Top 5 Reasons That Sales Training Fails
Companies spend billions of dollars every year on sales training. However, many sales professionals look at a sales training session with about the same enthusiasm as a visit to the dentist. The reason is simple: most of the time, sales training is darn pretty useless. Here are five reasons why:
- Reason #1: Wrong vendor for your firm. The assumption is that top training firms are always a safe bet. But that's not the case. If the root cause of your biggest sales problem is not a core competency of that particular sales training organization, it's likely that the training will simply be wasted effort.
- Reason #2: They hired a motivational speaker. Sure, a motivational speaker can get people pumped up, but motivation can't fix the root causes of sales ineffectiveness, such as not not having a pragmatic selling methodology, or not training sales people on its use.
- Reason #3: Not enough focus on basic skills. While it's true that new skills and new tools are required to sell in an environment where much of the communications takes place online, every salesperson needs to be competent at the basics of selling.
- Reason #4: Too many tips and techniques. If they're going to be of long-lasting value, sales tips and techniques must be incorporated into an overall approach to selling. Sales training should be presented in the form of a process, rather bite-sized nuggets.
- Reason #5: It was all in the classroom. Effective sales training requires upfront work building processes, tools, and metrics, as well as post-program reinforcement. It must also be combined with coaching, technology refreshers and reinforcement.
READERS: Any other reasons come to mind?
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