InsaneJournal

Sales Training Courses: Worthwhile Training That Could Deliver Results
Many sales training courses are good for when times are bad and even better when times are good. When times are good it will be easier to sell and then some sales people will do really well putting on fat that may carry them through lean periods.

The value of sales training courses is well illustrated in the television series known as 'The Office'. The fortunes of a good salesman and a bad salesman are followed taking viewers through the hilarious ups and downs of two characters named David and Tim.

David is pathologically unable to listen, and that is as a result of his self centeredness. Tim is a very good listener, and able to take his turn to speak at just the right moment. So the two characters sum up the epitome of good and bad sales technique. In one vignette Tim concludes a sale over the telephone showing exactly how a deal should be closed.

The TV series is instructive and entertaining but viewers might be tempted to think that success or failure in selling must be an outcome of innate personality traits rather than training. To an extent this must be true, as it is true in all fields of endeavour. However, the point of education is to grow an individual's genetic abilities in certain directions.

Even a person who can instinctively sell ice to Eskimos can improve his performance with training. In selling the sky is the limit and targets can always be exceeded. That is because selling is a dynamic process that is never static. One of the important things is adaptability, and this requires the skill of adjusting constantly to ever changing circumstances. When a person feels that he has learnt everything that there is to know, that is surely time for him to take a course.

In healthy organizations people are constantly on the move. Promotion opportunities provide for upward mobility and there should also be shifting of roles to allow for people to gain experience in various roles where they might find more satisfaction. It is such dynamism that generates the need for ongoing education within an organization to equip people for new roles or refresh them in the roles that they continue to play.

In fact, good refresher courses provide opportunities for morale boosting if they are well run. They should be fun, so that people learn together how to align their different talents in identifying and meeting the needs of clients. A company will certainly do better if its sales corps is working in unison with other role players such as accounts managers and business development managers.

Some sales training courses focus on particular skills that need to be developed further. The skill of listening may be important, but within that one skill there may be sets of sub-skills such as identifying needs and bringing a prospect to the point of closing. There may be no one agreed list of all the skills needed but a good trainer will identify in the group the people who need to develop in one direction or another. In some cases a training company will even follow up on progress by allowing trainees to have email contact with instructors after the course has been completed.