Developing sales trainings - 3 mistakes you should avoid

‍Mistake#1: Don‘t design for impact

When designing sales trainings, I differentiate between skills driven and impact driven sales trainings. The difference in the two starts with the questions you ask in the design phase. For skills driven trainings you ask “Which skill do we want to improve?”.

For impactdriven trainings you ask “Which KPI do we want to change?”. This leads to a fundamentally different discussion and potentially result. While asking for the skill to be improved will lead to a training that helps developing that particular skill, e.g. using SPIN-selling in discovery situations, asking for the KPI you want to change will lead to a discussion on the right measures. One could be training, even a skill-based training, but others might include helping the management to sustain the changed behaviors, or writing a sales playbook first because you realize you haven’t defined your way of selling yet.

Also, you will design the training in a different way. Because once you have answered the question on the KPIs, you need to ask the next question: “how do we measure whether we moved this KPI or not?” Which leads to the question: “How can we make sure that we really move these KPIs?”. And then you will start developing trainings that not only accompany the sales people for a longer period of time,but also become much more pragmatic and real life oriented. You will start integrating real sales work into each training session.

Mistake#2: Training against no or ill-defined ways of selling

You shouldn’t train for the sake of training. You should train for the sake of helping your sales force develop towards your way of selling. If you haven’t defined that way of selling yet, do your homework first. What’s your ideal customer profile? What is your value proposition? What does the sales process look like? How do you want your sales force to behave along that process? Which techniques should they use? How should they handle objections? Once you have answered (amongst others) these questions, you can start thinking about training. Otherwise you will end up like Alice in Wonderland when talking to the Cheshire Cat: If you don’t know where you want to go it doesn’t matter where you go.

Mistake#3: Don’t include the management

You can design and even deliver the best training in the world – if you don’t include management before, during and after the training sessions, you will most likely not reach sustained behavior change.

Before the training you must make sure that management is fully aligned with the training content (see mistake #2) and also sends the right messages to the team. Something along the lines that this is not just another training initiative. This is aligned with strategy and tactics, and it is expected to deliver measurable results.

During the training sessions, involve management as observers, integrate them in exercises, or, if you do cold calling for example, let them perform real calls as part of the group. This is leading by example.

After the sessions, the managers need to take over the trainer and coach role. Observe, give feedback, provide room for safe role playing and practicing, keep repeating the content of the training until part of the sales reps’ routines.

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