Is your sales training offering really helping your salespeople? Is it meaningful to the sales workforce or are you wasting valuable business hours training them on skills that are not relevant to their jobs?
I see this sickness in many organizations. Salespeople are asked to manage certain aspects of the account management process and therefore required to attend all sorts of administrative and corporate trainings that end up robbing them of valuable hunting time. The result is exhausted, overwhelmed salespeople trying to balance new business pitches and complete mandatory training at all hours of the day and night.
Workforce training needs to match job requirements. When it comes to new business there are salespeople and support people. Just as you wouldn’t train an administrative person how to present a new business pitch, you shouldn’t train salespeople on admin tasks—like spreadsheet software, for example.
Webinars, meetings, vendor presentations can also be big time wasters, especially for a sales team. Wasting good business hours on attending industry webinars or sitting in hour after hour of vendor presentation takes away from their ability to do their jobs.
When it comes to sales, your people need to be out hunting for deals, cold calling and networking. Here are three ways to make sure the training and internal meetings they attend are worth their time, help them succeed and relevant.
1. Short meetings. Keep any necessary internal meetings to 1 hour or less—preferably less. Meetings that go any longer are not focused enough and waste their time and yours.
2. Hyper-targeted training. Stop training sales people on administrative tasks. There is no reason sales people need to know how to do things that an account manager or admin assistant could easily do—and more importantly it is not a required skill set for their jobs. You hired these folks because they know how to sell. If you want salespeople closing sales, leave them out of admin stuff and let them sell.
3. Streamlined Support. Your account managers and/or administrative assistants should take as much “office busy work” off the salespeople’s plates as possible. Making copies, filing, reading every “reply all” email that piles up in their inbox are all time-sucks that directly impact how much time they are out selling.
How much time per week are your salespeople actually out selling? What is keeping them from selling more?
Howard Shore is a business growth expert who provides sales training and sales force management services. To learn more about how an executive coach, management consultant, leadership training, or business coach can help your team with employee engagement, please visit his website at activategroupinc.com or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or email him.
