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> Living on the Top Line - The Book > Joe's Blog > Sales Training Will Make the Difference - When It's Done Right
Sales Training Will Make the Difference - When It's Done RightWhen I think about all the things retail furniture sales managers have to do that have nothing to do with making the next sale, but rather saving the last sale - I wonder....
The three areas of knowledge salespeople deal with require a high level of training, particularly with new salespeople. I think that about half of a retailer's customer service issues (incoming calls) could be stopped with better training in all three areas: Systems (how your company works), products (the things you sell), and serving customers - the real purpose of having salespeople in the first place.
What happens in many companies is that sales managers become "technicians" and spend their days dealing with systems issues, process stuff that should have been done right by salespeople in the first place but wasn't because they truly didn't know how. They don't deal well with the systems we employ, and rather than improve training and performing constant update training to sharpen skills, we allow our "sales" managers to handle all this stuff.
As for products, there are so many thousands of things to know about all the different stuff you sell that most new people never learn it, and this causes lost sales, "bad" sales, misinformed customers, customer dissatisfaction, and lots of incoming service calls that also usually find their way to the sales manager's ear.
In the art of selling, where everyone's attention should be focused to ensure optimum performance and customer satisfaction, salespeople are pretty much on their own. Sure, there's some initial training, but once you set them free on your customers, they're pretty much on their own to succeed or fail.
A few succeed at high levels. A few fail, and many perform around some agreeable norm, but unless you carefully measure your revenue per customer opportunity, this is hard to see.
Because the sales manager is usually tied up in technical matters - fixing problems that never should have happened in the first place - the art and skills of selling usually go unmanaged. Training usually stops with the end of the salesperson's initial training period.
The reason sales training often fails is that there is no real compelling management system to ensure that the things learned in training are actualized on the selling floor. Managers are too busy handling service issues, sales order management, price tagging, and management reports to spend any time on sales.
For more on this, go to my website at www.joecapillo.com and click on the link to my new book on sale now at Amazon.com in the Solutions Store tab.
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