Online Sessions have become the new normal in this post-pandemic era. The pandemic has forced people to change their habitual things to some extent or in a new way, and training modules are one of these.

Sales Training & Coaching is one of the top trends from the past two years, as the world has seen a revolutionary change in the education system. Nowadays, training workshops happen on video conferencing tools like Zoom, meet, etc., making learning processes even more adaptable. 

Many sales trainers and sales coaches have online workshops where they train people in the sales domain. But having your sales training on an online platform isn’t as easy as it sounds. Sales consultants, trainers, and sales coaches often complain about their students’ engagement during their live sessions.

It is pretty normal for anyone to lose attention during a live session, as it appears boring and un-interactive. To make your students more attentive at your session, you need to gamify your session so that your students can be engaged and interact simultaneously during your session and learn in a better way.

So, this article will guide you on how to engage your Participants in your online sessions and make them learn more interactively.

First, let us address the issues with the online training process-

• Participants are less responsive during the online training
• Participants have a short attention span to the live sessions
• Low Engagement ratio of students till the entire session.

These are the most common problems faced by all the online trainers trying to upskill their Participants on a different level of skills in the sales domain.

Your Participant may be an experienced professional wanting to learn a sales and marketing skill or a student who wants to get hired for the skills they will learn from your online courses.

So, here we will address the problems you persist while having an online session, as like –

• How to Engage your Participants for your entire session?
• How to make your Participants respond during the session?
• How to increase the Attention span of your Participants?
• How to increase the confidence of your Participants on the topic?

And for these things to happen, you need to know about some of the most amazing tools available for making your session interesting, value-generating, and the most interactive. 

From my past experience of training thousands of students for over ten thousand hours and exploring varied tools and strategies for sales training, I have come up with some exciting tools that will make your online training sessions amazingly interactive and value-oriented.

So, here I will tell you about the tools which will help you with the above-discussed things. Following are the top 5 tools that will help you during your online sessions:

#1 Slido

Slido is a tool that makes your online workshop come alive with its interesting features like – 

• Live Polls
• Live Q & A
• Quizzes
• Live Video Interaction and make your students engage with you at one place

With Slido, you can create a poll in your live workshop and make the students answer the short and simple questions with the polls.

People always get excited when they see a poll and answer it. This is because it just takes a second to answer the poll, and it creates a sense of satisfaction within.

Polls are a major thing to keep your students engaged with your online sessions. You can frequently create a Poll during your live online training and make the participants answer them in a quick time.

This will intrigue your Participants, and they will be energized with this small activity and will be more attentive. This happens because people are more attentive to you when you ask something, as per psychology. 

And here you get the answer of “How to Engage your participants for your entire online session?” Just keep creating polls whenever necessary during your online training. For an online session of about 1 hour, you can run four polls at 15 minutes each.

How to use Slido?

• Log in to –   www.sli.do Create your Account on Slido by clicking on Sign Up
• Click on Create Slido option.
• Schedule a Slido as per the date and invite the attendees using email ids
• Create a presentation using different options like multiple choice, open text, rating, Quiz, word cloud and ranking options.
• Save it and run it in your online sessions.

Here are some screenshots to make you understand Slido –

#2 Mentimeter

Mentimeter is another tool that helps your students to be more attentive with your online sessions with- 

• Interactive live polling, 
• Quiz, 
• Presentations

With Mentimeter, you can create presentations and ask your students to comment on them LIVE. This is a unique tool that can be used simultaneously by the teacher and the students.

The teacher will ask a question through the Mentimeter, and the Participant will answer the same with the Mentimeter app by entering the code generated by the teacher.

With this, you get your answer for “How to make your Participant respond during the session?” 

Mentimeter will help in making your Participants interact with you more often in an easy way. 

How to use Mentimeter –

1. log in to www.mentimeter.com

2. Signup with your credentials

3. Click on New presentations 

4. Create Presentations and questions with the following options- Multiple choice, Word Cloud, Open-ended, Scales, Ranking, Q&A

Here is an overview of the Mentimeter interface – 

• Here you can click on New Presentation and start your interactive class.

• You can ask questions during the presentation and Participants will answer them live.

#3 Miro

Miro is a Mind Mapping tool that helps your participant get a clear idea about the entire course easily. 

This Mind Mapping tool gives a clear idea about the entire Course structure in a single page with a clear understanding.

And this tool gives the answer to “How to increase the confidence of your partcipant on the topic?” 

Providing a Mind Map about the course will increase your students’ confidence about the entire course as they will get a clear idea about what they are going to learn in the courses.

Here is a screenshot of the interface of Miro – 

#4 Poll Everywhere 

This tool is the best one for carrying out the polls during the live workshops and training. 

With this tool, you can make your participants understand the concept by creating live polls related to the concept you are explaining and increasing the understanding level of your participant.

With this tool, you can gather live feedback from the participant in your workshops.

 Here is a screenshot of the interface of Polls Everywhere.

#5 Wheel Decide 

Wheel Decide is the most amazing tool that trainers or teachers can use during their live sessions.

Wheel Decide creates a Spin Wheel with a certain number of choices and asks the viewers to spin it and get the right one selected.

You can create a list of choices for a certain topic that you will teach in your live session and embed them in this wheel.

After that, you can ask the participant to spin the wheel and get the right choices selected on their names.

This will keep the students amazed and energized about the live sessions, creating a sense of attention within them. With this tool, you can give your participant more attention during your entire live session.

And this answers –“How to increase the Attention span of your participants?”

Here is a screenshot of the Wheel Decide interface –

With these tools and the information we discussed, you must have got some valuable insights about the problems faced while conducting an online session.

There are many other tools in the market like – Quiziz, Padlet, Loom, etc., that can help you conduct your live sessions.

But to start with, you can use one of these 5 tools or even you can try out all the five tools at once during your session. With this, you can increase your students’ engagement during your online sessions and make them more interactive and value-oriented.

So, these are the proven strategies and tools to increase engagement ratio during the online training sessions, which I have researched and found to be the most useful.

To know more about such exciting tools and strategies, sales training modules, and tips on having a successful online training session, you can log on to hisales.com and know them better in simple and easy-to-understand language.