TRAINING
and use their influence to ensure that everyone in the company takes the sales training seriously. Expert Seven: “If there’s no com- mitment from the top, sales training always fails to achieve its objective.”
STEP #8: TRAIN THE SALES MANAGERS FIRST.
Sales training means changing the way sales reps behave during their everyday work. If the managers don’t buy into that change or don’t know how to reinforce that change, the sales training effort will fail. Sales managers should be able to provide ongoing coaching, including observa- tion, continual training, course correc- tion, and feedback. This is possible only if the sales managers have been trained beforehand and have inte- grated the sales training methods into their own working behavior. Expert Eight: “Coaching is the most important activity that sales managers
SELLING TIP
Four Action Steps for Better Sales and Marketing Alignment
The benefits of collaboration between sales and mar- keting teams are clear. In a survey of 453 companies, one research firm found that 47 percent of the sales forecasts at successful companies were generated by marketing – compared to an average 5 percent among laggard companies.
A sales expert says a formal sales process – when com- bined with a sales model that emphasizes relationship building – can have dramatically positive effects on sales activity. Recently, her company worked with a medical- device company that discovered, through mining its CRM data, that it had only a 20 percent success rate when sell- ing to purchasing departments – but a 70 percent success rate when selling directly to the nursing staff. “The nurses liked the product because it was the
most reliable and [was] easy to use, but the purchas- ing departments didn’t because it was more expensive than other alternatives,” she explains. “The sales team, therefore, directed the marketing team to focus on finding prospects inside nursing organizations, rather than purchasing groups, and devise messages to help
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can do to increase the effectiveness of their people; none of their other activities make a difference.”
STEP #9: MEASURE, MEASURE, MEASURE. You won’t know whether sales training is helping reps achieve that quota if the reps aren’t held accountable for learning and implementing the training in their day-to-day sales experience. Therefore, in addition to examining strategic and tactical met- rics, you should evaluate reps in the field, in real customer situations, both before and after the training, to see whether their behaviors have actually changed. Follow up with a post-semi- nar impact survey asking what specific business results participants attribute to the training. Only when you’re sure the training has taken hold can you look at the numbers and see whether there’s a causal connection. Expert Nine: “You don’t really
know if training works until you know that the reps and managers are living the change.”
STEP #10: MAKE SALES TRAIN- ING INTO AN ONGOING PROCESS. If you want to really change, both managers and reps will need to integrate the training from short-term memory into long-term memory, so the new behavior becomes part of their day-to-day experience. Experience says leading companies make training into a constant process rather than a one-time event, but effective sales training – training that will truly change behavior – takes time and effort. In other words, if you’re in the “a day, per year, per rep” kind of organization, the end result is predictable: You’ll have an average sales team inside an average company that makes average sales. In today’s globalized, Internet-driven world, that’s a recipe for going out of business.
purchasing groups understand why the nurses wanted a more expensive product.”
She outlined four clear action steps for sales leaders who want to align sales and marketing teams today: • Communicate. “Communication can either solve or
create problems. Have marketers sit in on sales meet- ings at least once a month. Get feedback on what is working or not working. Have both sales and marketing report to the same person, not separate VPs of sales and marketing.” • Track metrics. “Know the quality of leads coming in. Have marketing rate them from 1 to 5; then, have sales rate them. Then, it is up to top management to reconcile them. Know the close ratio and understand the formula that links the marketing funnel to the sales funnel.”
• Collaborate. “Lots of marketers do not attend trade shows, observe sales calls, or sit in on demonstrations. Marketers should spend three days with resellers if your company has channel partners.” • Compensate. “There is an old saying that, if sales
are down, the VP of sales is fired and the VP of mar- keting creates another plan. Give marketers perfor- mance-based compensation. In a large organization, you can give them 10 to 15 percent of compensation based on sales.”
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