Yesterday I heard a story about how store Santa’s were asking for training on the toys that were coming out this year—primarily electronics. In its simplest form, it is a great example of understanding where the gaps in performance exist (as well as being in touch with your customer needs). A trip to Santa can be traumatizing enough for kids but imagine if you asked for your dream toy and Santa hadn’t a clue what that was? Your belief system, your hopes for the perfect gift are all shattered in one visit to the mall. The moral of the story: Santa can’t make a successful “sale” if he doesn’t know his products.
Training, in my opinion is critical to the effectiveness of a sales force. Just like Santa, you need to have strong product knowledge and skills to build consistent results. I don’t envy the learning curve on all those toys but I applaud the Santa’s and the stores for coming to the conclusion that training was a critical success factor.
I have seen the range in business practices–those who actively promote training and others who throw the reps to the street hoping instinct and current skill level will drive results. It generally doesn’t. My friend Joe used to say that ten years of experience can equate to ten years of appreciable skills and knowledge or “the first year of knowledge and skill repeated ten times.”
In the case of Santa, they needed product knowledge. For most sales reps, knowledge must be paired with competency. Great product knowledge with poor sales execution doesn’t make a sale—and I would suggest that if it does, it is sheer luck and not likely to be sustainable. Conversely, good skills and poor product knowledge also don’t translate into sales effectiveness. Good training programs balance both while addressing ongoing and progressive development.
In a time when companies are re-engineering and business priorities are changing, are companies keeping pace with training to ensure that their sales people are up to speed on the essentials of knowledge-based and competency training?
