Stop Shaking A Stick At Sales Training

March 29th, 2007

by Justyn Howard

I ran across a very insightful article in CLO Magazine today written by Tina Teodorescu (I had to cut and paste that one!). The article, “How Effective is Your Sales Training Program?” talks about the unique challenges of developing an effective sales training program for people that fund your payroll.

Tina brings light to the fact that we’ve come to rely on Sales Managers, who were in many cases top performers themselves, to develop their team’s talent. The problem is these people were promoted because of their excellent sales skills, not their employee development skills. In other cases we rely on HR or T&D to develop sales training programs when they don’t have a sufficient understanding of the dynamics of sales to do so.

The article mentions using your top performers actual day to day tasks and activity (if I am reading correctly) as the basis for your training program instead of skills and competencies. This is where our opinions start to differ.

I have always been a believer in benchmarking your top performing sales people and developing toward that baseline. I also agree that competencies and skills are very difficult to measure in such a subjective process as sales. However I don’t feel that duplicating an activity pattern alone is going to get you where you need to be.

If you have a salesperson who is a terrible communicator, do you really want them speaking to an extra 20 prospects a day? If a salesperson can’t close deals, do you really want them working more of them?

It reminds me of the old seminar joke -

don’t send idiots to motivational seminars because you only end up with highly motivated idiots.”

While I think most of Tina’s thoughts are solid, I really feel that there needs to be a balance between process and execution. I personally wouldn’t want certain salespeople doing certain tasks - like writing a blog for example - It may be your top performers key to success, but the dynamic of that persons abilities cannot be mirrored in process alone. Communication, comprehension, confidence and expertise are all skills that must coexist with activity.

Let your sales managers help benchmark top performers on both activity and skill, and leverage T&D to figure out how to translate that into a program that can be coached to and measured.

I just don’t know if I would worry so much about mirroring activity. Sales Managers have every metric and dashboard you could think of for that stuff already.

Read more on this topic by visiting the Learning Management 2.0 Blog

Justyn Howard is the author of Learning Management 2.0 (http://www.lms20.com)

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Justyn_Howard

One Response to “Stop Shaking A Stick At Sales Training”

  1. on 12 Jun 2007 at 1 Tina Teodorescu

    My name is Tina Teodorescu and I am the author of the article that Justyn quoted in his blog - How Effective is Your Sales Training Program?.

    I wanted to respond and thank Justyn for this consideration and feedback. I also wanted to clarify some possible areas of misunderstanding.

    In Justyn’s blog, he says: “The article mentions using your top performers actual day to day tasks and activity (if I am reading correctly) as the basis for your training program instead of skills and competencies. This is where our opinions start to differ.”

    Justyn: We do not differ. I do not believe that only using the day to day tasks and activities of top performers as the basis of a performance improvement and development program will be effective.

    First: day to day tasks and activities are not the most important measure of success - it is the accomplishments - the measurable outputs that sales people leave behind that can be seen and directly contribute to closing of business and the meeting of the goals and metrics of the business. Activities and tasks can lead to valuable accomplishments but they don’t necessarily have to. An example is that a sales person may make 100 phone calls (activity) and not get one meeting with a decision maker (accomplishment).

    Second: I am in no way saying that Skills, Knowledge, Attributes, and Competencies are not important. They are the building blocks of a competent and successful top performing sales person. If a sales person doesn’t have the right skills, knowledge, attributes, and competencies they cannot consistently complete the accomplishments that lead the achievement of business goals (business goals can be not only revenue, % of marketshare, customer retention, customer share of wallet, etc.). You mentioned a sales person that is told to do a certain type of activity and he has poor communication skills. This person would not be successful, Justyn, because his ulimate success would be measured by his results and no matter how many calls he made (activities), if he didn’t have good communcation skills (skill and knowledge), he would not be able to complete the required accomplishments that would consistently lead him to achieve top results.

    The issue is that I believe (and all the research in Human Perfoermance Technology indicates) that one cannot know which skills, knowledge, attributes, etc. enable completion of the right accomplishments that lead to the achievement of business goals unless one starts first with business goals and then determines which accomplishments lead to those business goals, and then which tasks and behaviors lead to those accomplishments, and finally which skills and knowledge lead to the required behaviors.

    Once one knows this, (I call it a roadmap to success), one can then design the sales environment to build, support, and sustain the required performance (with the right expectations, tools, resources, informatation, incentives, training, selection and assignment, movitation, etc and removal of the obstacles preventing top performance).

    It is not a bandaid or a one solution approach (like sales automation or training), it is about building, supporting, and sustaining top performance systematically starting with the business goals and moving outside in to what tools, resources, and supports are needed to consistently achieve that performance.

    Thank you again for your ideas, feedback, and consideration.

    Tina Teodorescu
    tina@competencesystems.com

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