Transcript: Hi, it’s Ben Lai from Sales Ethos. Today I’m going to address the question “Who should I put through sales training?” This may originally sound like a no brainer. However, I would like to contend that there are many other considerations for who you should put through sales training.
1. Client facing staff should be put through sales training
Which brings me to my first point, which is that you need to put your customer service and your technical support people through sales training. Funnily enough, this is the group of people that I work with the most.
The key reason for this is that in their daily interactions with your clients. They uncover lots of opportunities to upsell and to cross sell for the benefit of the client. These opportunities are being missed out because they don’t have the sales mindset to open up and to think about these opportunities. So as a result, your company’s is missing out on lots of sales revenue. But your clients are also missing out on the benefits of having those additional products or services.
So client services and technical support; those are the first people that I’d like to suggest need to go through sales training.
2. “B” and “C” salespeople should be put through sales training
The second group is a bit more obvious. These are the “B” and the “C” players in your sales team. The key reason that these people are ideal candidates for sales training is that they have the greatest ability to improve their performance. Oftentimes, it’s only a few little things that they need to change in order to make a huge difference in their performance. So once again, this is a group that I’ve worked with quite frequently and gotten some really great results.
Now mind you, the reason that I’m excluding the D players in this category is that these people are usually not very motivated. They’re not trying very hard. They often are thinking about other things when they’re at work. These are probably people that should find to roles that are more suitable for their personal goals and their strengths.
3. Your “A” salespeople should be put through sales training
Now the third group that I’d like you to consider is actually the “A” players. This may sound contradictory in that, well, the A players are at the top of their game, right? So what can they possibly improve? I used to think this way, but in my research I’ve discovered that even top players can really benefit from having sales coaching and sales training. Just recently, one example is the LinkedIn sales blog. They put their top players through sales coaching and what they noticed was a 20% increase on their results compared with the consultants that didn’t have sales coaching. So this is a really important area.
It got me thinking as well. When you think about top athletes you know in order for them to perform at their very best they need coaches as well. When it comes to sales training, the way that I draw the analogy is that top athletes still need to practice the basics over and over and over and over again. In the same way, top sales people need to be absolute experts at the fundamentals of selling. They need to execute them almost as if by reflex. Once they get to that state, that’s how they reach higher levels of performance.
Conclusion: Who should I put through sales training?
So there you have it, these are the people that you need to put through sales training: your customer service and your technical support, your “B” and “C” players, but don’t forget your top “A” players as well. They need sales coaching as well to for them to perform at their best.
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Transcript by rev.com