closing

This question tells you about the areas the trainee is least confident about.

9. List down all the technology platforms ( like CRMs, Digital Sales Training Platforms, etc) that you have used before and are fluent with.

This gives you an insight into what technology platforms the majority of the trainees are comfortable with. Otherwise, some of them might struggle to use the CRM or any other digital platform of your choice. Based on their answer to this question, you can either choose the platform that they are comfortable with or include technology training in your training program.

10. What outcome do you expect from this training?

Lastly, all the trainees enter the training environment with some sort of expectations. They all hope to progress and improve professionally and personally. Therefore, it becomes important to incorporate their interests and goals as well in the training. Otherwise, they might lose interest. So, take this opportunity to know their expectations and personal goals so that they can be accommodated in the training.

Want to know how sales enablement can help in transforming your new product launch?

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Sales Training and Communication Playbook for New Product Launch

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Want to conduct a post-training survey for your trainees?

Read: Post Training Survey Questions

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