Want to get out of the gates fast in 2019? The time is now to invest in sales training.
Why is sales training so important?
Your entire organization is built upon a simple operational concept: acquiring and retaining customers. That is the single most important thing your company can do. Having an order to fill is GOLD! Having a well-trained sales team is the fastest way to growth.
So, why is sales training so important? Here are three irrefutable facts to get us started:
The only thing that remains constant is change. The ability to change requires an ability to learn. We must create learning organizations. Sales organizations should be leading the way.
A company is only as good as the people who represent it. Salespeople are the primary “face” of the company to the customer. Every interaction with your sales people is a “moment of truth” whereby the customer immediately forms an opinion of your company.
There is no such thing as a sustainable competitive advantage in terms of a product or service. Our only sustainable competitive advantage is our people and their ability to learn faster and change faster than the competition.
Here are six top reasons why you should stop and take the time to invest in the development of your sales team:
Growth. Growth is the oxygen of any business. Investing in your sales team is an investment in their personal development. HR Magazine reports that companies investing $1,500 or more per employee per year on training average 24 percent higher profit margins than companies with lower yearly training investments. “In auto parts, you’re either growing or you’re dying. There ain’t no third direction." - Big Tom Callahan, from the movie Tommy Boy
Help to your Sales Managers. Sales managers are burdened with many responsibilities and bringing in a Sales Training Company can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to get their team productive and provide them with a clear roadmap to reinforcing skill development.
Improved ability to retain your top talent. Although they may be the first to complain that they don’t have time for sales training, once completed, it is your top performers that will carry the immediate return on investment. They will appreciate the investment in their development to sharpen skills that may have dulled over time.
Promote innovation and sharing of best practices. Getting out of the “whirlwind” for a couple of days and focusing your efforts on discussing successes, challenges and customer problems that your company has solved is a good thing. The #3 reason why customers leave their current supplier is a lack of innovation. It is amazing the innovative solutions you learn about when you bring your sales team together for a two-day training session.
Coaching and Role-Practice. Unfortunately, coaching and putting your sales team in practice situations doesn’t have to be done by Friday at five o’clock, so we find, there is little to no role-practice or situation scrimmage done in most sales environments. Coaching and role-practice (or situation scrimmage as we like to call it) is one of the single greatest drivers to improved sales performance. We bring situation scrimmage back into the mainstream.
Create a system of reinforcing activities through positive habits. Prospecting, leaving an effective voicemail/email, social selling, being in the customer’s operating reality, effective questioning, active listening, pre-call planning, objection handling and monetizing your solution. How does your sales team stack up in these areas? Does your sales approach and methodology line-up as a system of reinforcing activities? Have positive habits in each area been established? Unless it has, you will never get the stickiness.
Honestly, I can easily give you twenty reasons for investing in sales training, but the key is to weave the training into the fabric of the culture and create a system of reinforcing activities that can dramatically improve the skills of your average sales people.
At Butler Street, our proprietary approach of Diagnose. Develop. Perfect.® enables us to customize a two-day Sales Effectiveness program that is reinforced with twelve bi-weekly continuous improvement sessions to ensure the training becomes an integral part of your culture. Put simply: We help companies and their people grow.® And the proof is in this fact: Butler Street trained companies grow 4X their respective markets. Contact us and let’s set up some time to show you how your investment in sales training will pay for itself in six months or less.