Imagine your part of a group of runners, training to run a marathon relay. The event is just a few away and you’ve been meeting regularly to prepare for it. However, as you meet and watch each other train, you begin to find fault in each other’s forms and methods.
Perhaps it’s poor form or substandard equipment. Maybe it’s bad nutrition or hydration habits. There are any number of things that you or the rest of the group could start finding fault with.
It’s important to find a way to bring these things up constructively so everyone can work together to make the entire team perform better. Teams that can’t create a supportive environment of truth are unlikely to eliminate bad habits and will undoubtedly underperform no matter how hard they work as individuals.
The same principle applies to sales training. Fledgling salespeople are often riddled with little flaws that can – if left uncorrected – hinder their success in the long run. To offset this, businesses often spend significant amounts of money on sales training for their employees.
However, they often overlook other issues that are preventing their sales teams from truly optimizing their performance. By disregarding these shortcomings, a sales team will struggle to reach its true potential and can start causing major issues for the company. Here are four issues that may hurt your company, if they are not nipped in the bud:
Customer Dissatisfaction
Many newly trained salespeople will want to jump into making calls and sales right away. However, those clients will be the first to experience the effects of your sales training, especially the negative ones. With many of their methods unrefined and their flaws on full display, said flaws will seep through into their sales pitches and clients will feel the full brunt of it.
For example, a salesperson may not use the appropriate selling strategies while presenting their products to clients, which can leave the client confused and unconvinced. They may not take the time to consider the customers’ concerns and treat them like they’re just a number, which may leave the client unheard. Clients are what keep a company afloat and if they aren’t able to train their sales team properly, those connected may be severed. Successful training programs will teach how to talk to their customers and to always be considerate of their client and their needs.
High Turnover Rates
Soon, if these issues aren’t resolved, it could result in either a lot of new salespeople being fired, or they will be expected to do more because of the lack of sales and will eventually quit. In the former, you don’t want to spend so much time on a new employee, only to have to fire time, flushing all that effort down the drain.
The latter is arguably worse since it creates a hostile and toxic work environment. In their higher amount of pressure, their flows may become even worse, leading to even more mistakes and possibly even worse sales. It could also lead to intense burnout and eventually low employee retention rates. Your current employees would likely quit, and your company would have difficulty finding new ones, since it’s developed a reputation.
Quality sales training will allow your sales team to know what they are doing and allow them to work effectively. You wouldn’t have to fire anyone or push them so hard that they quit and prevent anyone from wanting to work with you.
Unreachable Goals
In the long run, the flaws in your sales team and your sales program will prevent you from reaching your loftier goals. Poor sales training won’t give them the tools they need to do their job properly in the first place and those little things build up. If your team is constantly making those little mistakes, they will hold you back from building up to those goals in the long run. The plan to reach a goal is like a pyramid, where you’re building a foundation of decisions that build up to a bigger decision on top. If your foundation is a pile of broken glass, you won’t be able to take any steps toward that goal and will be forced to clean up your mess and/or start over.
Lingering Issues
Finally, if you’re not willing to change your sales training strategy for the better, those same issues that plagued you in the beginning will haunt you for the rest of your career. If you’re not willing to fix the problems with your training, different people will make the same mistakes over and over again for years to come.
This especially applies if you’re not willing to keep your program updated with new technology and methods. Companies that refuse to change will be left in dust by their competitors that have embraced the new and improved sales strategies supplied through sales training. If a sales team is reluctant to confront whatever narrow-mindedness they may have, it will all be for nothing.
