Increasing Sales Force Productivity

Maintaining a strong sales force during difficult times is where training and development organizations struggle to maintain ground, as training budgets often become the focus of cost-cutting initiatives. The right type of salesperson can be a point of differentiation that sets companies apart in a sea of commoditized, or nearly commoditized products. A salesperson who creates value with clients is an asset in a down economy.

Beyond product knowledge and a foundation of how to sell effectively, there are skills that help salespeople become more productive: prospecting, presentation skills, negotiation skills, communication skills, reaching high-level executives, writing an account plan, analyzing a customer's business and recognizing market trends. These pieces should be part of a larger plan based on the individual's traits as a salesperson, the needs of their clients and the business objectives of the organization.

Measuring results is important in establishing the credibility of your training initiatives for your company. Ingram Micro, a global wholesale provider of technology products and supply chain management services, uses a combination of surveys and sales data to measure the effectiveness of ongoing training initiatives for its sales team.

One of the goals of Ingram Micro's sales training is to help associates close more profitable sales. Information gathered prior to training was crucial to setting a benchmark for comparing post-training results. Sample groups of participating associates and non-participating associates provided a basis for comparison. Post-training information determined that associates who took the training increased their sales margins.

Good training achieves two things: It gets your sales force up to speed on products and skills, and it helps indoctrinate change throughout the organization so the entire organization sells. To increase the effectiveness of training initiatives, organizations must be able to identify and enhance the team members who are mostly likely to become top performers, spending limited training dollars where they will make the greatest impact.

Your current top performers are easy to identify: They are hitting or exceeding quota. That's the behavior of top performers. Identifying the characteristics of these top performers is more challenging. When you identify these characteristics, you can identify those who share the characteristics and develop them to become top performers. Consider a professional baseball player. It was probably recognized early on that he possessed natural talent through his behavior, but consider the characteristics that needed to be identified and developed to make him a top performer. Not everyone can be developed to be a top sales performer, just as not everyone can be developed to play in the major leagues.