subject: Sales Performance Training: How To Build A World Class Sales Organization [print this page] This article discusses what to focus on when building a world-class sales organization. As a business leader or sales manager, its not your job to grow your companys sales.Its your job to implement a sales training process that serves to grow salespeople in both quantity and quality every day.Here are five important initiatives that are musts in the sales performance training process when focusing on building a world-class organization.
Step #1: Finding good people. This step is all about recruiting great talent to your organization and it does not happen by chance. Successful companies are aggressive about their recruiting, and view recruiting as a process, not an event. This meaning that recruiting is an ongoing and continuous process, not just about adding new people to your team or replacing those who have left. Recruiting is about constantly seeking out new talent. Your company doesnt just go after new customers after losing an existing one, and your recruiting process shouldnt work that way either.
Step #2: Getting new individuals to join your team. If youve spent hours aggressively recruiting top candidates, ensure youve prepared and practiced a thorough and professional presentation. Highlight products and services, features, advantages, and benefits as well.
Step #3: Getting your new sales team trained and producing. After adding talent to the sales team, the next step is to quickly get them into the game. Be sure to have a planmany sales managers and CEOs believe ramp-up time for a new salesperson is around 6 months, possibly up to a year or more. A good sales training process gets new team members up and running quickly, and producing excellent results.
Step #4: Grow your sales team into top producers. Training is not a one-time event, but rather an ongoing and continuous process. Salespeople face constant change in the marketplace every dayconsider the following analogy. When lumberjacks head out into the forest each day to cut down trees, they have greater success with a sharpened axe. If these axes are not constantly being sharpened, lumberjacks will eventually have to work harder to achieve results. Not providing your team with constant sales performance training may result in turnover or salesperson burnout.
Step #5: Lastly, focus on keeping/retaining your sales team. The Harvard Business School conducted a recent survey of top producing sales professionals, asking them to rank the top 5 reasons they stayed in their current position or remained with their current company. The answers were: respect, recognition, a positive work environment, the opportunity for personal growth, and money.
