Sales Work – Why Training is so Important to Business Success

If you know any professional salespeople, you'll have heard a few groans from them about the media stereotype image of sales- Hype, fast talk, cliché after cliché, etc., none of which has anything to do with modern sales work in any industry. The key to sales isn't clichés – It's top quality sales training.

Sales basics – The training issues

Sales isn't the sort of job where people should be "thrown in off the deep end" at trainee level. Nothing is more likely to produce a spectacular lack of results. Nor is it the place for people to just mindlessly babble sales spiel. There's nothing worse than a trainee salesperson talking about things they know nothing about. The customers will stampede away from them.

Sales is based on:

• Interpersonal relationships
• Communication
• Delivery of useful information to customers
• Clear understanding of customer needs and issues
• Problem solving for customers
• A very strong product knowledge base

Sales really is a science, and it's pretty ridiculous to expect trainees to pick up all these skills in a few days on the job. Sadly, many managers seem to believe you can get all this expertise so easily. The media stereotype manager who yells at his young, inexperienced sales staff to "Get out there and sell!" is a true ignoramus, and is likely to contribute a lot to truly lousy sales figures and a worse bottom line for the business.

Trainees must get a good working understanding of each of the skill sets involved in the sales role. You'll note the use of the word "understanding". The trainees must learn how to be consciously directing and managing the sales process. To do that they must understand the issues involved in a customer's purchase.

"Same page" training programs

Best practice in sales training is to use consistent external training packages to ensure that all staff have the fundamental sales skills required to do their jobs. They're literally all on the "same page" in terms of knowledge. This is also useful for management, because it provides a quality control on training standards which is almost impossible to obtain with in-house or on the job training.

Same page sales training programs don't rely on a spasmodic series of sales to create the knowledge base needed for effective sales. Everybody gets the same training, everybody learns the same skills, and the training is structured to match the needs of the organization.

Many organizations use tiered training systems. Some will start with a fundamental skill like customer service training, which is a baseline sales issue. This is a good introduction to sales, and most importantly means that trainees aren't let loose on the customers without at least some basic skills and understanding of their roles. They then upgrade to formal sales training, a natural progression. Retailers and showrooms, for example, may have trainees which need to learn the whole process of sales from the checkout to actual sales, and this sort of system works extremely well.

The key to business is sales, and the key to sales is training. If the training is good, the sales will be good. Take it from there, and you can achieve anything in business.

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