Importance Of Sales Training

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In today’s marketplace, it’s a given that everyone wants increased sales, a bigger slice of the pie. Yet virtually everyone is finding this continually more difficult to achieve.

There are many reasons why this is true. Maybe the sheer number of your competitors has increased. Perhaps your customers’ purchasing decisions are being impacted by growing price pressures. Possibly your market is maturing or your technology aging.

So unless your product or service is the only one of its kind, you’re looking for an edge; an advantage; something to make you stand apart from your major competition.

Defining Our Terms

Here’s a quick vocabulary exercise.

In relatively casual language, selling can be defined as a bid to influence another/others to take an action although you don’t have the capability or authority to actually compel them to do your will. This was true when the first salesperson persuaded her prospect about the benefits of taking a bite from an apple, and it has continued to be valid right on down through history.

Sales training may be defined as those things which are done to help salespeople gain mastery in the skills, concepts, behaviors, and attitudes that will enhance their expertise in influencing prospects to make positive purchasing decisions. Sales training concentrates on how prospective sellers and buyers interact. It provides tools and techniques that help salespeople learn what they must know in order to persuasively present their goods or services to buyers in terms that buyers will understand and ultimately respond to.

If sales training concentrates on the ways in which prospective buyers and sellers interact, product training focuses on the dissemination of information and tools that support the selling of the particular product or service. For our purposes, product training will be considered as a subset of sales training.

What Happens When Sales Training Is Inadequate

When sales training is deficient, several negative outcomes are likely to result.

First, management expectations regarding the company’s products or services are not communicated through the ranks. In addition, experiences relating to products or services are not communicated back to management. This breakdown in communication often results in management and sales personnel working toward different goals.

Next, salespeople can lack confidence in their ability to market the company’s products or services. They may experience frustration and low morale. They may also fall back to the old tried-and-true ways of selling. These are the methods that didn’t work very well back in the good old days and haven’t gotten any more effective in the interim. When this happens, chances are excellent that sales quotas will not be met and revenue goals will not be achieved.

Finally, support personnel may be ill prepared to perform their jobs. For example, install the product, respond to customer service calls, etc. When this happens, customer satisfaction falls below acceptable levels and a loss of profit is the likely result.

The Positive Value Of Sales Training

The sales training function will be most securely entrenched in companies that are marketing-driven. These organizations recognize intuitively and explicitly that their goal is to sell profitably.

When marketing occupies a preeminent position in the hierarchy of company values, sales training usually holds a position of commensurate significance. This is basically true whether a company’s sales force is comprised of only a few salespeople who report to a single sales/product manager or many hundreds of salespeople organized among cross-functional teams.

So what’s the value of sales training? The key consequences are listed below.

Sales training increases the performance of salespeople, resulting in increased sales, by:

Preparing salespeople to maximize the effectiveness of each customer encounter.
Teaching salespeople a systematic selling process which makes it easier for them to apply specific selling techniques based on customer-initiated buying signals.
Improving the ability of salespeople to carry out corporate-endorsed selling strategies.

Sales training improves customer relations by:

Helping salespeople understand their customers’ underlying buying motivations.
Enabling salespeople to deal more effectively with customer concerns and objections.

Sales training improves the cost effectiveness of selling activities by training salespeople to qualify and prioritize genuine opportunities more quickly.

Sales training can reduce turnover for sales personnel by:

Getting new hires up-to-speed more quickly.
Helping experienced salespeople become more successful with existing opportunities.

Sales training reduces overall training costs by making more effective use of:

Salespeoples’ training time.
Current training resources.

Sales training improves the overall effectiveness of training by applying it universally throughout the company’s entire sales, sales support, and marketing organization.

For a broader/deeper perspective on these and related topics, check out:

	Using Sales Training Best Practices To Increase Sales
	Developing Performance-Based Sales Training To Increase Sales