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Your Sales Force Still Needs Training

One of my friends is always reminding me that one thing we’re sorely lacking in our industry is training, particularly sales training. Oh, there is plenty of training available for manual technical skills such as standards for soldering and inspecting. IPC and companies like Blackfox do a pretty good job at that. But when it comes to training to be more efficient about running our businesses or training our people to be better salespeople, we are sorely lacking.

I think the reason for this is that we feel that there are plenty of courses, seminars and books that can take care of that for us. After all, business management is business management and sales is sales, no matter what the product or industry may be. And I have to concede that this is probably true. But even this truism does not preclude the fact that we are still sorely in need of training focused on our specific industry.

Our salespeople need more training, and this training must occur regularly. We need to start educating our sales people to sell, to be able to convince someone to buy from them. Our sales teams must not only list the reasons why their customers should buy boards from us, but they should also have the ability to convince their customers to buy from us.

We need to provide our salespeople with a cognitive ongoing program to show them how to sell today, and into the future as well. We should consider our sales people athletes; like athletes, they need to exercise on a regular basis, always honing their skills to get better and better.

Here are some of the areas we need to cover when training our salespeople:

Lead generation: They must learn how to find the right customers for your company. They have to first figure out exactly what your company does best, who wants its product, and why they want it, and then go find potential customers who want that product.

Cold calling: Then they have to learn how to get in front of those customers. They have to develop a message that is compelling enough to provoke those potential customers into meeting with them.

Meeting with the customer: They have to learn how to tell the right story, and when they meet with customers, the salesperson has to have the right skills to convince these customers that they will be at a great advantage if they buy your company’s products. This alone is no small task; it’s where the rubber meets the road. This is where you as a manager have to make sure that your salesperson is well-equipped and well-armed with the right materials to conquer those customers. Your salesperson has to have all of her facts right. She has to not only know but actually believe that she is offering that customer the best possible value on the market today. If she does not believe this with every part of her being, then she is not going to successfully sell it to the customer. And, of course, it is our job as managers/trainers to make sure that she is able to do that.

Closing the deal: We have to teach our salespeople the art of closing the deal. Too often our salespeople are actually embarrassed to ask for the order. Some of them, too many of them in fact, act like asking for the order is tantamount to asking someone for a handout or a loan. No, we have to train them and instill so much confidence and belief in the company, its products, and its overall value that they believe they are offering the customer the deal of a lifetime, a deal that only a fool would not be willing to take.

We all know that there are plenty of great sales books and courses that you can send your salespeople to. We should take full advantage of those. But in the end, there is nothing better than good old-fashioned, done-at-home, specific training geared toward making your salespeople experts at sales and, more importantly, experts at selling your company, your services and you products. It’s only common sense.

Contact me at danbbeaulieu@aol.com if you want a copy of my sales training plan, specifically designed for our industry.