12 Ways to Boost Sales Training Results
Twelve Ways to Boost Sales Training Program Results
- Select a sales trainer who knows, or who is willing to invest the time it takes to learn your business and get to know your people. Remember, low knowledge = low credibility. And less ability to boost sales!
- Base the sales training program on the optimal sales process for your business. The sales training program should use existing or newly-innovated sales best practices that are specific to your business.
- Gain “buy in” prior to the sales training program. Effective sales trainers will interview your staff prior to training them to understand their individual needs and gain their buy in to what’s being taught.
- Tailor all course materials. When salespeople perceive the sales training program to be “canned” and they spot sections that are not relevant to their business, they often perceive the entire program to be irrelevant.
- Spread out the training. Providing salespeople time in between training sessions helps them practice what they’ve learned, ask the trainer for help when new techniques are not working for them and retain the knowledge longer.
- Require salespeople to attend all sessions of the sales training program. Creative methods, such as tying learning objectives to compensation and incentives, may be useful.
- Commit sales managers to 100% attendance so that they can observe their salespeople and note skills bottlenecks.
- Develop a follow on coaching and reinforcement plan. Permanent learning and behavior change occur over time and through repetition. That’s exactly why post-training coaching is essential for long-term success.
- Provide the sales manager with management and coaching training.
- Create an optimized sales process and track each sales rep’s performance against the company average. This provides a quick way to identify bottlenecks in each salesperson’s sales cycles.
- Consider using short-term incentives to boost sales activities such as cold calling.
- Provide a similar sales training program to non-sales staff to ensure consistent customer experiences with your firm.
For a list of our sales training classes, please view the sitemap on the right hand sidebar of this page.
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Sales Conferences Often Miss the Mark
It’s time consuming and expensive to produce an effective sales conference. Many see the single largest cost of a sales conference as travel, living and training expenses, yet it’s really the cost of sales lost when salespeople aren’t selling! For example, if you have 20 salespeople who each produce a gross margin of $2,500 per day, the cost of taking 20 people out of the field for a 3-day sales conference is $150,000 in lost profits!
So, how can you make your sales conference both productive and profitable?
Sales Conference Ideas
- Survey participants in advance of the sales conference to identify needed topics and outcomes.
- Plan out every element of the sales conference, publish and stick to an agenda and involve participants.
- Ensure that salespeople receive information and skills that help them significantly boost their sales results. Remember, good managers manage; great managers help boost the performance of their team members. Make sure improving sales performance is a key element of your upcoming sales meeting or conference (and feel free to contact The Sales Alliance for suggested conference topics and programs).
- Make the meeting fun and motivational. People learn more and are more attentive when they’re entertained and full of energy. Likewise, they sell more when they leave motivated and “pumped up.”
- Watch for hidden messages and inconsistencies. If you hope to communicate that your salespeople are important to you yet the company puts them up at Motel 6, are you presenting a consistent message? If you are hoping to help your newer people become effective yet all the “old timers” are the ones receiving most of the awards, what does this really communicate?
- Provide creature comforts. Having water, soda, coffee and snacks on hand ensures that people have what they need (yes, some of us are addicted to our caffeine or sweets!) in order to focus on the meeting topics. Providing plenty of breaks (not just a mid-morning and mid-afternoon break) allows people to use bathrooms, take medications, etc. at the intervals they need.
- Don’t overdo it. Marathon sales conference sessions generally receive negative ratings. Plan in time for fun, outings, dinners and drinks and never end the meeting past the published times on the agenda.
- Coach your presenters. Even the best content can be boring if presented poorly. So, consider having a “dry run” of your sales conference and coach your presenters to be interesting and interactive (and contact The Sales Alliance if we can assist with this function).
- Provide take-aways such as handouts, reference cards, pricing guides and software. People are able to retain more if they have reference materials to both re-read and to refer to when needed.
Indeed, time spent planning a sales conference, and including the best possible tools and materials, is essential to a profitable and productive meeting.
All Rights Reserved. The Sales Alliance Inc. San Diego, CA
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Traditional Sales Training Leads to Decline in Sales
Many companies looking for sales training classes are hoping that the end result will be a sales increase. And while that’s the best possible outcome, many sales training classes fail to produce either short-term or long-lasting results.
Industrial psychologist and sales researcher Neil Rackham reports in a landmark study that sales results typically went DOWN after traditional, non-customized sales training classes were implemented. Why?
Shortcomings of Sales Training Classes
- Sales training class materials were not sufficiently tailored to the client company or industry. Consequently, salespeople selling products like computer networks were using techniques more appropriate to other industries such as insurance and financial services. The use of suboptimal, less-than-successful sales techniques resulted in a higher level of objections and lost sales.
- Sales training classes used outdated techniques, like classical closing and appointment-setting methods popular in the 80′s and 90′s. Prospects’ everyday exposure to older and commonly-used sales techniques helped them easily identify someone as a “salesperson.” Indeed, when salespeople are “tagged” as such, they are often “screened” and prevented from reaching decision makers and making sales.
- The sales trainer(s) hired to present the training program lacked credibility with the salespeople they were training. In fact, many of the trainers spent little time prior to the training session learning their clients’ businesses or interviewing program participants. This knowledge gap was readily apparent to the salespeople who, in turn, failed to believe in or adopt much of what was presented in the training.
- When initially trying out newly-learned sales techniques with customers and prospects, salespeople often felt “awkward” and failed to successfully use the new techniques. Consequently, their sales results often went down. Due to a lack of success applying these new techniques, the most common reaction was to revert back to their old style of selling. Many sales training classes lacked the post-training sales team coaching needed to help salespeople through this “awkward use” phase so that they were consistently and successfully applying the new sales techniques.
Indeed, for sales training classes to produce measurable results, it is essential to tailor the training to each company and to select a sales training speaker and facilitator who can gain credibility with the sales team. The Sales Alliance customizes all sales training classes and, to further boost results, can tie training outcomes to company compensation, incentives, coaching, post-training reinforcement and “best sales practices.”
All Rights Reserved. The Sales Alliance Inc. San Diego, California.
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