How to Boost More Revenue Through Strategic Sales Training

Do you often perceive sales training as a cost-intensive event? Or that once-in-a-while opportunity where your organisation comes together to try and fix what’s broken?

Instead, what if you saw sales training as –

• A strategic investment
• And a proactive exercise that boosts faster and more sales?

Sales Training is a Revenue Generating Activity

If managers are able to make the connection between sales coaching and higher sales performance, then sales training becomes a revenue generating activity, not a ‘dreaded’ cost-intensive event.

Clearly, there is not one sales manager who wouldn’t then agree that sales training or coaching is crucial.

However, a recent survey carried out by Viddler revealed that 147 out of 150 sales executives agreed that “poor sales coaching” was a major weakness of most sales companies.

Another recent survey by Highspot reported that out of 79% of companies who engage in some form of strategic sales enablement process, 64% indicated ‘sales training must be improved.’

Engage in customised sales training to suit their business

Perhaps it’s time for sales managers to begin to reassess their sales enablement programs to ensure they are engaging in a more customised sales training suiting their unique business structure.

They need to take action, measure performance through good constructive feedback, and turn information into action.

Sales managers need to take action

Sales Managers should take inventory of the effectiveness and sales capability of their sales people so that the sales training can be customised to them, and not a generic ‘off the shelf’ course.

Measure performance through good constructive feedback

This can be done by assessing the gaps between where the business is right now and where you want it to be, or by benchmarking against competitors. A number of sales performance metrics can be used to measure as well as improve sales performance and grow revenue.

A few key performance metrics to focus on should include but not limited to:

• Time spent selling, (to identify and eliminate possible sales blocks)
• Lead response time (to ensure that your sales people are responding to leads quickly and efficiently).
• In addition, standard size of a closed deal is also an important metric to help measure and eliminate deals that are not worth pursuing —sometimes sales people prefer to spend time pursuing small deals because they are easier to get.

Turn information into action

The ability to transform information into action that can add value to your business is the crux of business intelligence (BI). The secret to getting actions such as boosting sales, improving customer service skills, and making intelligent decisions, is having the right information.

All the information that you’ve amassed from constructive feedbacks, customer insights, sales training programs and more should be put into action.

This quote from biomedical informatics and biotechnology entrepreneur, Atul Butte, just about sums it: “Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, [business] or change the world.”

KONA Group runs a series of different training programs:  sales training, sales management training; call centre training; customer service training and more — all customised to YOUR strategy, YOUR industry, YOUR people, YOUR customers, YOUR outcomes and results.

Contact KONA Group on 1300 611 288 or email info@kona.com.au to discuss how you can improve your business results.