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 weve come to rely on Sales Managers, who were in many cases top performers themselves, to develop their teams 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 dont 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 dont 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 cant close deals, do you really want them working more of them?

It reminds me of the old seminar joke - dont send idiots to motivational seminars because you only end up with highly motivated idiots.

While I think most of Tinas thoughts are solid, I really feel that there needs to be a balance between process and execution. I personally wouldnt want certain salespeople doing certain tasks - like writing a blog for example - It may be your top performers key to success, but the dynamic of that persons abilities cannot be mirrored in process alone. Communication, comprehension, confidence and expertise are all skills that must coexist with activity.

Let your sales managers help benchmark top performers on both activity and skill, and leverage T&D to figure out how to translate that into a program that can be coached to and measured.

I just dont know if I would worry so much about mirroring activity. Sales Managers have every metric and dashboard you could think of for that stuff already.

Read more on this topic by visiting the Learning Management 2.0 Blog

Justyn Howard is the author of Learning Management 2.0 (http://www.lms20.com)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 8:07 pm and is filed under Sales Training . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.