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Get Personal in Training Your Sales People to be the Best

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Close-up of people with hands together. Concept of union in busiDoes your sales training have a personal touch?

The aim of sales training is to equip your sales team to do their best for your business. Well-trained sales people will pursue the best leads and communicating effectively with customers, ultimately improving your sales and conversions.

By adding a personal touch to your sales training, you increase the chances of success for your sales team.

So just what does a personal touch mean in terms of sales training, and how can you implement it in your business?

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

When it comes to sales training, it’s all too easy to take a one size fits all approach.

You set up a training day or give your sales team an e-course to complete on their mobile devices, delivering everything you think they need to know. However, this may not be the most effective approach for your business.

Here’s why:

  • Different people have different learning styles;
  • Different people learn at different speeds;
  • Some team members will already be familiar with some of the material;
  • Team members will have different gaps in their knowledge;
  • Some people will learn better at different times of day;
  • Some people will respond better to specific content delivery methods than others.

Understanding the different needs of your sales team members is vital in creating sales training that has a truly personal touch.

What Does Personal Training Look Like?

Personal training is focused on what is best for each individual learner.

Personal training can include:

  • Offering different learning options (such as videos or interactive quizzes);
  • Breaking training down into bite size pieces so learners can choose where to go next;
  • Recommending new training modules based on each learner’s history;
  • Giving learners a chance to focus on problem areas;
  • Delivering different content based on each learner’s progress.

Benefits of Giving Training a Personal Touch

Adding a personal touch to your sales training means you’ll be offering the best training for each individual member of your sales team.

By focusing your efforts on adapting your training to be appropriate for each individual learner, you increase each team member’s chance of getting maximum benefit from the training.

As the article, “Modern Pharma Sales Training Deserves a Personal Touch” points out, customizing training to each learner’s needs improves the quality of the training.

Each person will receive the best content for them, in a way that they can personally work well with. Their engagement with the content will be more meaningful.

Making Training More Efficient

Adding a more personal touch to your training also means your training will be more efficient. When you deliver the same training to everyone, some people will receive training in topics they’re already well versed in.

As well as wasting time, this is likely to bore learners.

By personalizing your training, you let each learner skip over areas they are already familiar with.

More personal training also lets you see where each member of your team is struggling, giving you the chance to offer them support. Learners can put their focus on the areas they most need to improve.

Finally, by personalizing your sales training, you can pay attention to each learner’s preferred method of learning, for example by reading, answering quizzes or watching a video.

Targeting a preferred learning method is much more efficient than having everyone wade through material that doesn’t gel with their personal learning style.

When you add a personal touch to your sales training, you are essentially delivering the very best training for each member of your team.

The result is the best trained sales people, who are an asset to your business.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a variety of topics including social media, how to build customer relationships, content marketing and how to offer the best training to your sales people.

Get Personal in Training Your Sales People to be the Best

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Business People Waiting For Job Interview. Four Candidates CompeFor those business owners just starting out or only in business for a short period of time, does your sales training have a personal touch? If it doesn’t, it could set the stage for some long days down the road.

The aim of sales training is to equip your sales team to do their best for your business. Well-trained sales people will pursue the best leads and communicating effectively with customers, ultimately improving your sales and conversions.

By adding a personal touch to your sales training, you increase the chances of success for your sales team.

So just what does a personal touch mean in terms of sales training, and how can you implement it in your business?

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

When it comes to sales training, it’s all too easy to take a one-size-fits-all approach.

You set up a training day or give your sales team an e-course to complete on their mobile devices, delivering everything you think they need to know. However, this may not be the most effective approach for your business.

Here’s why:

  • Different people have different learning styles;
  • Different people learn at different speeds;
  • Some team members will already be familiar with some of the material;
  • Team members will have different gaps in their knowledge;
  • Some people will learn better at different times of day;
  • Some people will respond better to specific content delivery methods than others.

Understanding the different needs of your sales team members is vital in creating sales training that has a truly personal touch.

What Does Personal Training Look Like?

Personal training is focused on what is best for each individual learner.

Personal training can include:

  • Offering different learning options (such as videos or interactive quizzes);
  • Breaking training down into bite size pieces so learners can choose where to go next;
  • Recommending new training modules based on each learner’s history;
  • Giving learners a chance to focus on problem areas;
  • Delivering different content based on each learner’s progress.

The Benefits of Giving Training a Personal Touch

Adding a personal touch to your sales training means you’ll be offering the best training for each individual member of your sales team.

By focusing your efforts on adapting your training to be appropriate for each individual learner, you increase each team member’s chance of getting maximum benefit from the training.

As the article “Modern Pharma Sales Training Deserves a Personal Touch” points out, customizing training to each learner’s needs improves the quality of the training.

