As a member of the sales training community, I continue to be surprised by how often a sales training investment is not seen through. An organization spends thousands (millions in larger organizations) to provide sales skill or sales methodology training for their sales teams and then.... that's it. Last September, Dave Stein posted information about the "half-life of sales training". (http://davesteinsblog.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/whats-the-half-life-of-sales-training/). His organization, ES Research suggest you see a 90-120 day lift from any sales training.
Everyone knows this, right? If they do, they don't care enough to do something about it. It points back to two challenges of our time - attention span and execution, but that's a BIG topic for another day.
In my experience, those investing in sales training fall into a few categories:
The first - they are doing sales training because they feel they should commit to a certain amount of training each year. It's part of their culture. The training decision is made at a lower or HR level and loosely lines up with company strategy and selling philosophy. Typically this buyer has a tough time explaining the company at a strategic level and, instead, wants to talk about the training components such as "how much is train-the-trainer"?
The second - this is a sales leader who has a real sales goal to hit and sees better selling skills and methodology as one avenue to get there. This leader provides great information regarding the strategic plans of the company and what the salespeople need to be doing differently to get this result. He gives you access to his senior leadership team, even his CEO, to create the entire picture and he invests accordingly. This leader is usually pulling several other levers at the same time (CRM, hiring, etc) all aimed at accomplishing this real goal. Unfortunately, this leader fires all these guns and then no one owns the sales training follow-up, reinforcement, application or advancement of skills. Instead, there are some feeble attempts to use the new language, a few will get some immediate successes and leadership will feel "it worked". The reality is that these new skills fade without repetition and exercise and .... that is the hard part.
Then, there is the third category. Ah.... the third. This sales leader looks a lot like the sales leader in the second category, but with some key differences. This leader does all those same things to quickly assess and pick the best training for their teams. They stay close to the roll out, have a strong communication plan to their sales team during the implementation, hire, if necessary, someone to own the training and then execute on a plan to reinforce, apply and advance the skills and methodology. This leader is extremely rare.
In a coming post, I plan to share ideas on how your team, no matter what position you are in, can own and advance sales training you've already invested in or your company has invested in for you. Own it and you will be surprised at the results.
Stay tuned....
Link to original post
Everyone knows this, right? If they do, they don't care enough to do something about it. It points back to two challenges of our time - attention span and execution, but that's a BIG topic for another day.
In my experience, those investing in sales training fall into a few categories:
The first - they are doing sales training because they feel they should commit to a certain amount of training each year. It's part of their culture. The training decision is made at a lower or HR level and loosely lines up with company strategy and selling philosophy. Typically this buyer has a tough time explaining the company at a strategic level and, instead, wants to talk about the training components such as "how much is train-the-trainer"?
The second - this is a sales leader who has a real sales goal to hit and sees better selling skills and methodology as one avenue to get there. This leader provides great information regarding the strategic plans of the company and what the salespeople need to be doing differently to get this result. He gives you access to his senior leadership team, even his CEO, to create the entire picture and he invests accordingly. This leader is usually pulling several other levers at the same time (CRM, hiring, etc) all aimed at accomplishing this real goal. Unfortunately, this leader fires all these guns and then no one owns the sales training follow-up, reinforcement, application or advancement of skills. Instead, there are some feeble attempts to use the new language, a few will get some immediate successes and leadership will feel "it worked". The reality is that these new skills fade without repetition and exercise and .... that is the hard part.
Then, there is the third category. Ah.... the third. This sales leader looks a lot like the sales leader in the second category, but with some key differences. This leader does all those same things to quickly assess and pick the best training for their teams. They stay close to the roll out, have a strong communication plan to their sales team during the implementation, hire, if necessary, someone to own the training and then execute on a plan to reinforce, apply and advance the skills and methodology. This leader is extremely rare.
In a coming post, I plan to share ideas on how your team, no matter what position you are in, can own and advance sales training you've already invested in or your company has invested in for you. Own it and you will be surprised at the results.
Stay tuned....
Link to original post
