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How much training should I give my sales team?

Guest post by: Sue Barrett

Article Overview: Highly effective sales people and teams do not happen by chance. A study by Aberdeen Group (2009) of 8,500 top performing companies with a turnover in excess of $50 million, showed that the highest performing of these in each of their industries provided their sales teams with no less than 8 days of focussed sales training per year, and this did not include product training.

How much training should I give my sales team?

Highly effective sales people and teams do not happen by chance. A study by Aberdeen Group (2009) of 8,500 top performing companies with a turnover in excess of $50 million, showed that the highest performing of these in each of their industries provided their sales teams with no less than 8 days of focussed sales training per year, and this did not include product training.

Another Aberdeen Group Productivity report (2008) showed that top-performing sales organisations were 24% more likely than all other companies to either have in place, or have short-term plans to implement, formal sales training methodologies.

It is plausible that larger businesses can afford to, and do invest in, the development of their sales teams on a more consistent basis. Usually supported by Learning & Development departments, access to the latest research and training providers, corporates and larger businesses can appear to have the upper hand when it comes to highly skilled sales and service teams.

Providing regular and quality training and coaching can prove to be a challenge for smaller businesses. Finding the time to take 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. Too many ‘off the shelf’ sales programs aren’t usually flexible enough to meet most sales teams’ requirements and are often limited to simple transactional sales interactions or motivational ‘rah rah’ sessions. However, for many SME sales teams to compete head to head with the skills of larger businesses they need to be trained in more complex selling skills and processes which include:

• Sales and account planning
• Prospecting skills and strategies
• Consultative/diagnostics selling skills
• Negotiation skills
• Interpersonal communication skills
• Public speaking, pitching and presentation skills
• Account management and development
• Business acumen
• Deal making and proposal/tender writing
• Self or time management
• Self awareness, resilience and insight

So how can SME’s continue to develop the skills, knowledge and mindset of their sales teams even though they do not have the resources of a major corporate? We need to be clever about creating a continuous learning environment in SME’s. Here are a few tips:

1. Think about what standard you need your sales and customer service people to be operating at. This will help you determine the type of training you need to provide them with.
2. Assess what you feel confident delivering in-house and what you need to access from qualified, external providers. Research your external providers and make sure they deliver practical, competency based training that can be taught and transferred to others.
3. Map out a 12 month learning plan which provides regular learning sessions and has clear learning outcomes so you can check progress and skills and knowledge development. Not all of your training need be full day workshops. The best value is gained from ‘mini’ sessions of 30 minutes to 1 hour run regularly (fortnightly or at least every 4 weeks) interspersed with more formal classroom learning i.e. between 1-4 days per year on key topics where you need formal instruction.
4. The mini learning sessions can focus on specific topics. A great way to include everyone and create accountability for learning, is to allocate topics to your sales and customer service people and have each of them select a topic they will research and present to the team. This helps you spread the learning load whilst giving your people the chance to practice their presentation skills. Rotate these sessions amongst your sales team. Make sure the environment is supportive and constructive to encourage rather than discourage participation.
5. Reading material is in abundance. Giving your people access to free sales articles, such as the ones I write, can be used to assist further learning. Many of our clients’ sales managers use these sales articles to aid their sales team development. Whether they send it out as a topic to read or use the topic as a point for discussion in their sales meeting, they are creating a continuous learning environment.
6. If you are going to invest in external development, a critical area is sales management and coaching. This can have the greatest return on investment for you and your sales team in terms of their professional development. Between 60-70% of a sales managers time should be devoted to people development. We suggest you get yourself or your sales managers professionally trained as sales coaches and trainers. For instance, we have built a Sales Leader’s Tool Kit which includes sales coaching field guides and mini skill, drill learning sessions that sales managers can run with their sales teams on a regular basis. This equips them to run structured, well planned sessions, and aids the development of your sales teams and shows your commitment to their ongoing development.

SME’s don’t need to be left behind when it comes to having high performing sales and customer service teams.

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 the capabilities of your sales and service teams.

Start with the end in mind –sales mastery is a way of life not a fad.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

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Article Tags: coaching, learning, sales, sales coaching, sales team, sales training, training



Related Forum Posts
Training - Louis: Some regulated industries mandate that you attend training. However, even then, finding time to meet those requirements becomes an issue. This may explain the growth of tele-seminars. To answer your questions though, ROI is very important and everyone needs to sell or market no matter what they do. The best tip I ever got on training is not to pitch training as training b/c even big companies have limited budgets for training but training rebranded as "sales support." It makes the ROI argument that much more appealing. Hope that helps. Good luck.
Re: Training and Self Development - I've found the biggest barrier is leaders who don't completely buy-in to the notion that training is needed. For example, if leadership doesn't value or believe in team building then they will not be very likely to support a long-term, comprehensive program to help create a new team building culture. I've noticed that training and self-development work best when people are committed to practicing new behaviors over time. [Link removed by forum admin]
Training makes you healthier... - According to an article in today's Metro training is about more than just the economy. [quote:6xs3a3qe]... going to college, university or skills training helps Canadians live richer, healthier lives and give back more to their communities. People with some schooling beyond high school get sick less often, are more likely than others to vote, to volunteer and give to charity and less likely to break to law...[/quote:6xs3a3qe] And I thought that just being more competitive was reason enough!
Who/what inspired you? - I was just curious what or who inspired you to go into the field of sales and what did they do that caused the inspiration. We have a sales team that I would like to light a fire under and could use a little help knowing what makes people spark.
Re: Sales with no start up fees. - Hey Mary, Have you tried help wanted ads? There are a ton of IT & sales people out of work right now, if there is no cost to become a reseller, how about running an ad for a commission sales person that has sold advertising or software before? Set them up with a reseller website, some business cards, provide some training and get them to get your leads onto a webinar using gotomeeting or one like that? I have had success with this in other venues with sales, not software, but similar arena.


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