Lecture Notes

Welcome to Lesson 4. Regardless of the size of the company a sales manager might work for, one of the most important responsibilities is to be a good sales trainer. Whether done by a corporate training department or a single sales manager, the principles behind good training are the same. The sales training cycle includes identifying who needs what type of training, planning the training, delivering the training, and, finally, evaluating the effectiveness of the training.

The following are excerpts from Top Sales Training Tips, an article from shell-livewire.org. The article does a great job of presenting what constitutes quality training.

Selling is as essential an element of your business as, say, preparing a business plan or retaining effective financial control. It is a skill like any other, and can be developed and improved over time and with practice. For sales training to be deemed a success it has to make a positive impact on the bottom line. Below are ten tips to help ensure your sales training has the effect that your clients expect.

1. Remember, no two human beings are the same. This applies to both the buyer and the seller. Therefore, every sales situation and sales person will be different. Don’t be too prescriptive and tell people exactly what to say in order to sell. Concentrate on giving them the tools which allow them to do the job in an appropriate way.
2. Selling is a process. Although we can talk about individual techniques like questioning or objections handling, these skills need to be understood within the context of the whole process. All the pieces must fit together. Talk about sales techniques within a framework. This will empower your trainees so they can pick and choose the skills they use depending on the situation in which they find themselves.
3. Selling is about the buyer and not the salesperson. You must ensure that your trainees understand what motivates people to buy, how buyers reach decisions and the importance of questioning in order to understand who may influence those decisions.
4. Ensure you take time to understand the processes and techniques that your trainees already use before you undertake any training. In order to be effective you have to understand how your training will fit in with what they do.
5. When new methods are presented they must not be too abstract or theoretical. Selling is a practical activity. Therefore any training must focus on the application.
6. Don’t use jargon and tired old clichés. In order to make your training relevant and exciting, speak in layman’s terms and make things easy to understand.
7. Training isn’t just about techniques and tactics. Sales people need to understand the importance of being in the right frame of mind to be successful.
8. Selling is a practical activity. In order to be credible, and for your training to be relevant, you must be selling all the time. It gives you a chance to test out what you teach and to update your content to reflect changes in the market place.
9. There are none more cynical than a group of salespeople being told how to sell. For your training to make an impact you must get them to buy in to your message. Practice what you preach and make sure you are selling yourself, and your ideas, throughout the training.
10. Knowledge isn’t power. Applied knowledge is power. If your training isn’t used it will have no effect. Therefore, it is important that you follow up. Whatever form it takes, you must ensure you are accountable for the training and that the skills you taught are being used. (Retrieved on May 31, 2016, from http://www.shell-livewire.org/home/business-library/sales/top-sales-training-tips/)

“It is intuitive that the salesperson with a high need for achievement will strive to obtain positive evaluations of her performance. To this end, the salesperson is likely to focus both on the source of evaluation and the means of achieving goals.” (Kothandaraman, Agnihotri, and Dingus, 2014, p. 151) When a salesperson receives quality training, he or she will be able to service customers well. This will result in more sales and higher revenue for the company, as well as a higher income for the salesperson and greater job satisfaction.

Assessing Sales Training Needs

According to your textbook, there are six methods of assessing sales training needs.

