Sales Performance Training: How to build a world-class sales organization

Author: Jack Daly

As a business leader or sales manager, it’s not your job to grow your company’s sales. It’s your job to implement a sales training process that serves to grow salespeople in both quantity and quality every day. Here are five important initiatives that are musts in the sales performance training process when focusing on building a world-class organization.

Step #1: Finding good people. This step is all about recruiting great talent to your organization and it does not happen by chance. Successful companies are aggressive about their recruiting, and view recruiting as a “process”, not an event. This meaning that recruiting is an ongoing and continuous process, not just about adding new people to your team or replacing those who have left. Recruiting is about constantly seeking out new talent. Your company doesn’t just go after new customers after losing an existing one, and your recruiting process shouldn’t work that way either.

Step #2: Getting new individuals to join your team. If you’ve spent hours aggressively recruiting top candidates, ensure you’ve prepared and practiced a thorough and professional presentation. Highlight products and services, features, advantages, and benefits as well.

Step #3: Getting your new sales team trained and producing. After adding talent to the sales team, the next step is to quickly “get them into the game”. Be sure to have a plan—many sales managers and CEO’s believe “ramp-up” time for a new salesperson is around 6 months, possibly up to a year or more. A good sales training process gets new team members up and running quickly, and producing excellent results.

Step #4: Grow your sales team into top producers. Training is not a one-time event, but rather an ongoing and continuous process. Salespeople face constant change in the marketplace every day—consider the following analogy. When lumberjacks head out into the forest each day to cut down trees, they have greater success with a sharpened axe. If these axes are not constantly being sharpened, lumberjacks will eventually have to work harder to achieve results. Not providing your team with constant sales
performance training may result in turnover or salesperson burnout.

Step #5: Lastly, focus on keeping/retaining your sales team. The Harvard Business School conducted a recent survey of top producing sales professionals, asking them to rank the top 5 reasons they stayed in their current position or remained with their current company. The answers were: respect, recognition, a positive work environment, the opportunity for personal growth, and money.

Jack Daly brings 20+ years of field proven experience. As the head of sales, Jack has led sales forces numbering in the thousands, operating out of hundreds of offices.

In 1985, Jack started a mortgage company. As CEO he led the company to 750 employees working in 22 offices (within 18 months). In its first 3 years the company reported profits of US$42million.

In 1998, Jack help a privately owned company to be recognised as Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young and ranked 10th on the Inc.500 list of fastest growing companies in US.

Jack has built six businesses from scratch into national sized firms, two of which were sold on Wall Street to First Boston and Salomon Brothers. Now he helps companies build their businesses.
Want Jack to help your business? See Jack Daly LIVE in Australia!

Full Day: Winning Sales Strategies seminar
9 August 2011 | Le Montage, Sydney
10 August 2011 | Novotel Brisbane
11 August 2011 | Melbourne Convention Centre
Time: 08:30 – 17:00

Visit www.thegrowthfaculty.com.au for more information or call 1300 721 778.

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