5 Triggers Your Sales Team Needs Training
Sales training seminars can enhance the lives and performance of salespeople (and the businesses they work for) because of the gains in confidence and competence – not to mention the nice increase in pay from closing more deals.
Some firms think of sales training seminars as “nice to have” rather than as a necessity. If your company falls in this category, you might want to reconsider if certain conditions exist. Any of the following should trigger a conversation about investment in sales training seminars for existing staff and new recruits.
Growth plans
Expanding a business requires a marketing and sales lift. This means hiring new sales staff. Ensuring new members of the sales team get off on the right foot and contribute to your growth means sales training seminars. Whether done in-house or using an outside firm, training boosts performance and will help you retain your new hires.
Recruiters should include the value of sales training when presenting offers to prospective sales hires – the value this adds personally should not be discounted.
New products or services
Even if a single new salesperson is hired, new products or services are an opportunity to put existing salespeople through training in order to ensure successful launches.
Sales training seminars in this case could be a hybrid between product-specific deep dives and a motivational/refresher curriculum.
Not making quota
If a significant percentage of salespeople are not making quota, the cause is likely one of three things:
- Quotas are unrealistic
- Sales aptitude is absent
- Salespeople lack the tools to be successful
Unrealistic quotas could be caused by many factors, from insufficient production capacity to hyper-competitive market conditions, and to poor brand goodwill.
Lack of sales aptitude means that HR needs to improve its hiring criteria and use personality testing to filter in candidates with sales potential.
Regarding the last point, sales training seminars give salespeople most of the tools they need to perform well as long as they have the natural talent to do so. With cutting-edge CRM and marketing platforms, plus competent management, success comes easily.
Low morale & infighting
When an executive walks around and sees salespeople arguing, or when the sales department experiences high turnover of sales staff, he or she needs to take fast action. After investigating and getting rid of the one or two bad apples which are usually present in these situations, sales training seminars can help the remaining salespeople get back on track.
Customer complaints
In the eyes of customers, a business is only as good as their last interaction. Even long-standing firms with exemplary reputations can hit a slump where customer expectations are not being met. Too many services issues and complaints, especially on online forums such as Yelp or RipOffReport, can cripple a company’s sales.
If this happens, the right things to do are to first handle the service issues and complaints and fix the source of the problems. Second, put salespeople through sales training seminars and send them into the field to reconnect with customers and re-establish goodwill.
Sales training helps. Whether in-house or through a company like mine, don’t neglect it when any of the five triggers above take place.
