Sales Training: The Real Problem with Sales Training

Sales Training: Renbor Sales Solutions, The Pipeline Guest Post – Jonathan Farrington, 12/16/11

Jonathan Farrington identifies that sales training is not working in a very high percentage of cases – 85-90% (Wow!).

He then identifies 4 reasons for this:

(1) A one off, event based program, does very little, if anything to individually transfer new information and to change individual behaviors (think event based, one to many lecture).

(2) A very high percentage of courses offer “generalized skills development”, or what I call ‘one size fits all’ (think event based, one to many lecture).

(3) At least 80% of – training organizations today make the assumption that all participants are at the same level in terms of experience, expertise and have the same “commercial bandwidth” (again, think event based, one to many lecture).

(4) Every member of the team receives the same training (you guessed it, one to many training)

Okay, now that we know why sales training doesn’t work the vast majority of the time, how can we advance the sales training/learning process and advance corresponding individual outcomes, consistent with strategic organizational objectives ?

(1) Truely personalize the sales training/learning process

i. Focus on individual learning to fluency (mastery) of only those items each participant doesn’t know

ii. Focus on coached, individual reinforcement, of critical new information, over time

Without individual learning to fluency participants don’t understand the new information and as a result cannot understand how to successfully apply it in new situations. Without individual, coached, successful application, participants cannot see that the new information works for them. No individual success, no individual buy-in, then no individual behavior change. Training is then a failure for those individuals that did not change their behaviors. Or as we say, the new information was not individually transferred.

Sales training, to be individually successful, must include all of the above components.

Most all traditional sales training indentifies the importance of each component, but is unable to truely personalize the experience because of trainer bandwidth (time/expense), or scalability issues (can’t personalize with large teams, geographically dispersed).

Enter proven technology that overcomes all of the personalization/coached reinforcement over time issues above and works with any sales performance improvement material that compliments your defined training needs and is completely in tune with the new methodology in learning; Instructor facilitated, truely personalized and reinforced learning over time, in a blended learning environment, supplemented by truely personalized learning technology:

http://www.sellbetter.ca/blog/?p=5241

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To Discuss how these Solutions will add value for you, your organization and/or your clients, Affinity/Resale Opportunities, and/or Collaborative Efforts, Please Contact:

Tom McDonald, tsm @centurytel.net; 608-788-5144; Skype: tsmw5752