Sales Training

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Created: Monday, 26 March 2012 19:30

Published: Monday, 26 March 2012 19:30

Written by David DeCiero

                                Employees are the lifeblood of any business.  It is important to constantly challenge and improve their skills.  One of the main ways to do this is through sales training.  This training seeks to provide your employees with the tools to become successful sales people.

                Successful employees start out as happy employees.  So, before you embark on any training, make sure your people are satisfied with their jobs and comfortable in their positions.  No amount of training will fix a disgruntled employee.  Also, any training that you do provide to them will probably be lost when they walk out the door because they are unsatisfied.  If you feel that your employees are having issues, do not think that training will help them.  Try to understand what is going on and get on top of the situation.

                Once you know you have happy employees, it is time to start designing the sales training.  Now, sales training doesn’t mean that your employees have no idea what they are doing, it just means that there is a way to do it better.  The first step is to get an idea of the current state of your employees.  Watch (or have someone else) watch and monitor your employees to understand where they are doing things incorrectly.   I will either go in myself or have someone I know come in and take the role of a customer.  I will engage the staff to get an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.   From this interaction, I can get an idea as to how to customize the training to your staff’s unique needs.

                The next step is to understand the company’s vision.  This is a description of where the owner wants the company to be in the future.  This vision helps us to understand how the training should be designed to go from the current state to the future state.  Then, the training can take place.  (We’ll save the actual training for another article.)  Once the training is done, we want to make sure it worked.  We will have additional monitoring of the employees to understand which parts worked and which ones may need a refresher.  The key is that the employees continue to practice good sales habits for your customers.