Each person will receive the best content for them, in a way that they can personally work well with. Their engagement with the content will be more meaningful.

Making Training More Efficient

Adding a more personal touch to your training also means your training will be more efficient.

When you deliver the same training to everyone, some people will receive training in topics they’re already well versed in. As well as wasting time, this is likely to bore learners.

By personalizing your training, you let each employee skip over areas they are already familiar with.

More personal training also lets you see where each member of your team is struggling, giving you the chance to offer them support. Learners can put their focus on the areas they most need to improve.

Finally, by personalizing your sales training, you can pay attention to each learner’s preferred method of learning, for example by reading, answering quizzes or watching a video.

Targeting a preferred learning method is much more efficient than having everyone wade through material that doesn’t gel with their personal learning style.

When you add a personal touch to your sales training, you are essentially delivering the very best training for each member of your team.

The result is the best-trained sales people, who are an asset to your business.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

About the Author: Tristan Anwyn writes on a variety of topics including social media, how to build customer relationships, content marketing and how to offer the best training to your sales people.

Train Your Brain Like a Boss

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One of the most important pieces of equipment you need as a business owner is a healthy brain. You have to be able to make good decisions, think creatively, and respond to new challenges on a daily basis.

We don’t understand a lot about our brains. For example, we’ve been told we typically only use 10% of our brain. According to this myth-busting video from asapSCIENCE, we use all of it, all of the time. (So we don’t have to worry about Lucy happening any time soon.)

My favorite way to keep my brain sharp is doing the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. It’s available in digital format, but I love the paper version.

But you’re not limited to puzzles; the brain training trend has resulted in a variety of cool methods to keep your mental facilities in shape.

Brain Training Apps

Lumosity is a brain training and neuroscience company that offers both web-based and mobile apps. They will design a specific training regimen for you, based on a questionnaire, and provide statistics to show your progress. The games within the apps are fun and challenging.

focus@will App claims to be able to increase your attention span by 400%, using neuroscience based music channels. Their research shows that by listening to a specific type of music, your brain will respond by focusing more deeply on the task at hand.

Fit Brains from Rosetta Stone (the language learning folks) is another website that offers games tailored to training your brain for problem-solving, concentration, and memory skills.

Brain Training on TV

Wait. I thought it was called “the boob tube.” Perhaps it’s not so stupid after all.

The History Channel’s “Your Bleeped Up Brain” is a one hour show (currently on hiatus) that offers a light-hearted take on brain-related research. Find out how your brain separates fact from fiction, why some people have better memories, and how humans are often fooled by simple deceptions.

National Geographic Channel has Brain Games, an Emmy nominated series that uses intricate experiments to demonstrate the inner workings of the brain. Many of the experiments on the show are also available on the interactive website. Do you know whether a lightning strike or a wild bear is more likely to kill you?

Brain Training in Your Living Room

We bought a Mindflex as a gag gift last year, but it turned out to be fascinating. You wear a headset that makes contact with your temples, and power the movement of a ping pong ball through a series of obstacles. You can also go up against an opponent and try to push the ball over their goal line while they push in the opposite direction.

Physical exercise has been shown to increase your brain power too. So while you’re doing your Zumba, you’re training your brain!

How are you taking good care of your brain?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Slow Down the Revolving Door with Your Employees

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As a business owner, have you ever stopped to smell the roses?

You have a good mix of employees on hand, yet some of them come and go like there is a revolving door at the entrance of your company.

While things have changed since our parents spent 30 or 40 years at one company, that doesn’t mean you need people coming and going like at a yard sale. For those employers tired of the revolving door, stop and review your company’s practices when it comes to hiring and firing.

Among the items to look at are:

  • Training process – Have you ever taken the time to review your training methods for new employees? Given most companies have probationary periods of anywhere from 30 to 90 days, review your process to see if it is productive or not. Since your company spends time and effort on training new employees, you don’t want the door opening and closing every after you’ve successfully trained an employee. Not only have you wasted their time, but also the time of those on your staff who trained the individuals.
  • Employee satisfaction – It is inevitable that some employees will get the “seven-year itch” and want to leave, oftentimes before seven years. That being said, what are you doing to keep employees motivated, happy and successful? When an employee is at your company for several years, they develop relationships with both your staff and your customers. Should they leave, you then have to find the right piece to the puzzle to make sure the next employee co-exists well with others. Encourage them not to leave by providing opportunities for growth and happiness within your company.
  • Managerial skills – For every 100 good managers, there are always handfuls that stop just short of terrorizing your employees. Whether it on purpose or by accident, they are not doing a very good job relating to those under them. That being the case, some of your employees are working on their resumes during the day when they’re supposed to be working for you. While regular employees get reviews, it is important for business owners to review the efforts of their department managers. Meet with those working under the managers to see if they’re happy with the direction the managers are taking. Are they letting those under them be creative and do their jobs, or are they micro-managing them to the point the employees are tuning out? A bad relationship with one’s immediate boss is oftentimes the top reason solid employees leave a company.
  • Meeting employee needs – While there have to be rules in place in every office, business owners who can’t have a little flexibility will oftentimes see good employees say bye-bye. Whether it involves medical issues, children, commuting etc. company heads should offer some leeway when it comes to an employee’s personal matters than only can be met during the 9 to 5 day. Companies that do not allow employees to meet such needs either through excused absences or making up the time run the risk of losing these individuals over time.
  • Room for growth – Does your company have an environment where employees can grow and achieve their career goals or are they left just spinning their wheels? Whether it is through financial incentives, opportunities for more of a say and how things work, time off from work, be sure to have some markers in place where your employees have added motivation to do a good job. Nothing turns an employee off more than knowing that they’re essentially in a dead-end job.

