Training Your Sales Team

Sales training workshops may help the more self-disciplined people in your team to get a shift in their performance.

But once they have made that shift they are not always clear on how to progress and refine beyond that.

Is one shift enough?

It's common for people to try to justify workshops with "if you can just get one thing that helps then perhaps it's worth it", but to us that's seriously inadequate to only walk away with one thing from a time-consuming workshop that may never get traction and repeat use anyway.

Can you imagine if that 'one thing' was determined in a one to one coaching session that explored the highest impact improvement for the individual? And just focused on helping them to build that capability?

Or if that one thing was simply self-diagnosed and solved at the point of need using our digital learning solution?

These are the reasons to question workshops as the only learning strategy.

It's the difference between giving a man a fish and you feed him for one meal vs teaching a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

The lifetime value of a customer, and the lifetime value of an employee who can secure lifelong customers

When you consider the lifetime value of a customer, and the lifetime value of an employee who you support and invest in to acquire lifetime customers, it should become clear that ongoing investment in performance is worthwhile.

You may wish to explore different types of support that enable continuous improvement, and we suggest you consider building the internal capabilities to do that. We can help - just get in touch to discuss.

Yes. If you want a "sales improvement engine" internally then you should. But learn to do it right.

Some sales directors or managers do some 'training' or 'coaching' with their team. Often we find that they can present their own advice on how to sell, and project this on to their team. But for some reason, it rarely gets fully embraced and rarely sticks.

This leads to frustration between both leadership and salespeople.

The reason is, people need to be supported to find their way of succeeding. The training and coaching approach must focus on helping people to learn and grow - as fast and effectively as possible - leveraging current strengths and mindsets as a starting point, which can then be shaped.

Learners must be helped to explore a number of options of what they could do to improve, and must be supported and helped to even commit to trying these things out and reflecting on them.

How to help your people do this is covered in depth in our train the trainer and coach the coach programs.

Some people are driven to close the gap between where they are at and where they could be. They always see a gap that they're compelled to close. And they seek to gain the rewards that doing this would bring.

They also discipline themselves to learn, get organised, and translate what they learn purposefully to the job. Then they self-evaluate, improve and repeat.

But they're a unique breed.

More people have a blind spot for improvement, let alone knowing how to purposefully drive their learning and application consistently forwards.

How driven and competent your people are at learning and self-improving should determine how you'll support them (whether workshops, coaching, or e-learning will suit.)

Get in touch if you want help.

Workshops are valuable when everyone focuses on enhancing learning. The ideal learner attends thinking, "I'm going to help everyone else learn as much as they can (from me and from each other) and I'm going to get as much as I can from it to help me do my job more effectively and enjoyably."

But, not everyone thinks like that.

Unfortunately, if one or two people aren't on board, don't want to learn, or are fearful that pressure to sell is increasing, their attitude can end up diluting or even sabotaging the event for others.

When you throw them all into the wash together, the darker colours can run.

And being able to run these internally means that you can work with the right groups in the right ways, and at the right times.

There are many outdated approaches in sales still being pushed on to salespeople.

How people buy these days has absolutely changed, and it's changing again before your very eyes. But it's our job to stay on top of this and keep you in sync.

Your salespeople - especially the more experienced - may need to make some changes to what once worked.

It must work today for you, and it must be acquired and applied

You may want to ask:

1) Does our sales trainer have up to date experience actually selling?

And if they stopped selling some time back (to become an employed 'trainer'), what impact will this have on them understanding today's sales challenges? (It may not, but it's worth considering.)

2) Are they an expert in 'selling'? Or an expert in 'how to learn to sell?' There's a difference.

Some former excellent salespeople who become trainers are great at telling people how they once succeeded.

But do they have an understanding of how adults learn new skills, knowledge and behaviours and translate those into results?

Do you want your salespeople to be told or lectured about what once worked?

Or do you want to help them acquire what will work for them now?

It's worth considering not just how many opportunities your team are failing to convert into business, but the actual total value of these, per month. Not forgetting the lifetime value of a customer too. Each new customer you fail to acquire could be much costlier than you think over the lifetime of your business.

Now ask yourself if letting this value slip through the net could be avoided with a shift in how your people operate on the job?

How much of that missed value comes down to the skills, knowledge, and behaviours of each salesperson?

You could also consider the value to your business if the rest of your team could close the gap between their performance and that of your top sales performer.

Since the top performer sets the benchmark of what's possible under current conditions.

However you explore lost or missed business, you'll probably see that it's potentially very costly, and a tighter and more refined approach from your customer-facing people could make a significant impact.

There's nearly always a costly leak in the sales pipeline. Finding it and fixing it sooner rather than later could be worthwhile.

It's likely that your people can make a few shifts to drive new business forwards as well as convert more in their pipeline, in a comfortable, trusted, value-building way. And when they get better at it, they tend to enjoy it more, which leads naturally to getting better still.

For help in finding the leak, you might like our free document "The One Sales Thing" which you can download by clicking here.

We have produced fast results with our clients who commit to partnering with us and who prioritise and drive improvement from within, using our guidance.

To see results, we must all 'lift'. Your salespeople must be willing to learn to improve and find ways to become better at their jobs whilst also making it easier, more comfortable and more enjoyable to interact with their customers.

And your leadership must be willing to help keep the spotlight on improvement and support their people, whilst also increasing accountability for their own performance and results. We can help with this.

Mark also worked 1-2-1 with underperforming sales staff and we saw a turnaround in performance after just a couple of sessions. One particular salesperson had their own sales profit increase by an incredible 35% in the month following their sessions!" - Sam Mathuru, Head of Business Development, Building Materials Nationwide

If sales are leaking from the pipeline, it could be costlier than you think. It's probably worth finding the leak asap.

And when it comes to people performance, the time to put the spotlight onto it is now.

There is no silver bullet. It takes time to create a continuous sales improvement culture and get everyone facing the same direction and doing the right things.

Even if you think you'll put this on the back burner and address further down the line, it still may be worth getting a high-level plan of attack up your sleeve so that you can put things in place now that will pay off later. For example, you may decide to halt recruitment of new people into sales roles until you have a more effective way to get them up to speed fast.

When the spotlight is on performance, and people know about it, positive changes begins to happen.

If you would like to set the ball rolling with an initial exploratory conversation, get in touch (below) and we can learn about your challenges and share some ideas to help.