A large part of our business involves sales training and working with senior management ….so why say that most sales training does not work? The fact is that unless all the right ingredients are in place, training is doomed to failure before it begins. Successful sales training means participants will significantly improve their performance by consistently generating additional sales and profits.
There are certain steps to insure that sales training will be successful. The first component of success is the salesperson. The reality is that not everybody is trainable, and do not belong in a training program. This is not because they lack intelligence, it just means for one or more reasons they will not change. Consequently, it would be a waste of time and money to invest in training. How do we determine if someone is trainable or not? We must do an in-depth evaluation of the candidate for training. Undertaking training without doing an evaluation is like going to a surgeon because they happen to be running a special on appendectomies or hip replacement. Before surgery or a course of therapy, you must first get a diagnosis from a competent professional. What makes your sales force any different?
A second component of success is management participation. It is not enough for management to evaluate the sales force, determine who is trainable and what type of training is required. Management must be actively involved in the training and become competency models for the new skills and behaviors you expect to see adopted.
The third component of success is the training methodology. Many training programs focus on complex sales strategies, but fail to address the basic attitudes, behaviors and techniques necessary to implement them. Even with seasoned professionals, if basic skills are flawed no strategy, no matter how good, will work. And, on-going training and reinforcement is critical to long-term success. If new skills and behaviors are not regularly reinforced, participants will go back to what they had been doing previously, and the training investment will be lost.
Manny Montero
manny@saleprofessional.com