While business owners must decide what is best for their companies and not follow everyone else, it is important to have a culture in the workplace where employees come to work each and every day motivated.

For those companies whose employees just show up because they need a paycheck, expect that front door to get a lot of use over time.

Photo credit: hollywoodrepublican.net

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like credit card processing and is based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

Jack Welch on Candor and Liz Strauss on High-Trust Culture

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Lack of Candor Is a Killer

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Right at the top of the interview with Jack Welch (former Chairman and Chief Executive of GE) at the World Business forum, he spoke about leadership in many ways. The most interesting to me was his conversation about his famous policy of “Rank and Yank.”

When Jack first took over GE in 1981, America was facing high unemployment and high inflation. GE had 178 people in strategic positions and 3 business showing losses for 20 years. Welch became known as “Neutron Jack” because of the tens of thousands of positions he cut. But that single campaign left the company and the remaining employees with a streamlined organization prepared for future growth.

Hard choices and candor were his management tools. Welch is passionate and straightforward about candor in business. “I would call lack of candor the biggest little dirty secret in business, ” Welch says in his book, Winning. It “basically blockes smart ideas, fast action, and good people contributing all the stuff they’ve got. It’s a killer.” Jack’s deifnition of the difference between candor and abrasiveness is the corporate level from which the words are said. From higher up it’s candor, from lower levels it’s called abrasiveness.

I agree with Jack, nothing can break down trust (and build fear) more than lack of candor — inconsistent truth. People get fired when no one has said a word to them about their performance being less than it might be to be “great.” Then they wonder why no one told them the truth.

At GE, Jack held his managers to a policy of Rank and Yank — that every manager had to rank his or her employees and fire the bottom 10% once a year. When speaking on that at the WBF, Jack Welch seemed to have moved from firing those who might improve to retraining them. In this one minute interview, Jack explains who to keep and retrain and who to let go.

Here’s another one-minute interview with Jack on integrity, learning, and mentorship.

At the World Business Forum, Jack was clear and cogent on what makes a winning team. “You get the right players in the right positions and you will win.” Jack spoke of mentors and leaders and managing from the top, at one point delivering my favorite quote of the two-event.

“Fear as a management tool is dead.”

Jack and I are so aligned in that single statement.

How to Build a High Trust Culture

Fear cannot exist in the same space as trust. Here are a few of my best practices on how to wipe fear out of your organization. Ironically, in this grassroots social business world, developing a high trust culture a process that builds its roots from the to.

  • Leaders build a values system that resonates with everyone who helps the business thrive. This happens when leaders let go titles to be human, get their hands dirty, and invest their hearts as well as their heads outside of themselves — the higher cause of the business.
  • Incorporated core human values into your value proposition. Repeat both the same sentence every time you speak — to every audience.
  • Talk, walk, and live the truth online and offline, inside and outside the company. Trust is the hard truth spoken gently. Leaders are charged with defining the reality under which we serve the cause. Make it easy to see, hear, and understand what is valued and what is not.
  • Invite ideas and diverse thinking. Explore those ideas and thoughts that are different from our own.
  • Celebrate and reward people who live the values as well as the performance goals of the company.
  • Invite people outside the business who exemplify the same values and performance ideals to participate, engage in, learn from, and add to the culture and community you’re building.

Watching Jack it’s easy to see that the world is his natural habitat. He lives his values and feels no need to apologize for what he believes. He knows his losses, learns from them, and makes them part of his repertoire of strengths. It’s a irresistible combination of humanity and leadership.

And that sort of candor is easy to trust.

How will you contribute to building a culture of candor and trust in any business or any size?

You’ll find Jack as @Jack_Welch on Twitter — He does his own tweeting.
Read more about the World Business Forum 2010 at WBFNY.com and WBFNY-bloggershub

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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