Stop Shaking A Stick At Sales Training

I ran across a very insightful article in CLO Magazine today written by Tina Teodorescu (I had to cut and paste that one!). The article, “How Effective is Your Sales Training Program?” talks about the unique challenges of developing an effective training program for people that fund your payroll.

Tina brings light to the fact that we’ve come to rely on Sales Managers, who were in many cases top performers themselves, to develop their team’s talent. The problem is these people were promoted because of their excellent sales skills, not their employee development skills. In other cases we rely on HR or T&D to develop these programs when they don’t have a sufficient understanding of the dynamics of sales to do so.

The article mentions using your top performers actual day to day tasks and activity (if I am reading correctly) as the basis for your training program instead of skills and competencies. This is where our opinions start to differ.

I have always been a believer in benchmarking your top performing sales people and developing toward that baseline. I also agree that competencies and skills are very difficult to measure in such a subjective process as sales. However I don’t feel that duplicating an activity pattern alone is going to get you where you need to be.

If you have a salesperson who is a terrible communicator, do you really want them speaking to an extra 20 prospects a day? If a salesperson can’t close deals, do you really want them working more of them?

It reminds me of the old seminar joke - “don’t send idiots to motivational seminars because you only end up with highly motivated idiots.”

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Read more on this topic by visiting the Learning Management 2.0 Blog Justyn Howard is the author of Learning Management 2.0 (www.lms20.com)

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