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Do You See Value in Attending Sales Training Seminars?
Best Answer
- Recommended by:
- Craig Rosenberg
First, the participant's own attitude is important: If you attend a training with an open mind, you will recognize some key take-aways for yourself to be applied easily in your daily work.
Second, the training itself: It's mission critical that the training is focused on tailored, practical exercises, not based on theory and science only. Additionally it's important that the trainings are tailored to the specific sales team, their focus, their specific sales roles, e.g. account executives, presales or sales consultants and their specific challenges with e.g. value based selling, outcome based selling etc. How to apply best practices and tribal knowledge of the famous "A reps" as well as enough time and space to work in role-play based sessions.
Third, and that's the most important criteria from my point of view - the involvement of the sales management and the sales executives. If they don't have the sales trainings on their agenda with priority one and if they are not involved themselves in the trainings - how should appliance and implementation work later on? Exactly, nothing will be applied successfully.
The most important responsibility of the sales executives is to establish a culture within the (sales) organization that allows the participants immediately to apply the lessons learned. If not, the trainings are wasted time and money for the attendees (plus their frustration), the executives, the organization and also the customers.
That really comes down to two things:
1. Which seminars - are they relevant to what you are trying to achieve. Do they address in a real way those things that impact your sales and business; or is it just another talking head pushing a rehashed version of a rehashed concept they been pushing for 20 years. If the topic is relevant, timely and presented in a way that allows you to execute it the next day, rather than delivering pieces of a puzzle that to solve would require you to buy their latest book.
2. Execution - Putting it into practice, no matter how good the seminar is, if you do not go in to the seminar with a plan and commitment to execute, you may as well just mail in the money. The plan needs to exist in advance so you can come out of the seminar and act. All to many people g to a seminar, then take a few days to digest, plan and then think about how to implement. Those are the ones that don't get full value because they did not approach it right. Plan in advance, to the point where the last piece is the seminar content; once you have that execute right away, not the next day!
It is critical that the training address the needs of the sales force and managgement goals. Not a canned pitch used everywhere. Also there should be live field and phone training and a reinforcement plan installed for managers to support and reinforce what has been taught in training and then a 90 day post initial training comeback refresher.
I would agree that broad based sales training seminars as opposed to a single topic don't bring a great deal of value. But sales training as a whole is important if cistomized to the group being trained. The key is reinforcement....That can be done two ways. One the trainers trains people within the organization to manage and reinforce the training ,the other method is self based reinforcement through products like Brain X ( not a commercial I do not work for them but have seen the product in action).
Generally, no. Seminars focused on sales skills or selling strategies are generally too general. I would very much like to see the maturation of sales skill training complementary to the bite sized world we live in and sell to every day. People are more and more having to buy in tighter and tighter boxes of time, and selling in this world is very different than many seminars are willing or capable to deliver.
A sales seminar that is not a focused webinar with video based nuggets that can be applied in real time implies that selling is still feet on the street versus the growing legions of 'feet in the seat.'
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Related Activity
Personally, I think sales training seminars are valuable. Everytime I can learn something or get some ideas from them. It depends on the different levels of experience and personal interpretations. Everytime I have different understandings about sales.
Also here is an article about door to door sales.
http://www.edustarzone.com/doortodoorselling.html
Hope it helps.