Love this cartoon:
This is the challenge that faces many businesses.
On the one hand is the fear that well trained people will be attractive to other employers. On the other is the problem that if your own people aren’t adequately trained, how effective will they be?
Many businesses think like this, but in our view it’s very short sighted and in many ways misses the point (of everything!)
What’s the difference between coaching and training?
Training:
Training is teaching, or developing in oneself or others, any skills and knowledge or fitness that relate to specific useful competencies. Training has specific goals of improving one's skills, capability, capacity, productivity, and performance.
Coaching:
We’d say coaching is empowering people to be responsible for their own development. It’s about helping them to learn, to come up with their own answers and solutions.
It’s also about unlocking their own potential to help them to perform at the highest possible level. And it’s about holding them accountable for performance.
It is essential for businesses to train their people in the skills required to do their jobs. This particularly applies to salespeople. As you’ll see elsewhere in these pages, up to 80% of salespeople don’t sell effectively. Why is that? We’d say it’s because they’ve never been trained to sell properly, and they sell in the way that they’ve seen more experienced sales people sell, again with all things being equal is probably the wrong way.
This explains a never ending cycle of poor performance – experienced but poor salespeople passing on bad habits to newer team members.
This also explains the dearth of effective leadership skills in business generally.
Once the sales training is complete, Sales Managers should hold regular coaching sessions with their teams to:
Hold them accountable for activity. Check out QDQ here
Schedule coaching sessions, where:
Sales Managers complete joint sales calls with their salespeople to give them balanced feedback on their sales skills.
Identify other skill areas that each salesperson might need to work on, for example, overcoming objections or closing the sale.
Sales team members have the opportunity to discuss any other issues, business or personal that might be of concern to them.
Managers can bring up and poor performance issues, such as consistent failure to hit sales targets, and develop programmes to assist improvement.
Benefits of effective sales training and coaching:
A more effective team of salespeople, able to fully understand the needs of your clients and close more deals.
This greater success will lead to increased motivation.
More satisfied customers.
Increased sales.
What business wouldn’t want that?
We believe that coaching is the most underutilised skill in business today. Whilst it is regarded as essential for top sportspeople to have their own coaches, in business coaching is often given lip service, at best.
Good coaches get the best out of people. They unlock the potential that exists in individuals and translate it into quantifiable, measurable performance. This is best done when completed on the back of effective, bespoke training programmes.