Highly effective sales people do not happen by chance. Top performing companies across industries provide their sales teams with no less than 8 days of focussed sales training per year, excluding product training.
Of course, larger businesses can afford to invest in the development of their sales teams and appear to have the upper hand when it comes to highly skilled sales and service teams.
Having regular and quality training and coaching can prove to be a challenge for smaller businesses and one-person-bands. Finding the time to take yourself or your sales team out of the field to train them, getting access to quality, customised training content and quality trainers at an affordable price is problematic. Many ‘off the shelf’ sales programs aren’t flexible enough to meet most sales teams’ requirements and are often limited to simple transactional sales interactions or motivational ‘rah rah’ sessions. However, to be a successful salesperson you need to be trained in more complex selling skills and processes which include:
- Sales and account planning
- Prospecting skills and strategies
- Negotiation skills
- Interpersonal communication skills
- Public speaking, pitching and presentation
- Account management and development
- Business acumen
- Deal making and proposal/tender writing
- Self or time management
- Self awareness, resilience and insight
So how can you continue to develop your skills, knowledge and mindset without the resources of a major corporate?
We need to be clever about creating a continuous learning environment. Here are a few tips:
- Think about what standard you need to be operating at. This will help you determine the type of training you need.
- Assess what you feel confident at and what you need to access from qualified, external providers. Look for e-learning opportunities, you might find everything you need online. Online Sales Training can be very comprehensive an affordable.
- Map out a 12 month learning plan which provides regular learning or e-learning sessions and has clear outcomes so you can check progress and skills and knowledge development.
- Reading material is in abundance. Sales articles and blogs, whitepapers, there millions out there.
You don’t need to be left behind when it comes to becoming a high performing salesperson.
Continuous learning is a conscious choice and does not happen by accident. Whether you have access to large sums of money or not you can create a viable learning environment and continue to enhance your capabilities.
Why don’t you have a look at our Online Sales Training offers or read about the Benefits of Online Sales Training ?
Happy selling!