1. A salesforce audit assesses sales training needs through an appraisal of all salesforce activities including the environment in which the salesforce operates. The audit addresses many questions such as whether the training program is adequate in light of the organization’s objectives and resources. The salesforce audit is a very good proactive approach to determining sales training needs. It can also be used reactively to help diagnose where sales training problems lie.
2. Some firms use performance testing to help determine training needs. Salespeople are evaluated on particular tasks or skills to check for retention rates and to uncover areas in which salespeople need retraining. A firm can use performance testing both proactively and reactively to determine training needs.
3. Observation of salespeople by sales managers is another method used to assess sales training needs. One proactive approach would be to note particularly deficient or outstanding sales behavior and make these the topic of future training meetings. Reactively, sales managers can attempt to identify and correct unproductive behavior on the part of salespeople in response to a decline in sales revenue or market share.
4. A survey of the salesforce to isolate sales training needs might ask salespeople to list any problems they’re having or to mention areas in which they think managerial assistance would be helpful. Many companies use this training needs assessment tool proactively by making these types of questions part of the salesperson’s weekly reporting routine. A reactive approach to the use of a salesforce survey is possible as well. Salespeople might be asked questions regarding customer responses in an attempt to uncover why the introduction of a new product hasn’t been as successful as was forecasted.
5. A customer survey is another training needs assessment method that can be used either proactively or reactively. It’s used to define customer expectations and to help determine how competitive the salesforce is compared to other salesforces in the industry. A customer survey can be one part of a proactive approach to determine if there are areas in which salesforce performance might be improved. Reactively, in response to a decrease in the sales orders of longtime customers, it might be used to ask customers in what areas they could be better served.
6. A job analysis is a proactive approach to assessing sales training needs. It’s an investigation of the task, duties, and responsibilities of the sales job. Since the job analysis defines expected behavior for salespeople, it’s a logical tool to be employed in assessing training needs.

Sales Training

Initial sales training provided to new recruits is planned to correct any deficiencies noted during the recruitment and selection process. Sales training activities are planned to provide recruits with exposure to both sales concepts and new sales experiences. In addition, the company includes in its sales training information about the company history, its policies, facilities, procedures, and key people. This information is provided to help the salesperson become comfortable with his or her new working environment.

Salesforce socialization can be an extension of this initial training. Giving new employees more in-depth exposure to company personnel with whom they’ll need to interact is one way to use sales training to aid salesforce socialization. Socialization can be enhanced when sales training provides a positive initiation to task. This occurs when other members of the salesforce help new salespeople. Having new recruits work with an experienced salesperson for a period of time can help in this process. Sales managers must also be part of the training process, without overtaking situations. According to Yu, Patterson, and de Ruyter (2015), “confidence in her or his own ability to sell may decrease when a supervisor displays greater ability and takes over the process. A manager who tends to dominate training and the sales process thus reduces opportunities for the FLE to build her or his own skill set. This limitation then prompts FLEs to relinquish some control if it is the easiest path to take; it even might demotivate them from learning new required skills.” (p. 503)

For formal training delivery, companies can use internal trainers or external trainers. A company makes a choice based on which type of trainer has more credibility, how much time there is to develop the training, how specialized the product knowledge is, and the costs of each type of training. Internal trainers have better knowledge of company products and services, as well as the company culture and sales process. External trainers have better knowledge of their own products (if they work for a software vendor, for example) and can train those products well. They may also be more cost-efficient for some training situations.

Traditionalists prefer the interactivity of the classroom, yet many organizations today are open to more technologically sophisticated formats. To decide which method of training delivery is right for their situation, sales trainers should assess the number of people they need to train, where those people are located, whether this is a one-time or repeated training, how often it will be repeated (if at all), what the topic is, whether it’s information that’s best discussed, or if one-way lecture style will work. Then they can look at the costs associated with the different types of training. Instructor-led training, once quite common, is losing ground to Internet-delivered training. Instructor-led training can be excellent or quite boring, depending on the trainer. On-demand training, once delivered using brochures and audio or video tapes, is now quite sophisticated and usually delivered online. There are all sorts of Internet-delivered training methods, from web conferences (webinars and webcasts) to podcasts to wikis. It really doesn’t matter which training method is used, as long as well-supported, consistent training takes place.

References

Ingram, T., LaForge, R., Avila, R., Schwepker, Jr., C., and Williams, M. (2015). Sales Management: Analysis and Decision Making (9th ed.). Routledge

Kothandaraman, P., Agnihotri, R., and Dingus, R. (Apr-Sep 2014). Pursuing Success in Service Recovery: A Conceptual Framework of Salesperson's Power in Selling Centre. Journal of Services Research, 14.1, 141-159.

Yu, T., Patterson, P., and de Ruyter, K. (2015). Converting Service Encounters into Cross-Selling Opportunities: Does Faith in Supervisor Ability Help or Hinder Service-Sales Ambidexterity? European Journal of Marketing, 49.3/4, 511-491.