Sales Training:

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Sales Training Tips:

Sales Training for Building a World Class Sales On-Boarding & Certification Program

Should we try to boil the ocean? Just because we know everything that it takes to be successful in each sales role in our organization, does that mean we need to teach it to them all at the same time when they start their new job with us?

I really cannot tell you how many times I've heard that when you start a new sales job there's so much to learn that it's like drinking from a fire hose. Hmm. What would happen if someone tried to actually drink from a fire hose? Wouldn't they choke? That would NOT be considered a successful outcome would it. Now would it?

I think that setting up a sales onboarding program so that the learners feel like they're mentally "drinking from a fire hose" is stupid. It's lazy. And besides that, it's ineffective and just bad business. If your learners describe your sales onboarding like that, you should immediately start the re-design process. You are not setting those people up for success. Period.

Okay, so what do you do instead?

I prefer to divide what we know about being successful in each sales role into three categories:

Hire it - Certainly there are some skills or competencies that you may want to hire for. And I know that pay and incentives, location, and industry will all play a role in what you want to hire for and what you are able to hire for. But let's say that formal presentations are a key component in your sales process. You may want to hire for that rather than train for it. Or maybe you have a specific way of conducting a needs analysis and you want to select people that have the aptitude to be good at that and then train them on the specifics of how its done at your company. These are all decisions that you'll need to make. Once you make some of these decisions you'll also want to engage the Staffing department and Sales Leadership in order to get their support. If you design your program without an emphasis on something specific because you planned for that to be accounted for in the selection process, and that doesn't happen, then you risk the overall effectiveness of the program.

Train it later - I'm sure that during the design process, the instructional designer will lay out everything each sales roles needs to learn in a very linear, logical order. Then you may think that you need to begin developing training for every subject, from one end to the other. But as I've said, I do not think that is the best strategy. Even if you take the stuff out that you're hiring for, it's still too much. Instead you should identify a subset of your products or solutions to focus new hires on and teach them to sell that. The idea here is that you provide them with something to sell that they can sell rather quickly, so that they can begin getting some success in their new role. Once they've sold some of your simpler products, then they can move on to something more complex. If all of your products are inherently complex, try limiting them to one industry. Or you may even want to limit them to a particular part of the sales cycle at first. Of course then you have to design the curriculum to continue so that they do eventually learn everything. But you'll probably stretch that over some months. Again, drinking from a fire hose is stupid and doesn't set anyone up for success.

Source: Curt Will link

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