Your sales reps are the face of your company. They represent your brand to your target audience, communicate your value proposition, and help potential customers to see how your solution answers their needs. 

But that’s only true if your sellers fully understand both your corporate messaging and your audience’s pain points. Sales training certification comes to turn this theory into reality and create the sales team of your dreams – as long as you implement it effectively. 

What you will learn

• The importance of sales training certification 
• How to create a certification program
• Which sales certification methods are the most effective

Why Certification Programs Matter for Sales Teams

You spend a lot of time training your sales reps to know your value proposition, corporate messaging, and audience concerns. But how can you really know how proficient your sales team is in understanding your buyers and products? It’s hard to tell if your training programs are having an impact. 

Enter the sales training certification program. This is a way to review whether or not your sales training has the effect you desire. If your reps pass, you can feel confident that they’ve mastered the knowledge and skills needed to drive results. 

The only remaining question is which method to use for your sales training certification? Many certification programs require reps to complete a quiz after they review your sales materials. Others require a webcam recording that sales managers evaluate and score, or one-on-one real time role play sessions with a sales manager. A newer approach involves practicing and testing reps through automated, AI-driven role plays.

Criteria for a Certification Process

Each of these certification methods has its advantages and disadvantages. Based on our conversations with hundreds of sales enablement employees, we’ve concluded that the three most important criteria for a certification process are:

• Ensuring certification environments emulate real life as much as possible
• Applying consistent scoring to every rep and session
• Keeping the process simple and easy to access so it can scale to the needs of the organization

Let’s dive a little deeper into how to create a certification program.

How to Create a Sales Training Certification Program

Here are the actionable steps you’ll need to take to create a sales training certification program that helps you achieve your sales goals. 

1. Define Your Objectives and Outcomes – The first step is to decide what sales reps need to gain from your training programs. Identify key skills and knowledge areas that sales reps have to master, and set measurable objectives for each sales rep. 

2. Develop the Curriculum – Next, put together your sales training curriculum. Choose which modules you’ll cover and in what order, and select which topics to incorporate. Make sure to include practical exercises and real-world scenarios.

3. Create Training Materials – Now it’s time to create content tailored to your sales team’s needs. These can include presentations, manuals, multimedia resources, and more. Make sure that you offer a mix of learning methods, and that the experience is engaging and enjoyable. 

4. Select Trainers – It’s also important to appoint experienced sales professionals as trainers and coaches. Look for people who can empathize with new sales reps and support them when they struggle. Provide your trainers with guides and manuals to help them work effectively. 

5. Implement Training Sessions – Now you’re ready to put your training into action. Schedule in-person or online training sessions for times that are convenient for your sales teams. Make them as engaging and interactive as possible to drive participation. 

6. Assess and Certify – Design ways to evaluate how well sales reps have learned and mastered your training materials. These can include quizzes, role plays, or recorded pitches. Decide on the criteria to pass the program, and award certificates to reps who successfully complete the course. 

7. Review and Improve – Last but not least, keep making your certification programs better. Gather feedback from participants to look for areas to improve, and adapt the program based on responses you receive and changes to your industry or target audience.

Make Your Sales Training Certification Program Reflect Real-Life Scenarios

Quizzes and tests are the obvious way to “tick the box” for certification. They’re easy to write and check, but do they really move the needle? You can ask a handful of questions before reps lose interest, and passing a multiple-choice quiz rarely reflects proficiency or the ability to sell.

Selling is the art of conversation, which has to involve both talking and listening if it’s going to succeed. You need your reps to be able to ask the right questions, pick up on customer concerns and needs, and respond appropriately.

Certification should require your reps to practice a two-way, interactive dialogue. Reps need to encounter objections and questions that mirror real-life sales calls to improve their ability to respond effectively. AI role plays and one-on-one training sessions are optimal for this kind of dynamic interaction.

Ensure Consistent Scoring for Sales Rep Certifications

If you want your reps to feel motivated to practice and improve, you need to provide ways for them to track their progress and see results. Consistent scoring is key, otherwise, there’s no way for a rep to feel confident that they’ve actually increased their proficiency, rather than having caught the examiner on a good day. 

By nature, any certification program that is scored by a human being runs the risk of being inconsistent, which means scoring for webcam recordings and one-on-one training sessions could be seen as subjective. 

