The Best Sales Training Seminars Can Help an SMB Owner Transition to Retirement

An article in North Carolina’s Mountain Xpress sheds light on a looming crisis: there will soon be a mass retirement of baby boomers, who own about 50 percent of all American businesses, and very few have any sort of succession plan.

The article highlights several issues:

• Less children are willing to take over the family business than before, which was a common transition in past decades.

• Only 20 percent of businesses find a buyer when put up for sale.

• Without succession plans, many of these businesses will simply shutter or liquidate, costing jobs and hurting the economy.

SMB owners who wish to avoid hurting their employees and communities should develop an exit strategy with the help of trusted advisers. And investing in the best sales training seminars they can afford should be included.

Here’s why:

You will develop a sales process to carry on when you are gone

You have built your business using hard-won knowledge through years of experience selling your product or service. The problem is, whoever you hand your business over to will not have the same knowledge and experience under their belt. They might try to sell in a completely different manner, spoiling the business.

The solution is to develop a formal sales process and train your successors accordingly. The best sales training seminars will teach you how to develop one with efficiency, which can be replicated repeatedly with each sale, rather than force your successors to reinvent the wheel constantly.

Your revenue will keep flowing

After a transition, employees are insecure. It happens at just about every business, unless the sales staff keep the money flowing and ease the rest of the crew’s worries. To ensure sales staff undergo proper sales training is very important in succession planning, especially if you were the primary rainmaker. Or else, revenue will dry up and the business will die.

The best sales training seminars will pump up the staff to keep producing throughout the turnover, rather than slow down and let things get gloomy because you are leaving.

You can put the best people in charge

Putting the head accountant or human resource professional in charge is generally a bad idea, as they tend to be too risk-averse to make decisions which lead to growth. In general, the best people to run businesses are people who can sell, who also possess some leadership or executive chops.

The best sales training seminars allows you to discover or develop these people.

Planning for succession requires a lot of thought. Choose an adviser who can help you look at the situation rationally and with your end goals in mind. Perhaps you never intended for the business to continue after your retirement, which is fine. But if you want the venture to survive, invest in the best sales training seminars to ensure your legacy will continue.