Training Your Sales Team
The best longer-term solution for training your sales team
Train the Trainer and Coach the Coach
Train the trainer and coach the coach benefits

"If you want to teach, to change minds or to cause action, a consistent curriculum is always better than a single event. Drip by drip, with enrollment" - Seth Godin
"The best way to tackle this is from within, co-designing your approach with specialists in 'sales learning' and building internal capabilities to continuously maximise sales performance and results of your people" - Mark Moore
Questions you should ask yourself
-
If my salespeople were leaving customers less than fully satisfied, would I know about it?
What experience are your customers really getting?
As a customer yourself how often do salespeople leave you feeling a bit frustrated? How often do you feel that they don't fully understand you, and when do you begin to lose patience and trust that they'll add value?
If you think it's common for you to feel like this, then consider how many other customers speak to the same salesperson and feel the same.
Does the manager know?
It's also worth asking how often the salesperson's manager knows about the conversational experience the customers are really getting, how it makes the customer feel, and the real reasons why the customer ends up going elsewhere.
The true cost of the problem is hard to quantify because managers aren't usually aware of lost opportunities and why they were lost.
Unfortunately, it's common for salespeople to provide a less than satisfactory service.
The big question is, how likely is it that your salespeople are the exception to this?
How they could be
Do your customers respect your salespeople and trust that your salespeople are doing all they can to improve the customer's business?
Are your salespeople the obvious go-to advisors in your space? Do they explore where value lies for each of their customers and introduce solutions appropriately?
And are you absolutely sure?
Improve the right behaviours
This is worth your consideration and is perhaps a conversation worth picking up either with your colleagues or with us.
Get in touch (click here) with us if you'd like to explore how your salespeople are actually doing (not the 'hits' that you know about but the misses that you don't) and where you might find immediate improvement.
You might also find our free resource "The One Sales Thing" (click here) useful to help you prioritise your efforts to improve performance.
- Do I want one shift or continuous sales performance improvement?
- Should we train and coach our salespeople internally?
- How self-driven and self-directed are my team to learn and improve?
- Will everyone attending add value to the solution?
- Will we be trained on up to date techniques that work?
Training your sales team - typical challenges we address
Our train the trainer and coach the coach programs can be...
- flexible to suit your timeframes
- delivered face to face as workshops, or over the phone/Skype
- measurable (actions taken and observed behaviours/results)

Mark Moore
The true cost of average sales performance
-
How many opportunities are your sales people missing?
Not spotted
Consider how many existing opportunities are being missed by your salespeople.
That's customers who are looking to buy a solution that you can provide. But your salespeople fail to connect with them and convince them and so the customer goes elsewhere.
Not created
Now add to that how many overlooked opportunities are not being created by your salespeople.
That's where your salespeople could identify opportunities to add value that would make the customer better off than they would be hanging on to their money (ie. better off than keeping the status quo).
Not effectively progressed and converted
Further, add to that how many opportunities are in your pipeline but not being handled and managed as well as they could be. These sometimes begin to stagnate and the customer decides to go with an alternative option.
Most businesses should see missed opportunities in all three.
I wonder what missed opportunities are costing you?
- What's the true cost of that?
- Where is the leak?
- Why sales improvement only comes when we all lift
- Why setting the ball rolling early makes a big difference