Once all your reps are evaluated on a level playing field, you can add ways to gamify the sales certification experience and encourage competition. A leaderboard that enables reps to compare performance is a great way of motivating lagging employees, especially when you rank reps by the improvement they’ve made or the effort they’ve put in, rather than by natural ability.

Scale Your Sales Certification Program with Ease

One of the best ways to certify sales reps is to have them practice with a sales manager who can score their skills and deliver guidance in real time. But it’s also highly inefficient, requires coordinating a number of busy work schedules, and absorbs a lot of valuable work hours. 

You need a certification program that you can roll out to hundreds or thousands of reps at once, and one-on-one role plays don’t meet that need. Even sending recorded webcam conversations for managerial review requires managers to take time away from more urgent tasks, so they often can’t evaluate conversations within the expected time frame.

When you offer a simpler system that makes it easy for reps to practice whenever it’s convenient for them, more reps will take advantage of it. This can be self-run learning sessions via videos, or interactive voice conversations simulated via conversational AI. Either way, it means they don’t have to wait until a human coach is available, and they can receive an immediate score for instant feedback. 

An automated, searchable knowledge base of sales best practices helps weaker reps to learn from stronger colleagues, and new hires to swiftly learn the inside tricks. Automated sales training software can also enforce the minimum threshold for passing and keep following up regularly, without irritation, until every rep has reached the desired level.

Comparing the Top Sales Certification Methods

With these three key factors in mind, let’s look at how different certification methods measure up. We’ve summarized and compared the four options discussed in the post in a table below.

Certification method	Does it mirror real life?	Does it enable consistent scoring?	Can it scale?
Quizzes	No	Yes	Yes
Webcam recordings	No	No	No
One-on-one role plays	Yes	No	No
AI-powered role plays	Yes	Yes	Yes

Here’s the verdict for each type of certification program:

• Quizzes scale well and enable consistent scoring, but don’t reflect real-life situations
• Webcam recordings don’t reflect real-life situations, scale well, or enable consistent scoring
• One-on-one role plays reflect real-life situations, but they don’t scale well or allow consistent scoring
• AI role plays reflect real-life situations, scale well, and support consistent scoring. 

Overall, quizzes rank high for scalability and consistent scoring, but low for reflecting real life, while one-on-one role plays are the mirror image. Webcam recordings rank poorly for scalability, scoring, and real life, while AI role plays excel in all three areas. 

Evaluating Certification Methods: Scalability vs. Effectiveness Matrix

Another mental model — and I do love mental models — for considering certification options is to look at scalability and effectiveness. The scalability axis means, how easy would it be to scale the program to hundreds or thousands of reps and many certifications? And the effectiveness axis looks at how closely does the coaching/ certification program simulate real conversations? Will it drive improvement? Do the reps’ certification scores accurately and consistently reflect their proficiency?

As you can see, the webcam recording and manager role play score very low on the scalability axis, since, well, they are hard to scale due to limited hours in the day to review recordings or run role plays. If you can add an AI-driven scoring method to webcam recording, it becomes more scalable, but still loses on the effectiveness axis since it doesn’t allow for natural dialogue. Quizzes, of course, are highly scalable, but less effective for the same reason. And AI simulations with AI scoring is both highly scalable and highly effective.

Ultimately, if you’re looking for a certification program that will make a dent in the numbers, and that will encourage reps to keep updating their knowledge and skills look no further than Second Nature. Our AI-driven simulations delivers a sales training certification program with authentic-feeling conversations, applies consistent scoring, and delivers real-time guidance that drives sales and revenue.

Key Takeaways

• Sales training certification is vital for an effective sales team.
• Creating a sales training certification program requires defining objectives, creating materials, assessing achievement, and ongoing improvement.
• Certification methods need to be scalable, reflect real life situations, and allow for consistent scoring.
• Only AI role plays meet all three criteria.

Explore Second Nature’s AI-Driven Sales Certification Platform

Second Nature makes AI-powered role plays easily accessible so you can integrate them into your certification programs. The AI role play personas enable interactive, engaging learning experiences that improve memory retention and speed up skills acquisition, while the evaluation engine delivers objective, consistent scores. 

Key features:

• Experiential learning with AI
• AI sales training
• Sales certifications
• Onboard your sales team

What’s more, it includes dynamic leaderboards that gamify certification and make it something that reps actually enjoy, so you won’t have to nag them to participate. Scale up certification to teams of any size, and deliver a fully remote program without compromising on impact or efficacy.