Sales training: Is it worth spending my valuable time on?

Today Rod Solar answers a question that we get asked all the time by non-sales professionals. “Is learning how to sell worth my valuable time?” If you’ve ever wondered if sales training is worth it, then watch this video.

Question:

A lot of us feel like we have to wear a lot of hats as professionals. There is a lot of things we have to do, and the prospect of learning a whole new process surrounding sales elicits common responses like “I just don’t have the time!” So the question to Rod was: “Is sales training actually a very time intensive process? And do you think that time is even a problem?”

Answer:

I can completely agree with the notion that we are all pressed for time. I mean, one of the reasons, in fact, why professionals are being asked to sell is because companies are aiming to do more with fewer people.

The other reason of course is because the kinds of service and products we are selling today require a lot of intellectual knowledge and product knowledge that most salespeople just can’t possess or can’t acquire in the amount of time that is provided.

And so, professionals are being asked to communicate on their own behalf, whereas it might be left in the hands of people who call themselves salespeople as a career.

Time is a challenge for everybody. First off all, in terms how long does sales training take? Most of our sales training requires people’s undivided attention for two days. Two days of sales training is a normal amount of time, I think, that any professional would consider important in enhancing their own professional development. I think sales training is an area that has been left unattended for a very long time; you are not taught this in school where you learned your professional capabilities. In a way it’s making up for some lost time. I think as well when you invest the time in sales training, it pays back.

We found that many consultations, phone calls, interactions with clients – cycles, from the time somebody phones you to the point that they become a client of yours, can be unnecessarily long. And one of the things we teach in sales training is how to minimise the amount of time that one’s spends with people to only the required amount. So this offers a number of different benefits: number one you can see more people; interact with more people because you don’t waste any time, because you know exactly what you are doing with the time you are doing it, because you have a process. And the other thing that sales training does is shorten cycles between the amount of time you have to follow up with people because every single point of communication has an intent. Every point of communication has a purpose. And we find a lot of the time when people don’t have a process they are just meeting or calling each other to simply “keep in touch”. Because we are so lacking in time, that’s an exercise we just don’t have time for. Neither we as the sender of the communication or receiver of the communication; nobody has time for that.

We aim to make the time that you spend with clients efficient, never doing more than is necessary and rarely doing less. And in so doing we are able to help professionals save time because what happens is the efficiency of that time invested goes way up. And when that happens they need to invest less time in getting the same results which in the end, ends in a net game of time.