Are you rethinking your sales training? Or maybe you are now thinking of hiring a business coach or sales trainer to hone the skills of your sales force? Maybe these 7 tips will help you make that sales training far more effective.

• Define the desired results: What are the results that you want the sales training to deliver? When you can define the results, you can better tailor the sales training to achieve those results. Additionally, asking this question separates the real problems from the false problems or symptoms.

• Define the behaviors: What behaviors do you want to see specific to selling skills? The more you can be specific about the behaviors you can better objective judgments about the effectiveness of the sales training.

• Focus on Attitudes, Habits and Underlying Beliefs: Change does not come easy. Most sales training is about knowledge and how to improve selling skills. Yet, most performance failure is much more about bad attitudes and habits. Remember, learning is the acquisition of knowledge; performance is the application of knowledge.

• Develop Self Leadership Skills: Effective sales training infused strong interpersonal skills or people skills. People buy from people especially if the organization is embracing relationship selling.

• Schedule Sessions To Reinforce Performance: Educational research supports that a one time exposure to a learning event results in 2% cognitive retention after 16 days. The problem is that the newly acquired knowledge is too much and does not allow time for practice. By scheduling the sales training in shorter segments such as 2 hours over 10 weekly sessions increases long term cognitive retention and provides incredible opportunities for feedback and practice.

• Use Audio for Learning Reinforcement: Having the material recorded into compact discs allows the learners to rehear the sales training numerous times. Educational research also suggests that we need repeated exposure to a learning event. An example: we all know almost without thinking that 10x10 equals 100. However, we cannot answer as quickly or correctly what 25x24 is. Spaced repetition or rote memorization is what allows us to go from conscious knowing to unconscious knowing.

• Teach a Proven Goal Setting & Achievement Process: Selling is all about getting more sales. Unfortunately, most individuals have never been taught how to set and achieve their goals. So would it not make sense to make sure that everyone shares the same goal setting process within your sales training and sales force?

Are these the only effective tips to improve sales training? Absolutely not, but they are near the top of the actions that you need to take to make your sales training effective and more importantly that it delivers a sustainable return on investment (ROI).
Leanne Hoagland-Smith www.processspecialist.com

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