Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016 - (Page 10)

SALES TRAINING: IS IT WORTH IT ? By Jim Dickie "Money," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses." Sales leaders can't stop to smell the roses, though - they're too busy balancing priorities to make limited budgets cover a wide range of purposes and needs. Sales performance improvement is always a top priority. A pattern we see repeated year after year, in companies of all shapes and sizes, is that salespeople or sales teams who didn't make their quotas last year are still given higher quotas this year. And that gives rise to both a lot of soul searching and an entire performance improvement industry: How does an individual, a team, a sales organization, get better at selling? Many of the questions that we hear from clients boil down to this: How do we get the biggest bang for our buck? What are the investments most likely to pay off in terms of finding more opportunities, winning more deals, and retaining existing customers? Sales training, especially skills training, is an issue of particular concern. FIGURE 1 Our sales performance optimization studies have examined the multiple types of educational programs companies may offer their sales teams, including training on product or services, the customer's marketplace, CRM system utilization, and sales skills. Let's concentrate for a moment on "sales skills" and exactly what that means. During a sales cycle, there are many specific skills salespeople need to use to transform a prospect into a customer. These include prospecting, call planning, relationship building, needs analysis and prioritization, objection handling, purchase justification, consensus building, and negotiations. A popular saying among researchers in many fields is W. Edward Demming's remark, In one study, we included a question that asked participants to rate the quality of their company's sales skills training program. We found that 10.7 percent of the programs "exceeded expectations," 42.5 percent "met expectations," and 43.5 percent "needed improvement." What the data clearly showed is that effective sales training has a higher cost attached. Companies with sales skills training programs that exceeded expectations averaged PERCENTAGE OF REPS MAKING QUOTA 69.4% SALES SKILLS EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS 10 "Without data you're just another person with an opinion." It seems intuitive, even obvious, that skills training will improve skills, and better skills will result in better performance. That's a logical proposition, but it's still just an opinion until the data is collected and analyzed. 64.8% SALES SKILLS MEETS EXPECTATIONS 60.5% SALES SKILLS NEEDS IMPROVEMENT

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016

Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016
Perspectives on Sales Training
Table of Contents
Infographic
Four Ways to Increase the Impact of Sales Coaching
Sales Training: Is It Worth It?
Trust Is Dead. Long Live Trust!
The Salesperson's Most Valuable Portfolio: Aligning with What Matters Most to Your Customer
Great Selling Today: Navigating Change
Big Data-Driven Sales Training
Designing an Effective Sales Training Program
Putting the Cart Before the Horse?
Helping Sales and Marketing March Together
Modern Sales Management
What Sets High-Performing Teams Apart
Four Keys to Rapid Behavior Change
Do Your Salespeople Know Where They're Struggling
Banish the Other Four Lettered F-Word
The Secret of Sales Enablement
What's Online
Company News

Training Industry Magazine - Sales 2016