Best-in-Class Sales Training Reinforcement

Most of us appreciate that ongoing professional development is essential to success in this rapidly changing and ultra-competitive market. Basic skills need to be reinforced, and new knowledge, skills, and experience must be acquired to stay at the top of your game.

Training is important but must be reinforced and sustained to make a lasting impact. We’ve heard it all before, but we don’t always invest the necessary time and effort into sustainment to really make a difference.

However, according to a recent report by Aberdeen Research, “It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint: Reinforcing Sales Training”, organizations that take the right measures to sales training reinforce and sustain impact significantly outperform their peers.

According to Aberdeen;

“The ever-changing landscape of the business-to-business sales profession necessitates a fresh look at crucial training and development activities ... More than ever, companies expecting scalable and repeatable sales success stories are embedding their educational efforts into long-term, flexible, tech-say methodologies designed for multi-year results.”

The report offers some interesting observations and statistics. I’ve highlighted a few of these points below.

• The most effective B2B sales firms are 22% more likely (more than one in five) than all other sales firms to reinforce training at least once each quarter.
• Companies that carry out post-training reinforcement see 20% more salespeople achieve sales quotas.

Aberdeen raised more interesting and significant points to consider and actions to take — “takeaways” — from their survey and analysis of the results.

• Effective firms provide at least some sales training to nonsales staff. When the two groups understand each other, both benefit — as does the company.
• The need to focus training on better sales conversations between sales representatives and their clients. Train your staff to understand the needs of clients and to directly address these needs.
• Learn from the experience of others. Go even further. Collect the experience of others. Establish a central database of best practices — what works and what does not work — and under what circumstances methods work.

Continuous professional development, throughout a working career, is the best way, probably the only way, to enable people to remain effective employees. A well-thought-out sales training reinforcement plan drives effective employee development. The more effective companies know this and act on this knowledge.