If you want to build a strong business,you’re eventually going to have to hand over the sales reins to a sales team.And because sales are what drive a company’s growth, sales training is one of the best investments you can make in terms of time and resources to put your business on a good footing. Improving your sales staff on an ongoing basis is an essential part of growing your company.
Entrepreneur asked Joe Rios, CEO of sales training consultancy Sales Dynamics, what the most common problem areas are that he is tasked with correcting.
Underperformance of the sales team is a major problem for many organisations. As buoyant as the South African economy may be, companies are struggling to up their revenue and the pressure is on salespeople to achieve and exceed their targets and companies are demanding alot from them. We have found that underperformance is directly related to the way a company measures and manages its people. It’s quite logical – if you do not look after your staff, performance will go down. Alternatively, the great people will leave and you will be left with a mediocre team who do not understand what they are selling.
A major measurement system that has gained in importance over the past few years is the Balanced Score Card. One of the characteristics of great companies is their ability to apply performancemeasurement to gain insight into, and make judgments about, the organisation and the effectiveness and efficiency of its programmes, processes, and people. But you can’t stop there – you have to use performance to drive improvements and successfully translate strategy into action. That is why any business needs to have in place agreed-upon measures that managers understand, a combination of financial and non-financial measurements of performance, a link between strategic and operational measures, an up-to-date scorecard, and a means of continually communicating measures and progress to all employees.
What is your advice for implementing a training program that will have lasting results?
On the sales front, it’s vital to analyse your sales team’s performance all the time. We find that salespeople are often left to their own devices – to the great detriment of the company, the product and their own careers. Many do not know their product and they have no idea why customers would want to buy it.
The best way to remedy such situations is to conduct a complete sales force assessment and to compile a set of sales strategy recommendations based on that. It’s important to define specificr equirements, scope and deliverables.
We’ve also found that some companies take avery short-term approach to sales training, as through it’s a one-off “event” that you can just “do” In today’s knowledge-based economy, workers need information and they need it to be relevant. The best successes are to be had from a long-term continuous sales training programme that focuses on the people who are actually doing the selling. For more information, call +27 83326 7599 or visit www.salesdynamics.co.za