As you read in Jeannie's blog last week, learning is a critical component to any company’s success. We think it is so important that we will continue that theme today with great insights into meaningful continuous improvement.

One of the unique things about the way Butler Street constructs its approach to training sales teams that helps drive a sustainable revenue growth model is the continuous improvement series subsequent to our trainings. This is designed to reinforce the 6 key sales skills taught in training and to help an organization get “stickiness” with the new habits. But most importantly, and make no mistake about it, having a sales organization focused on being continuous learners WILL give you a competitive advantage and WILL lead to more customer wins.

But what does being a continuous learning organization mean? What actions can we take as leaders to ensure our teams are growing and becoming better professionals?

Here are a few ways to build an awesome sales team of progressively improving professionals:

Four Cornerstones of Success

The foundational culture for any successful organization is ensuring your team is consistently focused on a great Attitude, taking Personal Accountability for performance results and making the team better, demonstrating Perseverance both in overcoming day to day obstacles, and being constant learners, and finally, being in the Habit of doing all of the things successful salespeople do.

Training and Coaching

Sales training refers to an event that occurs as baseline education. We know from experience that while training normally provides a fantastic outcome, if the skills learned are not reinforced, they will quickly be forgotten and the investment in training will be lost. Sales coaching suggests a constant relationship between salespeople and their managers, with continued optimization and improvement as the focus. Coaching focuses on driving progressive improvement and mastering the skills learned in training over time.

Role Practice

The best way to improve and perfect certain skills is to hold role practices where we have an opportunity to assess and provide valuable team feedback on best practices. These can be done through team situation scrimmages where we take actual client situations and talk through the various scenarios that might arise. Focus on areas like effective questioning (what do we know/what do we need to know), handling objections (what objections might arise on this client visit and how will we overcome the objection) and finally, gaining commitments (understanding where we are in the customer’s decision process and how do ensure our customer is aligned and advancing with us).

The outcome we are trying to most avoid is not mastering these skills and sending out proposals with that proverbial “radio silence” that we know is never a good sign…as we say, “no dialogue, no deal”. By continually role practicing (notice I didn’t say role playing, because we are NOT playing), we will consistently drive better, more valuable client interactions, advance our relationships and win more deals.

Refresher Trainings

While this may appear to be a selfish reminder from a company that delivers world-class sales training, I am imploring you to invest in the training of your teams, even if not with Butler Street. Although this is a good time to remind you that our clients are growing 4X market on average. The reason refresher training is so critical is that our customers are relying on our teams to be innovative in our approaches and that we are hyper-focused on the customer’s reality and outcomes. Think about it like we are honing our axes so we can have an easier path to the results WE need. Don’t allow skills to go dull.

At Butler Street, we help companies and their people grow through a structured, repeatable approach to sales training based on a “Diagnose, Develop, Perfect” foundation that incorporates training AND continuous learning. Contact us and join the 1000s of sales leaders and salespeople enjoying incredible growth and progressive learning.